The breeding ground for All Things To All Men (and Women) was none other than a night out with friends during which an acquaintance made the claim that the group of five women should form a band as, together, they constituted “all things to all men….(and women.)” 1 Just as the Spice Girls provided five different stereospices; Cindy Baker’s installation is the artist’s response to the notion that human fantasy and desire can be boiled down to a finite number of stereotypes. The idea of a girl or boy band that targets an audience through collective fantasy is a marketing ploy that reduces and therefore limits the notion of fantasy and denies the beauty of individuality and difference; and while trying to co-opt our desire streamlines our viewpoint and sets us up for repeated disappointment. Using women’s underwear as her platform the artist has given herself the impossible challenge of trying to give form to all possible panty-wearing fantasies. Begun in 2004, this installation has continued to grow as the artist demonstrates her unwavering commitment, not to the idea that she will reach an end, but to the futility inherent in taking a reductionist view of social stereotypes and our endless need to categorize desire. Ultimately, the task cannot be completed and becomes a manic lifelong crusade. One person cannot encapsulate the breadth of human fantasy and thus, the work underscores the idea that perception is a highly individual concept; and even, given the task, to attempt to imagine all possible fantasies only highlights the desires of the creator no matter how open-minded and liberal she may be. While the work finds its birth in the notion of fantasy, “an imagined or conjured up sequence fulfilling a psychological need,” 2 the artist has removed fantasy from her inquiry as her underwear are, “not meant to reflect a broad spectrum of real women, but possible women; fictitious, impossible fantasy women (or men who would wear panties).” 3 Structurally, the panties are largely unwearable and serve not as signs of reality but as symptomary reminders of infinite possibility. Baker further explores this notion by creating a work that reverses the role of masquerade. Rather than collect panties from actual panty- wearing types, the artist has created the fetish garments playing on the commonly made assumption that there exists, external to us, someone who will fulfill our inner fantasies. While real world circumstances have people selecting their own undergarments, Baker’s piece suggests not only that desire often attempts to find its resolution through masquerade, which in itself can be construed as a falsifying of the facts, but that people wear underpants with the ulterior motive, to please an eventual external fantasy, a form of self-objectification and hopeful advertising. Strung throughout the Gallery on a clothesline and suspended with clothes pegs, the work itself delicately dances between the material and conceptual realms of private and public reflecting the functioning of fantasy. With the Gallery being an obvious public setting, the underwear a private sign of sexuality and desire, stays hidden and saved for the potential of fulfilling an unresolved fantasy. Playing along the lines of exposing the private in a public forum, All Things to All Men (and Women) prompts its viewers to align their own private fantasies with the collective fantasy that dominates our public existences. Rather than airing dirty laundry in public, the artist has crafted new forms of desire that not only encourage us to expand our own concept of fantasy and desire but remind us that we have the responsibility of keeping our fantasies in check with our realities. The fact, that she has sown the entirety of the installation draws a connection to second wave feminist artists who first took up their crafting needles to hold the mirror up to society’s ill-structured hegemonic ideals. Both the materials of her investigation and process of dissemination blur the line between real and the constructed ideals. Also known as a performance artist, Baker’s practice reflects a constant flux between art and life asserting, time and again, that they are one and the same. When she is not performing her art in real-time, she is using life as a real-time reference in order to create works that continue to perform in her absence. All Things to All Men (and Women) began in 2004 and has no imagined end. With infinite possibility as its backbone, the manifestation of this idea can only cease to grow with its maker. Its consequent existence however will continue to perform as long as viewers continue to relate to the work. The title, All Things to All Men (and Women), is also an interesting sociological comment on the dominance of a male heterosexual viewpoint inherent in our society and our subsequent awareness of this structure as an after-thought. The title mirrors the way we are conditioned as it takes the populist view and then quickly rectifies itself to be all inclusive. The title serves as an entry-point to the work and helps guide our experience of the installation. If “all the world is a stage,” Baker’s installation reminds us that we would be better off with an array of possibility as opposed to a small group of five type-cast actors. - Cara Tierney