Jean Shin in The New York Times
June 20, 2004 The New York Times
The Modern's Dirty Laundry
MoMA Queens Puts Its Detritus on Display
'Humble Masterpieces'
'Projects 81: Jean Shin'
Museum of Modern Art Queens
Excerpt--
The exhibition of employees' clothes, ''Projects 81: Jean Shin,'' has two parts, a fabric mural and a hanging sculpture, both of which Ms. Shin, an installation artist, created out of 90 articles of clothes donated by the museum's guards, curators, registrars, publicists and even its director, Glenn D. Lowry.
The show of ordinary objects, ''Humble Masterpieces,'' takes up a single case. Arranged in a grid under glass are 122 things, including a Bic pen, a paper clip, a soda can with a stay-on pull-tab opener, a Durabeam flashlight, a Bayer aspirin tablet, some Lego pieces, a Solo plastic coffee cup lid, a Ziploc bag, a Band-Aid strip, a roll of Scotch tape, a Duracell AA battery, a Swatch watch, a safety pin, a Post-it note and a pile of M & M's. The objects did not actually come from the staff's desk drawers.
...Some are in the museum's design collection; others are being considered for acquisition. And they are in mint condition.
In contrast, the clothes that appear in ''Project 81'' have clearly been through the wringer. The curator, Eva Respini, sent a memo out to the staff calling for clothes. Some articles, she noted, came right from the dry cleaners and still had their tags and staples. Others came dirty. Some she remembered seeing on her colleagues' backs. And then the art began.
To make the mural, Ms. Shin clipped out the seams, cuffs, collars, plackets and pockets from the garments that the curator collected for her. Then, as Ms. Shin explained during the installation, she starched and ironed the remaining pieces, labels and all, to the two facing walls leading from the coat check to the galleries. To make the sculpture, she wove the missing parts, which she poetically calls ''the seam skeletons,'' into a messy net, dripping with cuffs and collars, and hung it from the gap between the two mural walls.
It's all quite lovely. Starched to the left-hand wall (as you walk toward the galleries) you see the cut-outs from colorful print dresses and shirts. On the right-hand wall are the flattened remnants of lots of black and gray garments, shading into the dullness of khakis and into the paleness of oxford cloth. Why so much black? The art world wears black, she explained, so ''a lot of people gave black pants.'' She helpfully pointed out Mr. Lowry's shirt, a pink-and-white striped oxford.
''It is a portrait of the MoMA staff,'' Ms. Respini said, and it is about ''the impossibility of seamlessness.'' How so? ''We are in many locations, here in Queens and in Manhattan. This speaks to the fractured nature of the staff,'' she said. ''It is an attempt to deal with that.'' How has the staff responded? They are excited about the show. She said they keep coming up to her to say, ''I can't wait to see my corduroy shirt!'' And so the mending begins.