Set Seen: Pippa Garner, Beauty 2000, 1992
For Frieze Los Angeles 2024, Art Production Fund will be presenting the on-site public program ‘Set Seen’, featuring works that speak to constructed environments and how they relate to our perception of reality and understanding of space. These projects are in dialogue with the rich history of set design in Los Angeles and specifically the role that set designers played in camouflaging the former Douglas Aircraft Company factory at Santa Monica Airport. This program is free to the public, and select projects will remain on view through April 7, 2024.
Pippa Garner, Beauty 2000, 1992
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Following her satirical catalogs of the 1980s, Pippa Garner’s Beauty 2000 amplifies the absurdity of the beauty industry with over-the-top skincare and cosmetic routines. Originally created in 1992, the zine is a playful exploration of unconventional beauty hacks. Through diagrams and detailed instructions Garner interacts with her audience, delving into personal experiences while challenging our built perceptions of consumerism and aestheticism.
The zine has been specially published for Frieze Los Angeles 2024, as part of Frieze Projects: Set Seen curated by Art Production Fund and is free to the public. The zine was digitized by artist Megan Plunkett in 2021. With many thanks to Sara O’Keeffe and Julia Meyer.
ARTIST BIO
Born in 1942 in Evanston, Illinois, based in Long Beach, CA. Pippa Garner has offered deviant solutions to everyday problems for more than five decades. Her diverse body of work spans drawing, mail-order catalogs, classified ads, custom cars, tattoos, garments, and performances on the streets and on television. In the mid-80s, Garner began gender hacking, viewing her body as an appliance that could be altered like a commercial product. Embracing pleasure, kink, and the perversion of mass-produced products, Garner’s work imagines ways to restructure environments, everyday devices, and parodies the contradictions of commodity fetishism from the 1960s to today.
