100% Cotton Gallery X Through April 3
What You Missed
The massively indie-fied environment of Chicago generates more than its fair share of printed T-shirts. These are usually darling, yes. But the battle of the witty T-shirt has become a crisis in and of itself between be-spectacled emos (emotionally driven rockers) fighting impertinent punks for their right to wear the T-shirt uniform of the moment. Contributing to this hysteria as well as problematizing it, the SAIC Gallery X 100% Cotton Show is a plethora of anomalous T-shirts varying from outright hideous to the truly unique.
The exhibition statement (printed on a T-shirt, of course) claims that the show, composed of student work from the fiber departments of SAIC and the Glasgow School of Art, deals with "youth fashion semantics." This is perhaps an erroneous claim considering that the T-shirts refuse to deal outright with their existence as both art and, well, T-shirt. So there was a vast understatement being made amongst all the overstatements blatantly displayed on the T-shirts themselves. By not addressing the possibility of the "T-shirt as canvas," 100% Cotton far misses the "semantics" of wearable art.
Even so, perhaps such blatant semantics do not belong in the world of fashion-as-art. Take, for instance, a laser-transferred class picture of, ironically, a group of Glasgow fiber art students. This meddles with the boundaries of "semantics," challenging the anonymity of the artist, but it is still a billboard for art, not an integral canvas. The T-shirt itself isn't aesthetically interesting and is hardly high fashion, but it has conceptual merit. At the same time, there were some very wearable bits of good fashion, like a shirt pieced together from three printed shirts, spelling out "MEN," and nearby a black and white profile of a woman's face encompassing nearly three-quarters of a white tee's surface space.
Artistically, there are a few fine candidates in the 100% Cotton show, namely a bright pink T-shirt that looks like chaotic scribbling from far away, but up close it teems with a whole array of hidden erotic themes. Demonstrating proficiency with the laser transfer process, another tee shows a life-size photographic hand holding a miniature snapshot. These certainly do their part to redeem the awkwardness of the show itself.
And yes, I cannot help but comment on the more disturbing works in the show. One inflammatory piece exclaims over a map of Israel, "The Torah promised it to us! The U.N. gave it to us! So why are we dying to keep it?" Hmmm. Well, juxtapose that with yet another jingoistic T-shirt, "If you don't know the language, learn it. If you don't want to learn it (or use it for that matter) get the fuck out." And what have you got? Bad semantics.