Pippa Garner, 1990s

“Who is Pippa really?” Christopher Schwartz, Pippa Garner’s gallerist, and I used to ask each other. In the years that we worked with her, Pippa became an icon, a cult celebrity, representing something greater than herself that did not account for her totality. The few who knew her intimately know that Pippa was a mess of seeming contradictions, a living, breathing paradox, at once divinely kind and selfish, an individualist and collectivist, anti-capitalist and capitalist, anti-car yet obsessed with cars. She was a work-hard countercultural dropout fixated on the mainstream and a self-proclaimed “introverted exhibitionist” – vain and self-effacing, ambitious and self-sabotaging. A great artist. A martyr for art. Neither man nor woman, she was both and neither, by her own account not nonbinary – androgynous. She photographed herself as an androgynous godhead, painted in gold. She transitioned “for art,” as she wrote in 1995. Decades later, when, in her 70s, trans identities became more widely recognized, she spoke about the seeds of her androgyny, gender dysphoria, and queerness being there if not from the start then from a young age; it was not just about art.

Pippa was born on May 22, 1942, in Evanston, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, where her father worked as an ad man. She was a Gemini (Sun and Mercury), which, she told me, “might account for my duality.” True to her star sign, Pippa was a mercurial trickster, a talker. In her late life, she talked to people on the phone all day long, pretending, to each one, that she had no one else to talk to. Gemini is represented by twins, one of which is said to be all too human and the other angelic. That was Pippa: a materialist and a mystic. She liked to disparage “wisdom” in public, associating it with death, joking that she preferred “useless sound bites” and “bits and bites of knowledge.” And yet, in her undocumented life, she was a touchpoint of startling synchronicities (ask anyone who knew her: connections with her were marked by more than coincidence). And she was wise, in the tradition of a court fool who speaks truth to power and gets away with it because she’s hilarious and so outlandish she’s not liable to inspire too many imitators.

Raised upper middle class and male by an under-stimulated intellectual mother and an alcoholic father, Pippa experienced early traumas (her family moved and fought a lot, she wasn’t cis, and she was an artist), but she also had options. In the 1960s, Pippa, or at that time Phil – her given name, which she never considered to be a deadname – explored many options, trying out several colleges and jobs: dropping out of colleges like only a troubled rich kid does and working, in direct opposition to her father’s white-collar model, on an automotive assembly line and at a camp for children with disabilities. Pippa loved that job. She loved those kids, those with Down syndrome especially. When she got a vasectomy in her 20s, it was with the idea that if she ever changed her mind about raising a family, she’d adopt a neurodivergent child (though in the end, that never happened).

The vasectomy was, to my mind, Pippa’s first gender-affirming surgery. She was rejecting the masculine principle of spreading one’s seed. She wanted to sleep with women, but not as a man. (She later told Paul Ruscha that she “always wanted to be a lesbian.” To me, she’d say, “I loved pussy so much, I had one built in.”) Phil was popular with the ladies. Six-foot-three by 1960! That’s like six-six today. She was also buff, a gym rat, “before gyms were acceptable, back when they were seen as ‘kinky.’” She looked good in suits while youth culture was rejecting them in the hippie, glam, and punk eras. To Pippa, the suit was punk. She was parodying her father. In 1981, she’d crop the suit, an artwork that revealed her bare midriff and a look so iconic (as worn on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1982) that it was re-created by more than one fan this past Halloween.

Pippa claimed to have slept with hundreds of women before the AIDS crisis. Then, she became afraid of penetration. Phil was hung. This information has been confirmed. Her dates wanted it, but P. withheld. She’d mitigated the risk of pregnancy, but there was no vasectomy – no pill or procedure – available to protect against HIV. This new sexual threat and the fear and confusion surrounding it contributed to Pippa’s pursuit of a “sex-change” “for art” between 1986 and 1995, a move that would alienate the cis art world, only later to be called Pippa’s greatest work of all.

“Gender tampering gets the conscious and the sub-conscious into a wrestling match,” Pippa penned in 1995, the first in a long list of “Thoughts on sex-change.” She wrote many such lists, packaging her experiences into comic aphorisms, as if Marcus Aurelius met Groucho Marx. One take that couldn’t be squeezed into a gag involved Dr. Andrew Weil’s idea of “testosterone toxicity,” a concept Pippa made her own, surmising that “Men no longer need the high levels of testosterone once needed to perpetuate the species.” Technology had altered human relations; it was time for the human body to evolve. “Within a month of injecting ‘female hormones,’” Pippa said,

In her final years, Pippa would return to this thought weekly, if not daily, stating that it was “the only wisdom I have.” She was dismayed by wars and genocides, from Ukraine to Palestine, blaming them on the “testosterone toxicity” of male leaders such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Pippa’s other obituaries will list her career accolades, from Kar-Mann (1969) and the Backwards Car (1973–74) to the Better Living Catalog (1982). They’ll say she was a conceptual artist who satirized American consumerism. She was also someone who routinely donated the little money she had to charities and needy neighbors, all the while refusing to accept the care she so greatly needed, conflating help – as her friend of 57 years Henry Beer noted – with pity. The only thing that anyone who loved Pippa pitied about her was her conflation of loving care with pity.

Like many members of the Silent Generation, trauma and healing were not part of Pippa’s vocabulary. Autonomy was. She was self-driven, literally pedaling thousands of miles on her patented pedal vehicles after she gave up gas-powered ones in the 1990s because oil, like men, made for wars. (Three of Pippa’s cutest cars with bike parts are collected by the Audrain Auto Museum in Newport, Rhode Island. If you want to view them, you have to write them in advance.) Cycling had another benefit: it calmed Pippa down. Ever since she was a teenager, she had suffered from bouts of severe depression, and she was no stranger to panic attacks. When she could apply her boundless energy to making art, rearing rescue Persian cats, cycling, and tearing her muscles at the gym, she found equilibrium.

In the years that I knew her, from 2018 on, Pippa was going blind from glaucoma and had chronic lymphocytic leukemia, recognized by the US Department of Veterans Affairs as being caused by exposure to Agent Orange. She was a combat artist in the Vietnam War, that war that precipitated coinage of the term post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Once, Pippa’s beloved assistant Julia Meyer asked her if she’d ever experienced PTSD: “No.” Pippa was firm. It was hard to believe her. She slept on a cot on the floor: “In case of an anxiety attack – I need the ceiling to be far away.”

Pippa was prone to spiral-inducing thoughts like “It seems the more success I get, the closer to death I get. I can’t have both: success and life.” That was Pippa math, and it wasn’t far off. The art world loves a corpse. I started picturing her as an inverse Dorian Gray, a cursed celebrity. The more her image circulated in the press, the further her body deteriorated. In her last two years, Pippa had six solo exhibitions, was in thirteen group exhibitions, and had three books, three zines, and endless interviews come out. She also became too blind to bike, too weak to lift weights, and too sick to travel further than an hour by Uber. After her last rescue cat was rehomed and her witticisms slowed, Pippa fared better than I expected, boring through anxiety, fear, and nerve pain until she started to hear orchestras in the distance.

Fiona Alison Duncan is a Canadian American writer and curator. With Maurin Dietrich and others, she cocurated the first touring retrospective of Pippa Garner’s work, “Act Like You Know Me” (2022–23) and coedited an accompanying monograph of the same name (Bierke Books, 2023). Duncan is currently working on a literary book about Garner’s life and work.

Image credit: © The Estate of Pippa ­Garner