Act Like you Know Me is the first comprehensive monograph of American artist Pippa Garner and the first critical survey of the artist’s radical practice. The book maps fifty years of her transdisciplinary art practice, from the late 1960s to the early 2010s, through photography, illustration, ephemera and original writings.
Encompassing Garner’s most iconic works, from the Backwards Car to the Half-Suit, alongside never-before-seen photographs and ephemera, Act Like You Know Me serves to introduce a highly influential and under-recognised artist whose uncompromising approach to life and practice has allowed her to interact with the worlds of illustration, editorial, television and art without ever becoming beholden to them. Supplementing the exclusive visuals and texts by Garner, Act Like you Know Me contains archival press materials on the artist from such notable figures as Glenn O’Brien, Ralph Rugoff, and Hayden Dunham, in addition to three new original commissions from contemporary, award-winning authors Shola von Reinhold, Dodie Bellamy, and Fiona Alison Duncan.
Born in the suburbs of Chicago in 1942, the artist formerly known as Philip Garner has satirised American-style consumerism for decades, reifying the joys of everyday life and personal liberation along her way. With her prankish sense of humour and conceptual dedication to experimental engineering, she has altered materials of mass production – from Fordism through the pharmacopornographic era – subverting commercial binaries to reveal the transitory nature of material life and her own transpersonal identity.
