One
and Three Shirts was motivated by Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 conceptual piece
entitled One and Three Chairs. Kosuth’s art consisted of a chair, a
photograph of a chair, and an enlarged printed definition of the word “chair”.
The installer at the gallery was instructed to pick out any chair and display
it. Hung above and to the left of that chair was a life-sized photo of it,
and to the right was the printed definition. In this case, the highlights
of a photograph of a shirt are depicted so that the image takes on the underlying
color of any shirt it’s screened on, along with the definition of the
word “shirt”. The piece is meant to underscore the relation between
language, pictures and objects. Are there three shirts depicted here or just
one? Are the three elements the same or totally different? Although the image
of a shirt and the definition of a shirt are just signs to communicate the
concept of the actual shirt, one could argue that the definition is more essential
than the shirt itself because without the explanation of the word “shirt”
one would not know what the object is.
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