WHAT WE WEAR, WHAT WEARS US
INTERCHNAGEABLE
When David Datuna ate Maurizio Cattelan's $120,000 banana, the gallery replaced it with a new one without a word. In Andreas Gursky's photographs, the figures look as though their faces could be swapped without anyone noticing. Through these two experiences, I began asking myself: in contemporary society, if the concept and the shell remain intact, isn't an individual stripped of identity endlessly replaceable? I decided to take this a step further from my earlier question of whether clothing defines status. Clothing that symbolizes a profession shapes an individual's social identity. It fixes the role a person is meant to perform in society, and generates a hierarchy of value among those roles. Is what exists inside that clothing an individual, or a member of society obligated to perform a particular role? If someone with a different face stood in that same place wearing the same clothes, would we notice? If a person with an erased face lived out a different role each day in different clothing, would we notice? Is the person in the photograph a police officer, or Byeongwook Jeong? Yejeong Kim appears in the photograph as a nurse working at a public health center. At 5 p.m., once her nursing duties end, she moves to a nearby center to take on her second job as a Pilates instructor. Depending on the clothing she wears, she is recognized by society as performing different roles, and is recorded in the photographs under different identities. But without this information, the one person Yejeong Kim is perceived by the public as two separate people — one nurse, one Pilates instructor — according to her clothing. I began an experiment erasing individual identity within clothing that symbolizes a profession. Is a member of contemporary society, defined by their clothing, truly a replaceable being?
