Men’s Clothing Altered--Subtly and Not So Subtly

Posing for a snapshot with his father and brother, artist Nick Vaughn of Santa Ana wore an ordinary blue shirt with a strange-looking rigid insert of red plaid material sewn onto the front.

“I thought I would convert my whole wardrobe to these pieces,” Vaughn said Monday at a Rancho Santiago College slide lecture about his work from the past six years. “I fantasized that eventually all the pieces would end up in someone’s family snapshot, documented almost inadvertently.”

Vaughn’s art is based on standard men’s clothing, altered in various subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

“I always begin with something that’s familiar,” he told his noon “Art Forum” audience. “The wearer’s behavior comes into question, and that’s at the heart of the work.”

For long-necked friend Henry Eggers, he created an otherwise normal-looking shirt with a hugely enlarged collar band.

“The work started with his appearance,” Vaughn said. “He had a way of carrying his head that struck me as peculiar.”

Someone in the audience asked if the works have titles.

“No,” the artist replied. Referring to his own casual (but unaltered) garb, he added drolly, “I don’t have a title for my checked jacket, either.”

Another shirt he made looks normal except for a 60-foot-long bolt of material that extends from the left side, obliging the wearer to tote the fabric with him.

Another audience member wondered if the extra fabric represented the wearer’s personal burdens.

“No,” Vaughn said. “I didn’t think of things in that direct, literal way. I think these (works) grow out of a hallucinatory process.” When a few listeners laughed, he added, “Not drug-induced.”

Vaughn explained that he was “not making statements about fashion or the limitations of men’s clothing.” He has no particular interest in fabric or style, he said, other than taking pains to pick “timeless” designs that don’t seem rooted in a particular era.

“I’m not in love with sewing,” he noted. “I found that out very quickly!” In fact, he eventually began paying someone else to do the fabrication of these pieces.

“Letting someone else do the physical work is an important luxury,” he said. “I have no vested interest if the piece is wrong. I can send it back and say, ‘Fix it.’ . . . When you’re doing it yourself you think, ‘Gosh, I’ve spent three weeks on this. I’m too tired.’ ”

What Vaughn is interested in is human appearance--creating “an enlargement of the way people behave.”

His earliest works, made while he was still in graduate school at Cal State Fullerton, were colored-pencil drawings of “fantasized females” that “grew out of erotic concerns,” he said tantalizingly without elaborating.

“Sobriety Suit” of 1982 was his first piece “where the garment is part of the expressivity of the piece.” This female figure painted on Masonite mounted on a container wears a dress with a turtleneck so high, he explained, that it prevents her from seeing and hearing. The dress has fabric sleeves, and a doorway cut in back of the container is covered in sheer fabric.

“I started to think about clothing as an interesting language system,” he said. “There is a tacit information exchange that’s going on constantly. The volume (of information) is staggering. . . . The thought occurred to me that if I did clothing that was actually wearable, it would be an entry into the arena of clothing as a language.

“A lot of the pieces have a centrality to them. The alterations are right up front, at the center of the torso. They’re kind of guileless. They just literally emerge.”

One early attempt, which he now thinks was unsuccessful, is a gray suit in which the pants have creases 45 degrees off-center and one sleeve immobilizes the arm against the body. It was meant to give the impression that “as I faced and conversed with someone straight on, (I) would be twisting to the side.”

A major problem with the clothing pieces, he discovered, was having to display them on armatures in galleries and museums. It was hard “trying to get people to imagine . . . the kind of behavior that would lead to a piece of clothing.”

He also felt that he had “figured out what it was that was odd about those pieces” and “wanted to have things emerge that were truly peculiar and inexplicable.”

So he decided to make more anatomical figures “that from the very beginning are in a sense proposals for an outfit and an imaginary figure.”

One of these pieces is a headless male figure with oddly pear-shaped hips who “wears” a little dress and two other children’s outfits attached to the front of his own clothing.

Viewers were confused. Were these figures statements about fatherhood? Not to Vaughn. What he had in mind was a notion both simpler and stranger: What would it be like if the male figure looked like this?

The latest permutation of Vaughn’s theme takes place in photographs.

Photographing his work in a way that conveys the right kind of information to the viewer has always posed interesting problems for the artist.

At first, he explained, he shot models (himself or friends) wearing his clothing pieces against a neutral background of seamless black paper. Then he used ordinary rooms as backdrops because they looked more real.

Next, he tried out a “journalistic approach.” A grainy image of him in Los Angeles getting out of a truck suggests that “someone might be hiding behind a bush when they take the photograph.”

The family snapshot format was another attempt to suggest a “normal” context for his pieces.

In his most recent work, Vaughn pushed the idea further, photographing people who wear photographs of other people.

“There’s something very sociable about these pieces,” he said in his matter-of-fact but somewhat inscrutable way. Although the people in these photos do look rather peculiar, Vaughn said he is not trying to convey some form of eccentricity.

Because of the implied relationships with the people in the photographs, he means these pieces to imply “a kind of membership” in some kind of relationship structure. But he deliberately refrains from giving the viewer “enough information to tell you what that relationship is.”

Does he ever sell his work, someone in the audience wanted to know. The pieces he has worn are not for sale, he said, although a few people have bought his figurative pieces.

Maybe research into costume history might offer him new ideas, someone else suggested.

Vaughn acknowledged that he had done some of that. But ultimately, he feels, “as a regular citizen, my sort of knowledge of our appearance is really quite sufficient.”