Undressed: 350 Years of Underwear in Fashion

(Queensland Museum, 1 December 2014)

The exhibition’s implicit thesis is that underwear has been shaped by technological advances (nylon, lycra, central heating) and social fads (tango, aerobics), but has shaped nothing but the wearer’s frame. The underwear’s under-appreciated agency undermines the exhibition's artistic legitimacy, thereby relegating the exhibition to an ethnographic display.

An undergarment belongs to an art gallery only to the extend that it has been an element of a vocabulary current in a conversation that has effected social change, which, in turn, has affected the conversation---and with it, the vocabulary. Conversations have protagonists, whose lives intertwine to form a narrative, and who are the ultimate objects of art. Uninhabited, the exhibition is merely an anonymous exhibit of other people's washed laundry.