
AUTO EROTICS Brit Barton on Pippa Garner at the Kunstverein München
In hardly any other context does the excess of consumer culture emerge in such clear physicality as in the US automobile industry of the 1960s, with its most brawny car models subsequently dubbed “muscle cars.” It was in this environment, where unbridled capitalism met burgeoning countermovements, that Pippa Garner began to thematize the relationship between human body and car in her work – first as an industrial designer, later as an artist who, with a critical eye on the industry’s commodity fetish, referred not least to the body politics of a system that pushes the subject into binary role models. As Brit Barton points out, the comprehensive look into Garner’s progressive practice now provided by a series of exhibitions beginning in Munich was long overdue.
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