Philippa “Pippa” Venus Garner (1942–2024)
WHEN YOU’RE AN ARTIST and your signature medium is your own body, there’s one final act: You’ve got to die. In my time with Pippa, mortality was a material condition and an ever-present specter, which could be measured through grocery lists: “Home from nightly rave (Kroger’s). Hope I outlive the 40-bag garbage supply I bought.” Her opening salvo to perfect strangers—usually magazine editors and curators meeting her for the first time—was “Well, I’m dying.” Pippa delivered it frankly, though always with a card up her sleeve. An advertiser to her core, she knew the threat of death was good for business. Nothing blares limited time only, come and get it now, and eat your heart out, like an artist on the verge of her very last curtain call.
Pippa’s drawings were often about exchange: maximum reward for minimal effort, getting the biggest bang for your buck. Those who knew Pippa knew she lived in poverty. She was a true punk, avowedly anti-materialist, and persuading her to accept an artist honorarium for a new commission took, well, serious persuading. She lived on disability checks (a reward from the United States Department of Veterans Affairs for an encounter with Agent Orange after being drafted for Vietnam) in a small rental apartment in Long Beach, California. She wanted to move to Los Angeles but couldn’t swing the rent, and Long Beach had the added bonus of being close to the VA hospital, her primary care provider. Pippa’s studio and apartment were one and the same, fitting because in many ways her practice inhaled and exhaled life itself. The clutter of her home came from the many banker’s boxes and trunks filled with her archive that, along with her menagerie of stuffed animals, she had lugged from LA to Marin County to Santa Fe to Las Vegas and back again over the previous decades.
Over the past fifty years, Pippa’s art was a study of—and intervention into—the waxing and waning cycles of commodity fetishism: the marvels and drudgery of daily life refracted through the glint of American capitalism. Cloaked in the shiny optimism of a sales pitch, her work took on the tedium, pressure, ambivalence, and exhaustion that courses through the office and at home. Her proposals were an escape hatch for the fluorescent-lit corners of adulthood; exit strategies for chores, small talk, monogamy, congested traffic; formulas for a different kind of existence altogether.
For Pippa, the most achingly normal of scenes were the most fertile. Her notebooks are riddled with word games, playing on ready-made turns of phrase: trite idioms taken from doctors’ offices, customer satisfaction surveys, advertising—junk info stripped for parts, spliced, diced, and then fit back together. Hers was a kind of cut-up method but expanded; the resulting phrases became springboards for sculptures, body modifications, and performances. Word made flesh. William Burroughs once said, “When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.” With Pippa, the future was practically hemorrhaging. Dadaism and Surrealism were undercurrents in her practice; she liked their puckish sensibilities and beliefs in the generative potential of severing and reorganizing parts. Her own mode was infiltration. The platforms where she embedded her work didn’t need to be clean, nor ideologically aligned. In fact, the more mainstream the better—banal terrain allowed Pippa to plant her ideas deep into the muck of this world. Pippa’s art was often hidden in plain sight: in the back pages of weeklies and magazines, in grocery store aisles, on talk shows, boardwalks, and pavements. Her work functioned like sleeper cells.
Words mattered to Pippa. She was androgynous (she liked the way the word slipped off the tongue), not nonbinary (too clunky). When it came to pronouns, she proclaimed on the television series Monster Garage, “I don’t like to be called ‘he’ but I wouldn’t mind being called ‘it.’” As the host pressed her about whether she liked girls or guys, she retorted, “I don’t care much for people.”Pippa didn’t subscribe to deadnaming conventions. She regularly spoke about her pre-transition identity, Phil. Ask her about artworks she didn’t like and she’d tell you, “Oh, that was made by Phil.” He had been married and philandered until middle age; but Pippa took the wheel in the 1980s. Pippa was a conceptual project (“I did it for art,” she’d tell interviewers about her gender hacking). Rifle through her drawings and you’ll see that her interest in transness dates back to at least the ’60s, but she was firm that her transition be framed as a clean break.
Pippa frequently forgot passages of her life. “I feel like a string of paper dolls and each one of them looks like me but has a different experience,” she once told me. “As you move from one doll to the next, it’s like the circumstances are all different and each time you shift, things get lost in the process.” The holes led to rich creative rediscoveries. She would loop through the same idea again and again, forever finding it anew. She’d call me with an elevator pitch for her next project, with no recollection of the many prototypes she’d already produced of it in preceding decades. Prone to panic attacks, she’d call in a frenzy during her final years, not sure what to make as curators began inviting her to produce new work. We developed a system: She’d give me a keyword (e.g., peephole), and I’d send her proposals that she had drawn for sculptures, installations, and performances from the past fifty years.
I worked with Pippa on the commission of her final conceptual car, Haulin’ Ass!, which premiered during the opening of our 2023 exhibition “$ELL YOUR $ELF” at Art Omi, her first institutional solo show in New York State. Pippa was too unwell to fly, or so I thought. She called two days before the opening to tell me that she had decided to come. But nobody could know, she said, not even her gallerist. I pushed for Pippa to have a travel companion since she was legally blind and had limited mobility—her gallerist was going, couldn’t we tell him? “You must swear to me, he will not know, it must be a surprise.”She said it might be her last chance to come to New York. She was right. In Ghent, where Art Omi is located, Pippa talked about the humidity of the air, that it reminded her of her childhood. She liked the stickiness, and once described artists as being “spectators with sticky fingers” to the writer Fiona Alison Duncan.
Pippa often called from the VA hospital. She frequently smuggled in hydrocodone for overnight stays. She’d whisper into the phone, “They’ll never find it. It’s between my ass cheeks.” One evening, kept in the hospital because of a swollen implant, she described an elaborate Rube Goldberg device that filled a heavy bag on her chest with the very fluid they were pumping out of one ass cheek. Later, she called in a panic to inform me it was a hallucination. Her “T&A” (tit and ass implants) would stay. Funny to think that, years from now, they will be the only vestiges of Pippa in her burial plot. Just bits of silicone.
After receiving her leukemia diagnosis, Pippa moved back to California from Santa Fe in 2014. She told me she thought it was her last chance at being rediscovered, at not dying in obscurity. Clinical spaces seemed to be closing in on her. She’d regularly check herself into hospitals but was allergic to the soulless rooms that drained her of her fighting spirit. (Utopia would be, in her formulation, not a sanitized but a sensual—or, better yet, slutty—environment.) Mercurial (a true Gemini), she’d check herself out against doctor’s orders: “I was on life support but I got away!” Her body was a loaner, a toy, and she could feel the repo man drawing ever closer.
Death itself became fertile terrain for her, an arena for speculation and tinkering. For a while, she proposed having her trompe l’oeil tattoos (a fuchsia bra and blue G-string with Monopoly money stuffed in the waistband; an American oak woodgrain pattern on one leg, a nod to Magritte’s 1928 painting Discovery; a Post-it note that read I IS A ASS on her back) removed from her body, preserved, and put on view in a museum. She’d have her flesh harvested—her friends would be invited to eat it. Later, she proposed having her corpse dumped where all scrapped parts inevitably end up: the landfill.
In her twenties and thirties, friends would pay her small sums to transform old junkers into convertibles. She’d carve up the bodies, making them into sportier, more experimental models for joyrides into the horizon. Like cars barreling into the sunset, she wanted to go out in a blitz of sex and drugs. When the Hammer Museum booked her a hotel room for the 2023 Made in L.A. artist party, Pippa filled her backpack with a stash of MDMA and a stack of cash (for sex workers). In the end—and in signature fashion—she went home alone, skipping the hotel altogether.
For her last show, at LA’s STARS Gallery in 2024, she wore a giant plush beaver costume at the opening and lay on a cot. “Do I look like a beaver?” she’d ask friends between naps. No plan seemed to prepare her for what was coming. During her final month, Pippa was fascinated with the last words of pilots about to crash—recordings recovered from the black boxes of airplanes. The most common line right before impact was “Oh shit!”
In the end, she opted for a green burial. Heaven was not in the sky, she speculated, but deep in earth, where things germinate. In the mud.
Author’s note: It is fitting that this piece is being published in April, since there was only one holiday Pippa observed and held sacred: April Fools’ Day.
Sara O’Keeffe is a senior curator at Art Omi in Ghent, New York. There, she is organizing the first institutional solo exhibition in New York dedicated to the late painter Harold Stevenson, and an outdoor installation by Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio.
