First Person, Second Person, Third Person Museum

A prototype of the First Person Museum opened this month at the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia, and, as a work-in-progress, it achieved some successes and met with a few challenges. Being part of this project makes it difficult to review objectively, especially considering my unresolved concerns about its ideological framework. I will step around those issues to look specifically at one aspect of the exhibition that I came to consider only after my visits to the exhibition.

Before we wrote the captions, we received a list of goals for the exhibit, listed in order of priority. My focus is on the third goal in the list – “Visitors will be able to articulate an emotional response to the stories in the exhibit.” As with any exhibition, emotional responses are elicited on two levels: one response connected to the content of the stories and the exhibition, and another feeling that a visitor gets from the experience as a whole. In my opinion, this second response reflects how confident and clear an exhibition has been in guiding the visitor and in meeting its goals. Confusion or ambivalence on the part of the exiting public is an important indicator of emotional response that reflects on the coherence of the visiting experience as a whole. Despite its successes in other areas, this exhibit fails to elicit the desired response on both of these levels.

The main exhibition space, dotted with lamps and homey furniture, feels inviting and comfortable, if a bit difficult to navigate. The wall plaques, video monitors, and vitrines are neat and professional, giving a planned feel to a project that, because of the budget and location, otherwise might feel scrappy or temporary. Video and audio pieces that accompany some of the objects provide stories and context that reveal the real heart of the First Person Arts initiative, connecting visitors to participants through memoir and documentary. These elements help to anchor the exhibition in the personal.

Nevertheless, the exhibition is beset by one overriding challenge: a lack of clarity in the exhibition narrative. Visitors to the museum may feel themselves pulled in different directions, moved one way by the stories and another by the photographs, their experience corporatized and branded through terms like “StoryCircle” and design and text that echoes ad copy, but pushing to be individualized through the second-person “you.” I felt nudged toward an imperative to connect but inadequately guided to a relationship with the pieces on display. In the end, the exhibition feels designed by committee, lacking in a sense of a singular, unifying sensibility – a museum by and for me, you, we, them … who?

One of the first things I noticed about the show was the content of the stories. It seems that most of the stories hinge not on memories, but on the process of remembering. In many cases, the objects connected their owners not to a story, but to a different time in their lives. One participant remembered fishing with his grandfather over the course of many months or years. Another participant remembered the period of time when her baby daughter could fit into her first clothes. Another story talked about many family meals cooked in one specific pot. What I noticed most about many of these stories is that they lack the type of details that bring a narrative alive, those personalizing facts and embellishments that distinguish the voice of the teller, root the narrative in a time and a place, reveal the teller’s self to the listener, and connect people in and across communities. Specifics lead audience members to generalize about their own lives, but generalizations don’t lead them to generate specifics. Many of these stories left me feeling that my emotions were expected to develop on the basis of thinly developed universals: “having a baby,” “losing a parent/friend/culture,” “the pain of separation/divorce,” “nostalgia for the past.” I desperately wanted personal details – a true “first person” revelation – to guide me into feeling.

Objects that included no audio or video were most severely debilitated in this regard. Some of the audio and video stories, such as Renee’s story of her boxers, started to dig deeper into specifics, which helps to develop a sense of empathy in the audience. Still, even some of the best stories could have mined experiences and details further below the surface. The introductory wall text – heavy on the second person voice – promises to connect me, the viewer, with these stories and with stories of my own. But the text, audio, and video failed to take the risks necessary to form real relationships, between audience and storyteller, but also between storyteller and object, and between object and audience. Having gotten a nice introduction to these stories, I was left with a lot of questions, mainly about emotional content and the role of the object in the story itself. What does it feel like to connect with a father only after he has died? What is the depth of grief at the loss of a friend who was only 33 years old? What questions does a mother ask of herself or her society when her young son is sent to prison? And why are these stories so sad? Where is the humor, the nerviness, embarrassment, elation, fear, stubbornness, joy, or anger? Couple this one-note emotion of melancholy nostalgia with the staged photographs of smiling participants – in the style of a magazine spread – and I’m confused about what to feel. In the end, the museum experience, on the level of personal narrative, suffers not only from a lack of depth but also of breadth.

On the level of the individual narrative, I think the problems are easily corrected. Storytelling does not come naturally to most people, but the skill can be taught, or stories can be interpreted by professionals (as in the audio and video – both of which were culled from interviews and edited to communicate “story” effectively). More time and space needs to be dedicated to developing the narratives attached to each of the objects. One thing the exhibit succeeded in proving is that everyone does have a story. I think the museum can work with participants to make sure these stories mine the rich detail of the tellers’ lives, and then give them ample wall space for text as well as audio and video to present stories more fully.

On the level of the exhibition narrative, the problems may be more difficult to resolve. As a committee endeavor, the project bears some of the signs of too many cooks in the kitchen. My class contributed to this overrepresentation of voices as writers and researchers. With eighteen different captions with different points of view, different writing and conceptual styles, and different names on each placard, it was hard to get a unified message from these histories.

The First Person Museum received a $75,000 grant from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Heritage Philadelphia Program and a $75,000 grant from the Engage 2020 Innovation Grants Program. It’s worth pointing out that the programs seem to have a very narrow overlap, which may have contributed to what amounts to two more cooks in the kitchen. Heritage Philadelphia seems interested in pushing the envelope of how social history can connect and Engage 2020 seems to be encouraging restraint to appeal to large numbers of potential consumers. Although the goals of these two organizations are more similar than different, reading their mission statements and public materials (via their websites) induced a bit of a push-pull reaction in me. I suspect that this came to bear on the design of the First Person Museum, resulting in a show that wanted to do right by its participants, its paid staff, its consultants, and its granting organizations.

Ultimately, the First Person Museum suffers from its abundance of voices – the first-person “I” who tells the story, the second-person “you” who can tell your story, too, and the inevitable development of the third-person “he/she/it,” as people, their stories, and their possessions are objectified and turned into consumable narratives. If the other voices – those of the designers and directors – can be unified and clarified, I, you, and the rest might find ourselves blended in an exhibition narrative that successfully involves us all.

First Person Museum Captions

Five options for captions for Renee's boxer-briefs:

About Men's Undergarments

Ancient man, accustomed to wearing loincloths, added more layers by the fifth century. Diaper-like swaths of fabric were worn underneath to keep outer layers clean. Pull-on boxers and briefs entered the market in the 1930s, with eventual changes in fit and color that reflected fashion as equally as function – eroticizing garments once worn for practicality and modesty.

About the History of Diapers

Mothers once wrapped babies in animal skins, moss, leaves, or linen. Nineteenth-century parents with expensive furnishings to protect used thick cotton fabric fastened with safety pins and covered in wool or rubber. Wrappings in 1500s Europe were changed every few days; disposable diapers (available since the 1960s) are changed an average of five times a day.


About the Cultural Role of Diapering

A parent leaning over a baby to change his diaper communicates at close range with eye contact and smiles. At this young age, a baby’s sense of safety depends on physical connection and routine, like regular diapering. European babies in the 1500s were changed once every few days; babies today get this opportunity for caregiver bonding an average of five times a day.

About the Diapering Stage

Babies are seen as cute, powerless, and sexually and morally innocent. As a cultural activity, diapering represents the dependence a baby has on its caregivers, with adults performing a task that would be embarrassing at later ages. A child’s maturation can lead caregivers to idealize the diapering stage, when children are helpless and pure.

About Totemic Uses of Apparel

The ancient practice of wearing the clothing or bones of the dead or geographically distant persists today. Although stigmatized before the 1970s, attachment to a comfort object, such as a stuffed animal or item of clothing, is now seen as an acceptable way to ease the stress of separation.

Shine a Light

Renee’s boxer-briefs are part of the premier exhibition of the First Person Museum in Philadelphia. Our class has been asked to imagine our own versions.

The mission of First Person Arts is to transform the drama of real life into memoir and documentary art to foster appreciation for our unique and shared experience. The rest of the mission statement gives us the “take-home message” – that everyone has a story to tell, and sharing our stories connects us with each other. The exhibit encourages visitors to consider their relationship to their own “stuff” as receptacles of memory and interpersonal connection. My plan separates visitor encounters with the objects into three distinct experiences -- an audio experience, a direct experience with the objects, and a video experience -- to explore how each works on our sense of emotional connection.

Gallery 1, the audio gallery, has ample, central seating and surround-sound speakers. I’m a really big fan of StoryCorps, an oral history project that collects and archives stories about personal lives, as told by one person to a close friend or family member. I will borrow their model, setting up audio interviews with each of the exhibition participants and someone from their social or family circle, but focusing on questions relating to the object and its story. From an interview of 40- to 60-minutes, a 1- to 2-minute section will be selected for the looping audio program featuring all of the interviewees. Gallery 1 offers a chance for visitors to connect on an emotional level with the objects before seeing them in person.

In considering my design for Gallery 2, the word “drama” jumped out at me from the First Person Arts mission statement. To me, light equals drama. Gallery 2 is a dimly lit space that gets its light from two main sources, a 3-sided structure in the center of the space for projecting photo slideshows, and 19 window-like vitrines that resemble jewelers’ display windows built into the peripheral walls. Each object will shine in its window, illuminated with small, angled lights and raised slightly from its black fabric background. Each window carves out a pocket from the darkness. The visual metaphor of the jeweler’s window will, I hope, help visitors make the connection that the objects are precious and valuable to their owners, without adding much context about the object and where it came from. Next to each vitrine, placards will identify the object (“Beth’s Sock,” “Rocky’s Tie-Dye Shirt”) and contain a 100-word blurb (yeah! A hundred!) about the object’s historic context. The 6' x 5' sides of the projection structure will silently play slideshows of personal images from participant archives -- a photo of Jon and his father, the original owner of the fishing license? Vicki wearing her dress when it was new? Carla on her wedding day? The photos do not have to show obvious connection to the object, and a small title on the bottom of the slide will connect the photo to the participant.

In Gallery 3, set up in the same fashion as Gallery 1, short documentaries and home movies will be projected, showing the objects in their context. I leave the documentaries as the last step in the museum flow; I'm curious to see whether and how the power of the moving image has been mediated by or augmented by the first two galleries. On the way out, visitors can schedule their own interviews at an Interview Center connected to the lobby, where visitors can talk about objects that are important to them and take home their interview on a CD. This might provide the First Person Museum with new material that can be switched out for an evolving collection.

Larger versions of the floorplans are here.

Hidden contexts

Men’s underwear has featured in contemporary culture in everything from Tom Cruise’s dancing scene in “Risky Business” to at least one bombing attempt, but the means by which most of us are educated about underwear is through advertisements. Throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the advertising of underwear has been a surprisingly open-air practice. One might assume that in past eras, public marketing of “unmentionables” would have met with disapproval. But when illustrated advertisements of underwear began to appear in the second half of the 19^th century, consumers may have seen underwear merely as a practical garment – and one with a satisfactory amount of body-concealing fabric – that was not always associated with sexuality and ideas about gender identity.

The linking of male sexuality to underwear emerged in popular culture in the 1970s and 1980s, with the eroticization of male bodies in art and advertising. Robert Mapplethorpe’s stylized and confrontational photographs of naked men did much to recast the male body as an object for viewing; at least one image in his oeuvre cleverly and suggestively links underwear with his other works. And whether Mapplethorpe was an engine of change or only an actor in the objectification of men’s bodies, these changes are reflected in his work and in similar icons of underwear advertising, both of which fostered the sexualization of this garment.

Underwear advertising in the 1920s was somewhat lifeless to literally lifeless. By the late 1930s and into the 1940s, the squeaky-clean camaraderie of the locker room emerged as a trope that persists today. Color ads brought to life not only the new, vibrant patterns of menswear in the 1950s but also the model’s flesh. Flesh notwithstanding, underwear ads continued to equate malehood with wholesome versions of fatherhood and were clearly not playing the “sexy” angle – although at least one brand urged men to pay attention to their figures. Despite women doing the bulk of the family underwear-buying it wasn’t until the 1970s that body-hugging neon mesh entered the market. Were women not supposed to be attracted to the male form?

Changing sexual mores from the 1950s through the 1980s and the public emergence of gay culture probably helped new underwear styles from Europe find an audience in the United States. Women could be attracted to the naked or nearly-naked male body, as could men. The next couple of decades of underwear advertising cast idealized bodies in an increasingly sexualized role. It is interesting to note that while most advertisements that play to homoeroticized conceptions of the male body will feature a single man in the image, those that show two or more hew to the desexualized “buddy” context of the locker-room setting. Comfort with men’s sexuality has grown, but boundaries seem to have been clearly drawn.

All of this points to an underlying anxiety about underwear that certainly doesn’t come from the cotton-blend fabric. Anxiety about men’s underwear seems to be linked through a series of associations to that which it shields from view – the male anatomy, and the poopy, drippy, farty things that happen under there. A man's choice in underwear is a carefully considered selection based not only on comfort but also on fears and affirmations about male gender roles.

(Click here if you want to see a turkey marching in a Union Suit, circa 1951!)

(And click here to see today's take on underwear advertising.)

Detours in context (and a brief history of underwear)

What’s a woman doing with a pair of men’s underwear? To begin to answer that question, I’ll let you in on part of the backstory: this pair of underwear first belonged to Renee’s oldest son, who wore them as a 19-year-old in 2001.

This fact of their previous ownership situates the boxer-briefs within their intended context – use by men as a daily layer for warmth and hygiene. The history of undergarments is an array of practical, social, technological, and economic developments, but a condensed history pulled from a variety of online resources reveals the following about why people own and wear these things:

• In much of the ancient world, men (and in some cultures, women) wore loincloths to cover their genitals, either for protection or for modesty, as their only clothing – thus, not yet an “under”-garment.

• The fall of the Roman Empire was also the fall of the loincloth – what used to be a show of modesty was now considered uncivilized.

• People began to wear more clothing to cover themselves. Baggy swaths of folded fabric resembling diapers, followed by longer, pant-like “braies” in Medieval times, were used to protect the more-expensive outer layer. During the Renaissance era, braies lost their excess fabric, becoming more fitted and easier to wear under clothing.

• Such pants also necessitated the wearing of an undershirt, but by Victorian times the two were combined into the Union suit, a one-piece undergarment with long sleeves and legs.

• In the 20th century, pull-on boxers and briefs entered the market. Pre-shrunk material and a series of developments in the fabric industry (such as Rayon and Nylon) changed the fit mid-century and led to a new range of colors and patterns.

• As undergarments began reflecting fashion tastes as equally as functionality, underwear advertising attached concepts of sexuality and masculinity to clothing once worn for practicality and modesty.

This last context is the one in which Renee’s son wore his boxer-briefs. But the story does not end there – the briefs had a second, more idiosyncratic, life after Renee took ownership of them. In 2001, Renee was sent a box of her son’s belongings after he was arrested and imprisoned on drug charges; the box included an A-shirt, a pair of jeans, a pair of boots, and the underwear. Renee kept only the shorts and wears them sometimes.

At this point in the story of the object, there’s a detour in the intended context. It’s not a big one – the underwear aren’t being used in place of an oven mitt or to organize mail. The underwear are still being worn – although in this case by a woman (itself a small detour in function) – but now, social and emotional factors color and significantly change the context. It’s not simply about whether the briefs are worn, but about how and why they are worn.

What we may be faced with now is not a broad socio-historical survey of undergarments generally (darn!), but an investigation into a new, culturally determined use. Part of the key to this new context might be in the fact that Renee kept the shorts, and not, for instance, the boots. Underwear, because of their closeness to the body and the bodily functions and the socio-sexual part of the body they cover from view, are uniquely intimate objects. At the meeting where I was able to see and touch the briefs, several bystanders became squeamish at the sight of them. I suspect, though, that if they knew the personal story behind the briefs, if they spoke to Renee and discovered a mother’s emotional response to her son’s incarceration, they might be (a little) less uncomfortable with seeing used underwear in a public setting.

I hypothesize that this is not just because of personal connection with Renee and the power of personal stories, but because her use of the underwear is part of a shared history of deep cultural responses to the totemic uses of objects. In seeing Renee’s boxer-briefs as receptacles of emotional response, nostalgia, and comfort, we are now looking at a concept of object-use that supercedes the first intended use of the object, and even supercedes the specifics of Renee’s story. Totemic use is a whole category of object-use with a history all its own.

Kind-of interesting that a pair of underwear can do all of that.

(I went a bit long in this post, but I didn't want to deprive any readers of those tidbits from underwear history. I found a lot of my poppy historical information from Wikipedia and other Web sources, including this video from the BBC. I also consulted a neat source of information on Medieval underwear.)

The briefs, briefly

My object – an undergarment, size unknown – comes from a woman named Renee. I have seen a photograph of the object but have not examined the object in person, so my description here is limited by the angle and lighting of the image.

The image shows one pair of trunk-style or boxer brief–style men’s underwear. This underwear style executes the boxy, longer-legged fit of boxer shorts in the form-fitting cotton blend material of briefs (now known colloquially as “tighty whities”), resulting in a hybrid style of underwear that emerged in the 1990s and remains popular in the United States today. The boxer brief style is held in place on the waist by an elastic band, either exposed or fabric-covered, and provides coverage from the waist to the top or middle of the thighs. The front of these undergarments often features a pouch-like protuberance to accommodate the male sexual anatomy and may have a keyhole fly, a button-front closure, or no fly along the pouch.

In the production of the boxer brief, layers of cotton or cotton-blend fabric are cut along die lines to produce each piece of the undergarment pattern. Pattern pieces are sewn together and then serge-stitched along major seams. Serging machines sew straight and zigzag stitches together in a pattern, completely sealing the edge of the fabric to prevent unraveling and to reinforce the seams. Legholes are reinforced with a hem or with binding fabric for a clean look. Each undergarment is finished with an elastic waistband and a tag relating brand, size, material content, and place of manufacture.

Renee’s boxer briefs have a keyhole fly and are heather grey in color with darker, carbon-colored horizontal striping throughout. The exposed elastic waistband bears the letters “FTL” (for Fruit of the Loom) at regular intervals. At the legholes, a simple hem was created by folding the raw edge under and fastening with a standard stitch. Label information was not available, but boxer briefs available in a similar style are constructed of 75% polyester and 25% cotton material. Site of production of the sample undergarment could not be determined; however, Fruit of the Loom operates factories in the Caribbean and Central America that ship to retail locations in the United States.

The sample boxer briefs appear to have been previously worn, judging by the slight rippling of the elastic waistband in the back that results from laundering and drying elastic at high temperatures. The fabric itself lacks the crisp appearance of new underwear, suggesting laundering. It is unusual—but not unheard of—for undergarments to be ironed, but these appear to have gone through a typical washing-and-drying cycle without ironing: the fabric in the thigh portion looks soft and slightly rumpled.

These shorts are clean and well preserved. Though designed specifically for men, this style of underwear could be worn by women. If the briefs are not worn functionally by their owner, they may have some totemic or symbolic value for her.

UPDATE: I got to see the shorts! Instead of recasting my description to include the new details, I'll summarize my new findings here to highlight some of the differences between what can be observed in person and what can be seen in a photograph. I found that

• The stripes are black, not carbon grey.
• The binding thread and serge-stitch are black.
  
• The fabric has a thin-to-medium feel/weight and has developed tiny "pills" on the surface from friction and laundering.
• Elastic threads are fraying along the waistband.
• A heavy scent of laundry detergent masks what may be a very slight scent of cigarette smoke.
• The tag on the inside back of the waistband is extremely worn. It appears to have been adhered with a gluelike binding substance rather than sewn to the band. What remains is greyish "islands" of the tag with a slight bit of smeared red dye in one spot. All information about size, brand, and material content has been eradicated.
• The briefs measure 15.75" at the waist on one side of the garment, 14.5" along the side from waist to leghole, and 9" across the leghole, and have an 11" rise.
  

Introduction

As a dancer and filmmaker, I never thought I'd be taking a graduate-level history course. However, in 2009, I began working with the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks to develop site-specific films through their contemporary arts project. Invitations like this sometimes afford just a month or two of access to the site, but through the generosity of Landmarks, I've been able to deepen my artistic research during the past year and now find myself with a growing body of film work based on contemporary interaction with history.

Currently I am developing a script-based experimental film project sited at the historic Grumblethorpe house in Germantown, Philadelphia. I am also finishing two short films using material shot at Powel House in Society Hill. These short films will complete a cycle of four films that have served as my introduction to public history practices and the role of material culture in shaping narratives at historic sites.

Through my work with Landmarks, I became interested in how historical narratives are built and presented to the public, and how a tendency to make and use narratives to make sense of our world operates in the field of history as well as in film and literature. My films identify narratives without resolving them--a practice I plan to continue and hope to intensity through this Studies in American Material Culture course.

Images from some of my past projects are at jmakary.com.