Pippa Garner: $Ell Your $Elf - by Sara O'Keeffe (Paperback)

About the Book

"A kaleidoscopic introduction to five decades of visionary artist Pippa Garner's work including gender hacking, custom cars and deviant proposals to solve everyday problems."--Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

A kaleidoscopic introduction to five decades of visionary artist Pippa Garner's work including gender hacking, custom cars and deviant proposals to solve everyday problems

Published in conjunction with Pippa Garner's (born 1942) first institutional exhibition in New York, Pippa Garner: $ELL YOUR $ELF features her previously unpublished writing, including personal accounts of her gender transition-as-performance, with texts by contemporaries and admirers including McKenzie Wark, Nayland Blake and Chip Lord. Featuring hundreds of never-before-published images of Garner's drawings, garments, classified ads and more, it brings into focus the artist's singular approach to addressing--and parodying--the contradictions of commodity fetishism from the 1960s to today.
Embracing pleasure, kink and the perversion of mass-produced products, Garner's work imagines ways to restructure environments, everyday devices and conceptualizations of self. For much of her career, Garner has embedded her work in the world, often realizing projects outside the confines of galleries or museums, continually challenging what is strictly defined as art. This richly illustrated publication underscores Garner as a provocative and indispensable voice of our time.

Review Quotes

Across over 300 pages, the book dwells on equally kinky and cheeky conceptualizations of the corporeal self as a commodity, with the artist's own diaries endearing us to her decades-long pursuit of self-satisfaction--gender as a source of ennui and later, of triumph.--Yume Murphy "The Whitney Review of New Writing"

Garner's playful tenacity and utopian contraptions gesture toward another politic--an eternal tinkering.--Grace Byron "Bookforum"

From billboards to algorithms to cars that drive themselves. Garner's show seemingly compels us to take the wheel and explore our latent desires as opposed to those that are right in front of us.--Meyme Nakash "Office"

The artist A.K. Burns, who resides in the Hudson Valley, described the exhibition as a "must-see" for anyone interested in the octogenarian's work.--Zachary Small "The New York Times: Arts"

Few things have escaped her restless, imaginative tinkering, from automobiles to her own body.--Evan Moffitt "T Magazine"

One could also argue that there's never not a good time for a statement from Garner, who, over the course of a five-decade practice, has satirized, subverted, and otherwise sent up the ever-present scourge of consumerism.--Min Chen "Artnet"

Re-engineering everyday consumerism to reveal sinister truths about excess consumption, Garner deconstructs the foundational pillars of gender and sexuality through the products and mechanisms of Capitalism.--Orlando Estrada "Elephant"

Turns expressions of consumerist exhaustion into something wonderful, embracing the perversion and pleasure of mass production.--Erin Ikeuchi "Document Journal"