The artist died during the run of her exhibition, just a few days before the new year. It is fitting given that Pippa Garner used her body as a sort of extended art project, something she worked on for years—altering it with surgeries, tattoos and piercings. The greatest work of the show may be that which was not on the checklist: She attended her own opening just a few weeks before her death and laid down on a cot dressed as a stuffed animal. Supine in the gallery, her body’s presence in the show is perhaps just as great as its absence from the world.
A quote from last year’s press release references her death, “I just want to make sure my body ends up where it belongs when I die: in the junkyard with the appliances I’ve made fun of throughout my career.” Garner has always had an irreverence towards the body, viewing it as part machine, part product: just another appliance.
In “Misc Pippa” at STARS in Hollywood, the artist’s final exhibition, the body is always present but always on the verge of becoming something else. When entering the gallery one is faced with Kar-mann (1969/2024) Garner’s sculpture whose front is a gold hot rod and back is two human legs: one on the ground, one kicked out to the side, looking as if it will sprint out of the gallery. The two parts seamlessly blend as one, rendered in sleek fiberglass and painted with automotive paint; human balls hang off the back of the car between the legs. It’s something you might see on the road—it’s not uncommon to see plastic gonads dangling from the tailgate of a truck. Garner pushes the anthropomorphizing of machines that already exists in the world even further.
Pippa Garner. Courtesy of Matthew Brown.
Another work, Un(tit)led (Clitoris Ashtray), features a photograph of an ashtray sculpture where the indentation for an in-progress cigarette is made yonic by a small pink clitoris. An old car headlight adorns the other side of the ashtray, pointing to the smoker. With this strange object—part fetish part utilitarian—Garner pulls out the suggestive innuendo of the everyday. These quotidian objects become unexpectedly sexual through her touch. A couple of lamps in the show feature the same gesture: the chubby bottom half of a kewpie doll is merged with a plastic dildo, a candelabra bulb meant to look like a candle dripping with wax. And in Agitator Lamp, a washing machine agitator is used as the base of a lamp, its wavy lines suggestive of female anatomy. In much of the artist’s work, the body is divided into parts, merging with other objects, never completely whole.
Garner left us with hundreds of plans for sculptures. A series of sketches show designs for works, many left unrealized but detailed so that they might still be produced. Some appear in the gallery, like the Cunnilingus Chair (2024), emerging from its sketched idea: the seat of a chair with eyes and a tongue sticking upwards in order to pleasure the sitter. Many of the works in the show span time periods, and their dates on the checklist are sometimes 50 years apart — from plan to fully realized object. The artist’s imagination lingers in the works yet to be produced.
