Artist’s Uniform #1: The Year I Dyed All My Clothes Pink
(05/16/2002-05/16/2003)
Artist’s Uniform # 1: The Year I Dyed All My Clothes Pink involved the process of removing all color from then dying my entire wardrobe pink, as well as re-branding the clothing by replacing the original labels with my own. Interested in reversing the commodity fetishism and alienation that transpires when we accumulate objects, I sacrificed all the clothes I owned in an attempt to shift their material identity to that of “art”. I then wore this new monochromatic uniform for 365 days while attending graduate school, working construction, traveling across the country, and every other minute of the year. This activity was not only a challenge to conventions about male identity but also engaged almost everyone I encountered in a productive discourse about the effects that fashion and consumption have on an individual’s life. This project started on May 16, 2002 and ended on May 16, 2003, the day I graduated from California Institute of the Arts.
Artist’s Uniform #2: The Year I Paid People To Buy Me Clothes
(05/17/2003-11/03/2004)
Rooted in the question "What would be the opposite of wearing pink?" Artist’s Uniform #2: The Year I Paid People To Buy Me Clothes deferred the responsibility of forming my new post-pink identity to others. Because the pink project ended the day I graduated, I decided to invite seven members of the art faculty to collaborate on the next installment of Artist’s Uniform. This gesture not only reflected the semi-parental relationship between student and teacher but also mirrored the financial investment I had made in them. Once they agreed to participate, I gave them my measurements and paid them each $142.86 to purchase new, used, or commissioned clothing. They had no restrictions or rules, but were collectively responsible for and independently expected to provide me my new uniform. This project lasted until I felt that I had “cut the cord” from CalArts and had established my own identity as an artist in Los Angeles.
Artist's Uniform #3: The Year I Wore My Catholic School Uniform From Kindergarten to Eighth Grade (USA/STA Red, White, & Blue)
(11/04/2004-08/01/2005)
Linked to the idea of “starting over” or a “new beginning”, Artist's Uniform #3: The Year I Wore My Catholic School Uniform From Kindergarten to Eighth Grade (USA/STA Red, White, and Blue) was an optimistic gesture towards attracting major change in my life. Because Artist’s Uniform is temporally linked to the length of time I wore a school uniform/dress code in childhood (13 years), my first uniform became a departure point for AU#3. From 1982 to 1992, at St. Thomas the Apostle in Phoenix, AZ, I went to school in navy blue corduroy pants and red, white, or blue (robin’s egg or navy) short-sleeved collared shirts. All sweaters or jackets also had to be solid red, white, or blue.
Naturally I decided to start this project on Election Day (November 2, 2004), with the hopes that America would elect a new president and propel us in a different direction. To mark this event, and add a nostalgic 80’s twist, I purchased a red heather knit cotton sweater with a large American flag to wear to my neighborhood polling place in Los Angeles. (The stars look more like upside-down fleurs-de-lys or dying/diving doves than the five-sided symbol for the states, which should have been a sign for the times to come…) In February 2005, I decided to leave Los Angeles and move to South Boston. This year did mark a lot of new beginnings, like my first teaching positions and a year full of art shows. AU #3 ended in Los Angeles on my 27th birthday (August 2, 2005) while installing a new artwork about my “move”.
Artist’s Uniform #4: The Year I Realized I Wanted To Be Like Everyone Else Or More Accurately, The Year I Realized I Missed Shopping
(08/02/2005-02/13/2007)
On a beautiful spring day in 2005, I ventured into Boston's Filene’s Basement to peruse the male fashions. By this time it had been four years since I'd gone shopping and I left feeling very alienated by the whole experience. I sat down and considered the past years’ “accomplishments”, noting that I had achieved the goal of removing myself from the cycle of consumption -- but that I also felt completely removed from American society. I had become an alien in the market. I decided it was time to readopt the populist agendas of mass consumption, individual choice, and brand allegiance. Artist’s Uniform #4: The Year I Realized I Wanted To Be Like Everyone Else Or More Accurately, The Year I Realized I Missed Shopping allowed me to re-approach mainstream culture, engaging individual taste, current trends, and the moral decisions one confronts when designing an identity. Besides a birthday shopping trip in Baltimore funded by my mother, almost all of the clothes for this project came from two thrift stores in South Boston which provided me with a new wardrobe based mostly on things I liked and that I thought were unique and fun. Amazingly, this experiment in freedom of choice and personal aesthetics led me to my next endeavor, which began February 14, 2007 (St. Valentine’s Day – my chosen confirmation name – and my home state of Arizona’s 95th Birthday).
Artist’s Uniform #5: The Year I Became A Zebra
(02/14/2007-02/28/2008)
My next uniform played off the question "If you were an animal, what would you be?" Artist’s Uniform #5: The Year I Became A Zebra sought to make my own answer -- "a zebra" -- not only a reality but also incorporating my herd into the process. I sent out an invitation that contextualized my desire to become a zebra* and outlined the steps I was taking. The most important was an open call for my herd’s assistance in creating my stripes -- I would wear only the generous donations of “zebra-striped” clothing received from family and friends. And I had been sporting a mane (not a Mohawk!) since my move from Boston to Cambridge in March of 2006.
My transition to Harvard life was a little rocky mostly due to its overemphasis on civilized behavior and cultivated discussion. Fortunately I discovered a few ancestors at Harvard’s Natural History Museum and was able to conduct some research into the psychological and societal impact of transforming into another animal. Supposedly it has never actually happened. But if you did change into another animal, how would another human know? It’s not like you could just tell them! Maybe my real reason, I figured, to announce the new project to my herd was just in case I escaped to the wild and never came back. They would at least know I was content in the new form they'd helped create.
*Note: In addition to having an attraction to black and white animals, I also relate to the zebra’s inability to be domesticated (and/or lassoed) by humans. This is partly due to their unpredictable (impulsive) and aggressive (antagonistic) behavior: once they bite into something, they don’t like to let go! I am also intrigued by the individualistic markings that adorn and identify each of these beautiful equines. Plus, I love their hairdos!
Artist’s Uniform #6: The Year I Became Gustave Courbet and Was Not Only A Man But Created “Living Art”
(02/29/2008-05/16/2008)
After being a zebra for a year, I was ready to become a human again. Anticipating this return, I began to grow a beard six months prior to my planned conversion. My plan had originally been to become a mountain man or cowboy from the Wild West (circa 1850’s) but the more I thought about it I felt I had a unique opportunity -- I could become any human I wanted.
I began my sixth installment of Artist’s Uniform on leap day February 29, 2008. Artist’s Uniform #6: The Year I Became Gustave Courbet and Was Not Only A Man But Created “Living Art” corresponded with my own interest (obsession!?) with Courbet, whom I had been exploring in my installation work and whose Realist Manifesto seemed to have a lot of meaning for the performance work as well. My wardrobe was made up of vintage and period reenactment-wear as well as an exact replica of the outfit Courbet is wearing in his 1854-5 painting The Artist’s Studio, meticulously handcrafted by my mother and me. The duration of AU #6 corresponded with Courbet’s retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (Feb. 27 – May 18, 2008), which I frequented during my visits to the city. On May 16, 2008 (the 6th anniversary of the Artist’s Uniform project) the Courbet project came to an end.
Artist’s Uniform #7: Tyler Rowland
(05/17/2008-5/16/2015)
After six years, I decided to abandon the existing structure of Artist’s Uniform, in which I retire all my clothing at the end of each “year” and then start over every time based on a new idea. I was tired of propagating a model based on the “Catholic” principles of sacrifice, piety, and discipline. I renamed the artwork, Tyler Rowland, and determined to spend the remaining 7 years of the project building my identity based on what I have learned and what I want to be. (Why not be Gustave Courbet as Tyler Rowland? While my clothes might be 21st century, my spirit and mind are pure mid-nineteenth century!) It would be about the constant evolution of an identity and incorporate a plethora of ideas and strategies -- as opposed to the strict singular nature and relentless restarting of the first six years.
I had recently reread Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote.”
"Initially, Menard’s method was to be relatively simple: Learn Spanish, return to Catholicism, fight against the Moor or Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918--be Miguel de Cervantes. Pierre Menard weighed that course (I know he pretty thoroughly mastered seventeenth century Castilian) but he discarded it as too easy. Too impossible, rather!, the reader will say. Quite so, but the undertaking was impossible from the outset, and of all impossible ways of bringing it about, this the least interesting. To be a popular novelist of the seventeenth century in the twentieth seemed to Menard to be a diminution. Being, somehow, Cervantes and arriving thereby at the Quixote—that looked to Menard less challenging (and therefore less interesting) than continuing to be Pierre Menard and coming to the Quixote, through the experiences of Pierre Menard…"The task I have undertaken is not in essence difficult,” I read at another place in that letter. “If I could just be immortal, I could do it.”"
Artist’s Uniform #8: “… to sail gaily, in brave feathers, right in the teeth of a dreary convention”
(10/27/2010)
This open letter was published as part of the exhibition invitation I designed for a group show called En Cada Instante, Ruptura at Sala de Arte Publico Siqueiros (SAPS), Mexico City, Mexico.
REVOLT AGAINST DULLNESS
Artist’s Uniform #8: “… to sail gaily, in brave feathers, right in the teeth of a dreary convention”
Dear Audience,
Let me introduce myself. I am an artist in New York City and have been wearing a different Artist’s Uniform for each of the last 8 years.
All these uniforms were uniforms for one. But this installment--Artist’s Uniform #8--takes the form of an invitation to others.
After living abroad in Italy and Mexico, the British author D. H. Lawrence dreamed up the following dress code in a column for London’s The Evening News, published on September 27, 1928:
“Start with externals, and proceed to internals, and treat life as a good joke. If a dozen men would stroll down the Strand and Piccadilly to-morrow, wearing tight scarlet trousers fitting the leg, gay little orange-brown jackets and bright green hats, then the revolution against dullness which we need so much would have begun. And, of course, those dozen men would be considerably braver, really, than Captain Nobile or the other arctic ventures. It is not particularly brave to do something the public wants you to do. But it takes a lot of courage to sail gaily, in brave feathers, right in the teeth of a dreary convention.”
This exhibition invitation can be folded into a green hat (please follow the diagram above). It’s to help you get started on our adventure. Please wear this green hat--and your own red pants and rust-colored jacket--to the opening event announced on this poster.
Wear the hat (as they say in Spanish)! Together we are stronger.
Below is an excerpt from a proposal for a local artist residency rejected in March 2013.
My thirteen-year live artwork, Artist's Uniform, is scheduled to end on May 16, 2015. After each AU ends, all of its clothing and accessories are taken out of my closet and stored. I have been saving this performance residue with the idea that I would alter (customize) it into artworks in a range of ways, as yet undecided. AU #9: Tailor Rowland would be a tailored art exhibition / installation -- much in the tradition of my sacrificed clothing sculptures.
Some possible alterations: decorative / narrative quilts; a shoe-and-sock rainbow arch; a Bedouin-inspired tent; custom uniforms for specific people; fabric T-shirt or jacket paintings; saw-horses with zebra-print pants; a double-sided clothing mosaic created by weaving items through a metal storefront grid; Russian nesting dolls (in the order of the Uniforms); stuffed animals with miniature uniforms; a costume-making party; and/or new clothes for my two-year-old daughter Union, made from my old clothes. These sculptural experiments will have various direct or poetic relationships to the themes and experiences of each Artist’s Uniform.
Artist’s Uniform #10: Tomás Valentine
(7/27/13-on-going)
Tomás Valentine is my Mexican Catholic alter-ego. The name is derived from my middle name, Thomas, and my Catholic confirmation name, Valentine. My maternal grandmother, Rosalie Placencía Ralf, was of Mexican descent and raised Catholic in El Paso, Texas -- this piece is dedicated to her.
Tomás was born during a residency organized by galería perdida in Chilchota, Michoacan, Mexico in July 2013. Rosario Garcia, a retired Los Angeles hairdresser (and the galería perdida artist Andrés Janacua's mother) cut my hair and beard every morning for a week, creating TV's new look.
Since Tomás has left Chilchota, he has been sighted in Mexico City, NYC, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Phoenix, and Baltimore. He also was chosen to serve as the Holy See delegate at the People's United Nations (pUN) -- a project by Mexican artist Pedro Reyes that premiered at the Queens Museum in November 2013.
Artist's Uniform #11: Kellie Ines Doge Reno
(8/2/1978 - Present)
Kellie Ines Doge Reno is my life-long female doppelgänger and a pseudonym that I occasionally use in my art and writing.
At 8 a friend’s mother dressed me in make-up and girl’s clothes to fool a babysitter—it worked for hours until I changed and removed the makeup. Over the years, I have occasionally enjoyed wearing women’s clothes in public—from comfortable sweaters to Charles Long’s contributions to AU #2 (all women’s clothes from Target) to a watermelon pink bridesmaid’s dress at my brother’s wedding.
Artist's Uniform #12: To Be Announced
(To Be Determined)
This is a wild-card—a time-warp or worm-hole that will allow me to do more Artist’s Uniforms whenever I want.
Artist's Uniform #13: Once upon a time…The End.
(May 16, 2015)
AU #13 was conceived as a one-night only event and installation in my apartment that celebrated the completion of the 13 years of my Artist’s Uniform project. A custom double-sided apron which reads “Once Upon A Time …” and “The End.” as well as this handoutwere created exclusively for this fiesta / finale.
Coming Soon ...
... Artist's Uniform book!
Warning: It could take me another 13 years to process this project.
