What can art really do? I find myself asking this again and again as I see show after show. Occasionally—not as often as I would like—art provides an answer at once simple and profound: At its best, it makes us free.
Pippa Garner, who died at the age of 82 in Los Angeles late in the evening of December 30, was one of those artists whose work made us free. Or, maybe, I should speak for myself here. Garner made me free, taught me one version of what freedom might look like; how the work, the body, and the person behind it all could be playful and inventive—life, a project. Behind the prankishness of her absurd, tricked-out objects—cars with their bodies flipped, so they would appear to drive backwards (she made two); a television with its screen nailed over with wooden boards (Garner was thinking about "screentime" before the smart phone); a boombox brassiere (with speakers atop the cups)—there was a restless yearning for transformation. The whole of her life, in the corporeal vehicle of her body, was a revolutionary artwork.
Garner is important to me, in part, because I identify with where she came from, and because I see how it informs her sensibility. Though she was born a half-century earlier (she came of age in the postwar '50s), her Midwest background is familiar to me. Garner was born in Evanston, Illinois, and worked for several months, in the '60s, at a Chrysler manufacturing plant in Detroit. I was born in Detroit; my father worked at a different Chrysler assembly plant in the city for nearly two decades.
