Daftari Fereshteh
Ready Made Identities
 
in “Project 40: Ready Made Identities”
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
catalogue of the exhibition , New York, 1983
 

Clothes make the man (or the woman), they say. There is no question that coded messages are woven into the fabric of our apparel. What we wear not only protects the body, decorates it, and serves modesty, it also constitutes a rich lexicon of information. In recent years, with increasing frequency, artists have been appropriating, recontextualizing, and refashioning clothes in order to examine their ethnic, class, religious, and gender defining attributes. For some, clothing has been a medium for private psychological reflection or diaristic confession. Carefully presented articles of wardrobes tailored to personal needs may thus function as relics or emblems of the owner’s unique experience. Ready Made Identities concerns itself with the more public dimensions of clothing’s symbolism.
It focuses not on the idiosyncrasies of our attire but on conventional trappings that suppress individuality, on body surrogates that evoke sexual stereotypes, on generic clothes that proclaim a collective affiliation – in sum, on ready-to-wear clothes that carry ready made messages.
As anyone who has been to a haberdasher will tell you, the well-dressed man makes his most personal statement through his selection of a tie. An accessory to the conventional modern suit, the straight tie is the only remaining article in which masculine display is generally permitted. Venetian artist Maurizio Pellegrin’s Colors of a Crowd seizes this opportunity and, by presenting an array of the available possibilities, mocks this show of individuality. His ties are huddled in boxes.
A row of muted black elements on top contrasts with the crowded display below. Some ties are neatly folded; a few, obeying the gesture of ritual, curl into a knot and blend with the rest. Only one cluster breaks loose. These fugitive ties, asserting a phallic will of their own, overflow their minimalist constraints, perhaps, symbolizing an escape from the restraints of male conventions. The ties are decorated with a riot of color and geometric motifs. Bright, patterned, and at once repetitive and varied, they recall the design strategies of Andy Warhol’s soup cans and reiterated media icons. Conjuring up the idea of the crowd, Pellegrin plays like Warhol did with flashy individual elements within a homogenized whole. With their supergraphic flags neatly tucked under their chins, businessmen march along en masse, each one of them vivid for a moment and just as quickly lost in a sea of their own kind.