High-heeled roller skates, a palm-frond umbrella and a shower in a can — these are just a few of Pippa Garner’s hundreds of inventions.
For the past 50 years, the artist has been satirizing U.S. consumer habits with designs that are not always entirely useful.
Few things have escaped her restless, imaginative tinkering, from automobiles to her own body, which she began, in her words, “gender-hacking” in the mid-1980s.
That may be why the art world establishment long treated Garner, 81, as a fringe character, more madcap inventor than conceptual artist in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp or Andy Warhol.
There are T-shirts printed with Garner’s sardonic proto-meme images and slogans, including one featuring the actor Gary Busey and the words “I pay my stalker a living wage” in all caps.
Persons:
Pippa Garner’s, Garner, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Omi, Gary Busey, Johnny Carson, ”
Locations:
Columbia County, N.Y