Free

Join Arcana: Books on the Arts on Saturday, November 18th, 4:00-6:00 pm for a book signing with renowned Los Angeles-based artist Pippa Garner.

Available will be the much-anticipated catalogue for Ms. Garner’s current career-spanning retrospective – Act Like You Know Me, along with the 2023 edition of her iconic, long-unavailable Philip Garner’s Better Living Catalog.

If you cannot attend and would like to order a signed copy of either – or both – to have shipped or to pick up at the shop, please place your order with Arcana Books!

We look forward to seeing you this Saturday!

Act Like You Know Me is the first comprehensive monograph on innovative American artist Pippa Garner. Encompassing Garner’s most iconic works, from the Backwards Car to the Half-Suit, alongside never-before-seen photographs and ephemera, it surveys fifty years of her transdisciplinary art practice, from the late 1960s to the early 2010s, through photography, illustration, ephemera, and original writings. “Act Like You Know Me” supplements exclusive visuals and texts by Garner with 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, and serves to introduce a highly-influential, under-recognized 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.

Pippa Garner’s Better Living Catalogue – originally published in 1982, takes the form of a mail order catalog featuring clever and whimsical inventions that parody consumer goods while simultaneously critiquing America’s obsession with ingenuity, efficiency, leisure, and comfort. These works, which were made as prototypes and photographed for the publication, take the form of improbable accessories, clothing, footwear, home appliances, and office gadgets. For example, the “Reactiononometer,” a portable wristband, instantly measures social success, while the “Digital Diet Loafers” display the wearer’s weight with every step. If the “Munch-o-Matic” reduces deskwork interruptions by flinging a snack right into the user’s mouth, other items promise financial solvency (the controlled cash flow “Autowallet”), sustainable waste management, or mess-free companionship (the “Pet-a-Vision” TV console). The artist asserts that all of the products in the book are “absolute necessities for contemporary survival.” Many of the prototypes Garner created for the publication were ultimately repurposed or recycled, making this previously rare gem of an artist book one of the artist’s few works to now be widely available.

Born in the suburbs of Chicago in 1942, the artist formerly known as Philip Garner has satirized 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.