“A shirt is a window
into the soul.”
For my second project I decided to examine clothes and they ways that
clothes communicate essential facts about our selves to the world at
large. No matter what you wear or how you wear it every person
communicates something by what they wear. Clothes can be used to
express and mystify the wearer’s social class, gender, sexuality,
cultural identity, likes, and dislikes.
Recognizing this as a constant attribute of life, I am interested in
the ways that clothing codes a future behavior or can telepathically
unite people through symbol. Like a flag or club insignia,
wearing an Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirt places the wearer in a
specific class and social stratum. In a more subversive way, the
use of a hankerchief system by some gay subcultures to indicate the
method and manner of sexual appetites also serves to identify and
create small-scale community connections. However, to the unaware
and uninitiated, the hankerchief system has little meaning beyond a
traditionally masculine working man's accessory.
The first part of my experiment was the create a coded piece of
clothing that would identify some piece of knowledge of I have to
people who have the same piece of knowledge. Hence, I created a
shirt that says “24601”. A lay person may wonder if this is a zip
code, when in fact it is the prison number of assigned to Jean Valjean
in the book Les Miserables and
popularized in the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical of the same name in a
falsetto’d cry of self-identification by Jean Valjean (“2!
4! 6! 0! 1!!!!!”).
Many adults are embarrassed by their love of musical theatre;
oftentimes the musical form is seen as unsophisticated and
cheesy. The ownership of a “Phantom of the Opera” compiliation
disk can send owner into a paroxism of excuses (“I got it from my
mother as a Christmas gift!”). While wearing my “24601” t-shirt,
I recognized first-hand the embarrassment tinged with joy induced by
people reading the t-shirt. The Numbers Shirt place the
recognizing viewer in a secret club with the shirt's wearer
simultaneously excluding those who are uninitiated to the wonder of Les Miserables.
SHERRY KRAMER
I also made t-shirts dedicated to a playwright and teacher I highly
admire. Sherry Kramer is a national treasure. Though I
speak high hyperbolically about many things that I love, I do not have
the hyperbolic wizardry to do justice to my appreciation of Sherry.
Having worked as an assistant on a Sherry Kramer world premiere play (When Something Wonderful Ends at
the 2007 Humana Festival) and been Sherry’s student in two classes
offered in the Spring of 2008, I am a faithful acolyte to the church of
Sherry.
Sherry believes a couple things integral to the development of this
project:
*In a good play nothing is superfluous.
*Visual metaphors are highly sophisticated artistic tools that easily
communicate complicated layers of meaning.
*We are busy little meaning making creatures.
While conceptualizing a t-shirt that could communicate a complicated
set of layers I returned to the lessons of the visual metaphor that I
picked up in Sherry’s Spring class.
Here’s the process of creating the visual metaphor as seen in August
Wilson’s The Piano Lesson.
The process of creating a successful visual metaphor is acheived
through these steps:
1. Pattern of reference.
2. Mystery.
3. Story
4. And then Final Effect.
THE BLUE HEART SHIRT
The Blue Heart Shirt was my empty symbol. It's a plain white
t-shirt with a blue heart scrawled over the left breast. It has
some slight meaning just based on it’s color and figuration. As a
combination of color and symbol I think that there’s something sad and
earnest about a blue heart. However, as a symbol it has no
readily available or apparent visual metaphor.
Hence, I created one.
In class, I introduced the Blue Heart Shirt as something I made with no
ready explanation. It was a whim, a fancy.
It was just a symbol waiting to gain meaning.
Then I announced to the class that I had made another item, but was
currently wearing it. I sheepishly explained that in order to
show my final artifact, I would have to take off my clothes.
Then, I played a song ("Do You Hear the People Sing?" from Les Miserables) and stripped off
all of my clothes.
However, every time I took off an article of clothing another layer was
introduced. First, a pair of blue jeans. Then a
dress. Then a Chicago Bear football shirt. Then a woman's
blouse. Then a pair of boxers. Then a mini-skirt. Each
layer of clothing posed, counterposed, and intermixed different
iterations of gendered clothing. It took a number of layers until
I was finally in a pair of underwear covered with the International
Male Symbol. I explainied that I was expressing my gender through
clothing and since I was obviously male I was expressing this fact
through symbol.
But I had one more layer to show. In one quick motion, I slipped
off my International Male Symbol underwear and presented another pair
of underwear covered in Blue Hearts mimicking my Blue Heart
Shirt.
As a result, I let my stripping through various outfits tell a story of
a gendered world. I presented the mutability and volatility of my
gender through representational clothes and through this act set the
scene for the Blue Heart to become a highly personal symbol for my
gender.
END NOTES
In the end, I was trying to create an uncanny experience through the
development of a symbol. Using the mystical conjurations of live
performance, I used layers of clothes and my own body to tell the story
of a symbol and then presented this symbol in a new, unexpected
format.
My end goal is simple: when I wear my Blue Heart Shirt again
anyone who was present for the performance will remember me standing in
my Blue Heart Underwear. As a result, I have created a coded
symbol that communicates my own complex notions of gender to the
witnesses of my performance, but still remains a benign scribbling to
everyone else.
In a world of deeply encoded symbols and subtle references, I believe
that an uncanny mechanism can be used to create a new order of symbolic
institutions. Make the Blue Heart a window and you might see some
soul that no one else can see.
Boy oh boy I want to see some PICTURES!