50 years ago, Pippa Garner drove a car backwards over the Golden Gate Bridge. Well, sort of: the body of the 1959 Chevy she was riding in had been rotated 180 degrees, so it only looked like it was driving the streets of San Franciscan the wrong way. It was her shrewd way of ridiculing the car culture that devoured America in the 1960s, but more so, she just got a kick out of it.

“It was amazing because anyone on the sidewalk would see this thing and think there was something wrong with their vision,” she told Artnet News. “It was just a crazy flurry of reactions.”

As part of the piece, Garner intended for the upside down car to make only one appearance, that it could be a “ghost”, as in “something people thought they had seen and lived through their lives wondering if it really existed”. She threw away the car, but not the idea.

Pippa Garner, upside down car (1973–74). Documentation of the performance of the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco. Courtesy of the artist and STARS Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Jeff Cohen.

On June 24, when Garner’s latest solo institutional exhibition opens at Art Omi in Ghent, New York, the artist upside down car will be resurrected, taking the form of a 2003 Ford Ranger pickup truck with a similar reverse exterior. Title Haulin’ Ass! (2023), the job comes with truck nuts attached, of course.

“He’s back,” Garner said. “Maybe it’s a good time for it to reappear, when things change again with human mobility. It’s an interesting time for a statement about the absurdity of a vehicle.

We could also say that there is never not a good time for a statement from Garner, who in a five-decade practice satirized, subverted and otherwise dispatched the pervasive scourge of consumerism. The well-titled “$ELL YOUR $ELF” at Art Omi presents more than 100 of his works, ranging from drawings and sculptures to videos and clothing, all bearing the marks of the absurd and conceptual taste with which Garner attacked his subject.

Pippa Garner, Kar-Mann (half human, half car) (1969). Courtesy of the artist and STARS, Los Angeles.

There is his cheeky Kar Mann (1969), a sculpture combining a car and a human body; his self-published 1980s mail-order catalogs peddling ridiculous fictional inventions (high heels with roller skates, anyone?); and his recent t-shirt designs, featuring perversions of clichéd phrases. Garner’s obsession with mass-produced products and his accompanying desire to disrupt their existence are present.

“I just had it in my nature to play and juxtapose – I could think of myself as a ‘juxtaposer,'” the California artist said. “You know, lift things up and see what happens.”

Pippa Garner, I PAY MY STALKER A LIVING WAGE, from the “Shirtstorm” series (c. 2005–). Courtesy of the artist and STARS Gallery, Los Angeles.

Garner was born in Illinois in 1942, and within a few years, with the increase in post-war manufacturing capacity, so was the American consumer. She grew up with a passion for design, although her eye was also caught by the wave of cutting-edge household appliances hitting the market. Egg beaters, electric refrigerators, waffle makers, etc. appeared and became obsolete just as quickly as new versions replaced them. Watching these old-fashioned consumer products end up in garage sales and thrift stores, Garner said, “I started to almost feel sorry for some of this stuff.”

“Somebody spent a lot of time making this stuff just the way you wanted it. And now it’s considered junk,” she added. “I thought, well, maybe be that I can bring them back to life somehow.”

It was a seed that followed Garner when she entered the transportation design program at the ArtCenter College of Design in 1969, from where she would be expelled for submitting a proposal for a car that transformed into a human body. .

Pippa Garner, conversation pit (1973). Courtesy of the artist and STARS Gallery, Los Angeles.

Undaunted, she would realize – and make a name for herself – the upside down car in 1973, selecting a Chevy for its highly directional shape. Notably, too, the final piece was not sent to a gallery, but down the road and into the pages of Squire magazine, confirming Garner’s understanding of the reach of mass media.

“You could do something in a magazine and it would be seen by thousands of people, as opposed to a handful in a gallery. The art versus the commercial thing was really a divide at that time. If you started doing stuff for magazines, you were seen as not living up to the standards of gallery art, even if you would shine,” she said.

Mass media will serve as Garner’s platform for years to come. She crushed the classifieds, public-access television, and mail-order catalogs with concept pieces and performances that challenged the presentation of art and, ultimately, self.

Pippa Garner, Untitled ($ELL YOUR $ELF) (1996). Courtesy of the artist and STARS Gallery, Los Angeles.

In the 1980s, while hacking mass-produced goods, Garner started a project to hack her own sex and her own body. Born biologically male as Philip Garner, she began a hormone regimen and eventually surgery to transition to a female gender. She was less motivated by some form of dysphoria, but by a desire to “mess around” with her body because, “I wouldn’t want to leave it as it was.

“What am I, if not a device? she added. “I didn’t choose who I am or what I look like – these things were assigned to me. It’s not much different than if I walked into a thrift store and bought someone’s old vacuum cleaner and decided to turn it into a record player. So why can’t I play with my body? What’s stopping me?

Pippa Garner, Untitled (Virtual Womanoid 2000) (circa 1995). Courtesy of the artist and STARS Gallery, Los Angeles.

Now, at 81, Garner’s body has suffered devastation beyond his control. She was diagnosed with leukemia and glaucoma, the first she said was caused by exposure to Agent Orange when she was drafted into the military during the Vietnam War. When we spoke she was just recovering from a bout of pneumonia which had kept her in hospital for a month.

Not that any of this dampened his creative momentum. She expressed her frustration at not being able to get more involved with “$ELL YOUR $ELF”, thanking curator Sara O’Keeffe for doing “a great job” going through her archive. More so, Garner is looking forward to overcoming her health issues so she can “get back to being productive for a little while.”

But as Garner said, productivity for her isn’t so much about making art as it is about having fun. Or maybe they are the same thing.

“I never thought these things had any value, but then people started telling me it was art,” she said. “I didn’t think of myself as an artist at all. I was just doing stuff that amused me.

“Pippa Garner: $ELL YOUR $ELFis on view at Art Omi, 1405 County Route 22, Ghent, New York, from June 24 through October 29.

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