Text
to accompany Patricio Forrester's exhibition.
If you want to sell a shirt to a businesswoman, it is sometimes better
to say that no one else in the City is wearing it, yet if your client
is a businessman, it may be better to say that everyone is wearing it.
Rather than wishing to be admired for his difference, a man might take
pride in his belonging, his 'sameness' to the other members of his sex.
If the business shirt is not always the same in terms of pattern, cut
and colour, it is still always a business shirt in the sense of its
place in an image. It matters not so much for its difference but for
its sameness, but what Patricio Forrester's creations show is the fragility
of this identity, the fact that a shirt can be a shirt and many other
things at the same time : including, for example, not a shirt. When
art meets the City, it thus aims at what it does best - making something
different, taking something that belongs to a series and making it special.
Each of Patricio Forrester's shirts is a shirt, and yet each one is
unique and transformed, something which no longer tells you it is a
business shirt but which never quite forgets it either. The shirts speak
and remain silent all at once, some of them sending a message with writing,
yet evoking a dimension beyond the message with their materiality and
their empty form. A shirt is most often a shirt worn by someone, but
each of these is empty : they are shirts without people in them, making
us focus on what usually remains synthesised. And as the shirts become
dense with paint and paraphernalia, we see how the objects which we
define as separate from the body are closer to it than we think, the
packets, coins and silicon tufts materialising the substance of our
enjoyment as well as pointing to its contingency, its triviality. The
world is reduced to a collection of manufactured signs and objects in
the shirt with packets, to a few tokens of exchange in the shirt with
coins, and then, in contrast, rather than being reduced to something
in the shirt with silicon, it shows us that there is more. As in the
shirt with hair, it confronts us with an excess, the fact that the limits
of the body are not the same as the limits of our biology, that there
is something which always overtakes the body image, something which
is never easy to contain. On the one hand the shirts are too empty (
there's no one in them ) and on the other too full ( there's an addition,
a surplus ).
This dimension of the sprouting body evokes one aspect not just of an
individual shirt but of the production of the shirts themselves. The
hair shirt may be a shirt with too much hair, but even the shirt with
a single message inscribed on it indexes the register of something too
much, an embodiment which comes to interfere with the quiet life of
the shirts and tears them away from the business day. There is always
something which shouldn't be there, be it in the form of shirt like
matter ( an emphasised pattern ) or matter that is definitely unshirtlike
( coins, silicon, hair ). When Patricio Forrester chooses the title
'My Father is a Businessman' for the shirts, it poses not only the question
of whether his father would wear them but also that of transmission
: can a garment be passed on without being changed, recreated, made
different?
The jackets and the ties continue Patricio Forrester's concern with
who and what belongs where. 'I'll never be a local' is a collection
of different jackets with the same message in different languages :
'You are not even British, French, American…' Sparked by an incident
when Patricio was jostled by an angry crowd for precisely not even being
'British', the jackets refer to their bearers and to their viewers,
putting in question the very place from which we belong to a group.
'You are not even British' may designate the one wearing the jacket,
as if the other's invective has become materialised, stamped on the
garment like an echo, or it may refer to the viewer, giving them a place
as not British even before the question had been posed. The ambiguity
works to destabilise the supposedly firm foundations from which we claim
that others do not belong, and it shows how nationalist passions are
so often based on answers that come before questions : you are not even
British is a response, an affirmation that emerges before the question
of the speaker' s own identity and the more general question of what
it means to 'be' anything. The problem, and Patricio Forrester's jackets
show us this, is that in designating the other, we are simultaneously
designating ourselves. All we have to guarantee our own Britishness
is that the other isn't even British.
Although the graphics of the jackets and shirts invite appreciation
in terms of fashion, it is the ties which perhaps engage most directly
with fashion as a question in itself. They are all ties and yet they
span several different eras, from the 1950s to the 1990s : unlike the
shirts, we are confronted with clear variations and changes in the series
of 'background' objects, from the boldness of colour to the geometry
of designs. The ties have a chronology, a history, they are telling
us something about the cycle of fashion, and yet they all bear the same
grimacing mouth. Whether the mouth is laughing or pained is unclear
: is it laughing at the empty spectacle of fashion or evoking the suffering
body that changes in fashion try to screen off? However many ties there
are, the same mouth is still there ; whatever the fashion of the moment,
the body still suffers. Change is matched by constancy, a modern version
of the classic tension between the vanities of the world and the stable
fate that awaits its inhabitants.
Patricio Forrester's shirts, jackets and ties are thus all very busy.
And if being a business shirt is in fact by no means a simple thing,
as the collection shows, perhaps that suggests that being a businessman
is not such a simple and univocal thing either. Speaking about his own
choice of the path of the artist, Patricio Forrester evokes the scene
of his father's first entrance into the world of business : at the weighted
moment of company interview, he does the most artistic thing possible
- he spills a bottle of ink. A surplus is made present, and the frame
of the image is broken. With the passage into the world of business
tinted in this way, it suggests that art and the City are perhaps closer
than we think. At the doorway to business there is a little art, and
it is one of the many skills of the artist to be able to show us that.
