Americans love their t-shirts. Commemorating sports teams, music groups, cultural events, family reunions and everything under the sun, t-shirts are an accessible and frequently artistic form of personal expression for the masses.
Frequently manufactured and printed in Mexico, The Philippines or China, these t-shirts find their way to the U.S.A. by the millions, where they are sold everywhere from big box chain stores to little indie boutiques. They are a part of American life as much as cars and Coke and Ronald McDonald.
Less woven into the fabric of our culture are the thinkers who cast an unblinking gaze on capitalism and it's unceasing appetite for accumulating men and capital and stuff: Chomsky, Derrida, Foucault, McLuhan, Marx, Che Guevara.
My project will literally weave them into the fabric of mass capitalist society.
With gold thread.
Visitors to the gallery will see a wide range of t-shirts personally selected by the artist from the racks of stores and listings of eBay. The t-shirts will all be hand washed by the artist and tumble-dried in an electric clothes dryer before being brought to the gallery and displayed on a standard retail clothes rack.
If a visitor decides they want to become a collector of art, they can buy one of the t-shirts and have the name of a famous philosopher embroidered on it with gold thread. The list will include, but not be limited to, the names mentioned above. For double (or triple or so on) the cost, they can have 2 or 3 or more names embroidered on it.
The new art collector will write down their philosopher of choice on an order form and give it, and the t-shirt, to gallery personnel. When checkout is completed and all the goods and services have been paid for, gallery personnel will bring the t-shirt and order form to one of two seamstresses who will have been hired to sit at the ready during gallery hours. If they're not busy, the seamstress will begin embroidering, for example, Derrida on a Nascar t-shirt, while the patron watches and waits.
During the sewing, the patron will notice that the embroidery of the t-shirt is not just making it into a piece of art, but is also making it useless as an article of clothing, as the sewing is going through both front and back of the T, sewing it shut.
A photoshop mock-up of the finished product is below:
In deciding to take part in this process, the collector becomes intentionally, overtly and transparently complicit in the machinery of capitalism and waste and the caprice of taste -- all in the process of making and supporting the arts.
Dirty hands/beautiful hands
