Bob Watts
Female Underpants
New York City, USA: Implosions, Inc., [circa 1966]
33 x 28 cm.
Edition size unknown
Not as popular as the shirt printed with an image of breasts (which had a wide reach, including a Rolling Stones album cover), these Female Underpants consist of a screen-printed image of pubic hair and a flower, on fabric.
The work was first mentioned in a Fluxus newsletter in 1965 (where they were discussed as potential costumes in a forthcoming Fluxus concert, which doesn't seem to have happened), and were originally offered for $5.00 a pair.
Implosions Inc. was a company set up by Watts, Herman Fine, and George Maciunas, intended as a more populist novelty operation, to function as a fundraising arm of Fluxus. Watts and Maciunas shared a love of what the latter referred to as ‘functionality'. The example he used to define this term was the Fluxus Apron, which was printed with a medical image of the stomach, over the area where the wearer’s stomach would be.
For Male Underpants, see next post.
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