All the Pants I Had Except the Ones I Was Wearing (Front and Back), 1974/2010
- Medium
- Two chromogenic prints
- Dimensions
- Each: 11 x 14 in. (27.94 x 35.56 cm)
- Accession Number
- 2012.33A-B
- Credit
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Purchase with funds provided by the Photography Committee
All the Pants I Had Except the Ones I Was Wearing (Front and Back) displays the fourteen pairs of pants in Ilene Segalove’s wardrobe in front and rear views. The low-quality snapshot photography is a conceptual strategy, declaring that the artwork is driven by an idea, spelled out in the title, rather than by aesthetics or technique. There is even a sense that the diptych merely dutifully fulfills the function of recording what the title specifies. Since Segalove is modeling one of the pairs of pants, she appears as a depthless, two-sided figure, as flat as the photographs themselves. Her humorous depiction of herself caught in a world of surfaces is a wry comment on the shallow gender roles into which women are cast in the realm of television, movies, magazines, and media generally: here, she resembles a paper doll whose only purpose is to model clothes.
