Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom: ‘Patent 3306x’, from his solo show at NiCOLETTi (to 5th Sept)
T-shirts can be a good place to view art, and here an installation of 39 of them makes up a work by Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom. The fronts are uniform: they show a 19th century scientific illustration made as the record of a species that was – from a Western perspective – newly discovered. That embodies the classificatory ambitions of Victorian natural history and, more broadly, the colonial impulse to catalogue – and control – the world.
The backs feature – the wrong way up – 39 songs that feature recorded sex sounds from the sixties onwards: aural sex, I suppose, as a tracker for sexual liberation. There’s ‘Lovely Rita’ by The Beatles, 1967;‘Love To Ball’ by Marvin Gaye, 1973; ‘Slip It In’ by Black Flag, 1984; and ‘Body’ by Megan Thee Stallion, 2020, along with plenty of relative obscurities – to me, at any rate. If asked to name such songs I’d have started with Donna Summer’s ‘Love to Love You Baby’, Gainsbourg and Birkin’s ‘Je t’aime… moi non plus’ and Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’, none of which feature. Nor do those recurring sexual moaners, Madonna, Britney Spears and Beyoncé, make it.
Perhaps there are other criteria in play, but what’s the point? The title ‘Patent 3306x’ refers to the 1821 invention of ‘dry scouring’ – the precursor to modern dry cleaning. That suggests that more than shirts are being washed here. I guess we’re talking about how classificatory schema can serve to exclude as well as include – and can turn things upside-down. In the gallery’s words: ‘Juxtaposing the disciplinary language of scientific taxonomy with the circulation of mass-cultural ephemera, Boakye-Yiadom places seemingly incompatible systems of knowledge on the same garment. In both cases, the artist seems less concerned with what is classified than with the persistent cultural desire to classify.’ I’m classifying ‘Patent 3306x’ as my ‘Work of the Month’.
Paul Carey-Kent selects a ‘Gallery of the Month’, a ‘Show of the Month’, a ‘Work of the Month’ and a ‘Book of the Month’ for his weekly column in FAD. A collection of previous gallery columns, ‘Paul’s Galleries To Go’, is available from FAD Bazaar.
