Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing

Floor 3

Born 1942 in Evanston, IL
Died in 2024

Born shortly after the United States entered World War II, Pippa Garner came of age in a culture largely shaped by consumer goods that were available on a massive scale for the first time in history. From a young age, she has been attuned to the ways that the marketing and design of these objects—and cars, above all—seem to imply humanlike qualities, such as personality and gender. The “impossible inventions” displayed in this gallery play with the oddity of anthropomorphizing manufactured goods, for example, imagining fantastical second lives for objects that have become obsolete. Some of the works reflect on her transition—or genderhacking, as she put it— which she began at the end of the 1980s.“I thought, with all this energy that I was putting into altering consumer appliances from the assembly line, can’t that be applied to the human body? If I can work with a waffle iron, why not the body?”