Abby Merrick on an ever-young octogenarian artist
Pippa Garner gets her New York minute
This week at Public Seminar, we’re treating ourselves to Abby Merrick’s effervescent essay on Pippa Garner. The ever-experimenting artist is “a walking Gesamtkunstwerk,” Merrick writes. “Her body-as-work body of work encompasses the techniques of the hacker, the inventor, and the provocateur—but can’t be limited to any one paradigm. Her practice, as McKenzie Wark puts it, is a worldview.”
HE 2 SHE: Artist Pippa Garner Hacks Her Gender
Abby Merrick
Misc. Philippa Venus Garner was born in Evanston, Illinois, on May 22, 1942, at 3:45 a.m. Central Time. She is a Gemini sun, Leo moon, Aries rising. She served in Vietnam without firing a single shot, and has maintained a lifelong interest in cars, DIY projects, and novelty commodities. She identifies as an “androgynous dual entity” and, at present, has no exclusive preference for pronouns. She doesn’t completely adhere to the contemporary convention of avoiding a transgender person’s deadname: her early artworks remain attributed to “Philip Garner.” She does, however, object to the use of he/him pronouns when referring to work and events following her forays into gender hacking.
Philip Garner grew up in the shadow of a world at war, in a Chicago suburb, to two parents: a masculine advertising executive father, and a frustrated stay-at-home mother. Garner, a talented draftsperson, studied art and industrial design in a piecemeal fashion (enrolling in and dropping out of both the ArtCenter College of Design in California and the Cleveland Institute of Art) before she was drafted into the United States Army in 1966, where she served as a combat artist in Vietnam. This post kept her away from the fighting but not from Agent Orange. (Garner is now living with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, ostensibly attributable to the exposure.) In later autobiographical writings, Garner is characteristically blasé about her time overseas, but does note that her political views going into the service were the products of her relatively conservative upbringing. Employment as a combat artist meant that Garner not only witnessed the atrocities of war but was tasked with documenting them for military posterity. The traumas of deployment surely contributed to Garner’s subsequent political about-face.