Around the year 2000, I was in middle school, and my Aunt Elaine was moving. She gave me this shirt, and it inadvertently became my favorite shirt of all. "Outside" refers to Outside Magazine, based in VT, a magazine my Aunt used to be editor for. I've seen the magazine once or twice, but I'm not an especial fan. What I love about this shirt is how it says "outside" on my t-shirt, emphasizing that there is an inside, a divide. The more I learn here at MICA, the more I recognize that divide as being part of modern industrial society - it goes along with the alienation from labor and slavery to capitalism: the idea that there is an OUTSIDE/INSIDE... but really you are the same person throughout each. Through industrialization (which signifies the idea of 'work' leaving the domestic scene, into the 'work-place') we have made specific places for certain qualities of our lives to manifest.
I didn't always think this way about the shirt. For so long, it was funny, because it was obvious. I'd think "Well, ofcourse - OUTSIDE of my body!" But now the connotations are so different. First, there was realizing what a walking ad I had become. Now, mostly because of Henri Lefebvre's "Critique of Everyday Life" (which was written in 1947, I believe) this shirt takes on entirely new proportions.
-Pilar
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