The Boldly Queer, Proudly Off-Kilter World of Pippa Garner

We now have language for someone like Garner, terms such as nonbinary, genderqueer, and transgender. But back in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, Garner’s approach to gender was often misunderstood, resulting in isolation from many of her former peers and supporters, not to mention the art world. A confluence of cultural updates have set the stage for Garner’s recent rediscovery, from the dawning of a new, expansive queer and feminist consciousness to the flattening of distinctions between artistic mediums and fields thanks to the Internet and social media. A new generation of artists and curators—mainly millennials who intuitively understand Garner’s playful, cross-disciplinary practice as well as her fluid gender—are flocking to the now 80-year-old artist and honoring her five-decade-long career.

Anti-materialist and something of a self-saboteur, Garner was in the habit of destroying, recycling, or giving away nearly all of the things she made. One of her most notable pieces, Backwards Car, a 1959 Chevrolet re-engineered to appear as though it’s driving backwards, was shredded at a scrap yard. When I undertook to write Garner’s biography last year, I thought that collecting her stories, along with those of her peers, was the only way to preserve her life in art—but while digging through the half-dozen boxes that make up Garner’s archives, I discovered that she had taken and kept hundreds of photographs in the portable form of Kodachrome slides. These images, which date from the late 1960s through the early 2000s, serve as both a documentation of the artist’s past performances, sculptures, illustrations, and installations and as autonomous works.

Garner’s photographs fall into a few distinct categories. First, there’s personal and street photography: Garner loved to bike around the sprawling city of Los Angeles and take photos of things that amused her. Here we see provocative and humorous bumper stickers and business signs, as well as goofy DIY design choices and human design failures including cars in states of deterioration or wild customization. (Garner was obsessed with cars from a young age, although later came to critique them, denouncing the oil industry, wars abroad, suburban alienation, and land waste.)