Education is dying
The future looks bleak as exam results are manipulated, academies push education closer to the jaws of the private sector, playing fields are sold off for housing, and Gove's Govs are sent in to get rid of the chaf.
Several weeks into the project, 'A t-shirt for every day of the year' continues to engage a steadily growing number of followers.
In some ways, 'A t-shirt for every day of the year' is a bit of a backlash against digital culture. Also known as '366 T-shirts', the project sees Oswestry creative, Neil Phillips, wearing a different t-shirt with a different slogan for each day of 2012.
Most people will have a rant about the cost of living, overpaid footballers and the trials of parenthood over a beer in the pub.
When you can go viral on the web in the flicker of a VDU, why would you start a conversation with the world on a t-shirt?
Clothes rails, brushed cotton, mint imperials and PowerPoint. Sounds more like a sales convention at GAP than the half-way review of an art project.
In a year when Britain's streets have been festooned with banners and bunting for the Diamond Jubilee and 2012 Olympics/Paralympics, Hermon Chapel flew the flag in its own unique way for the recent heritage open days.
With over 300 t-shirts now blocking out a considerable proportion of daylight in his spare bedroom, Neil Phillips is close to finishing the year-long art installation, 366 T-shirts.
As the New Year looms, the final threads are unravelling in the year-long art installation, 'A T-shirt for every day of the year', also known as '366 T-Shirts'.
On January 1, 2013, one man in Oswestry will be waking up with a feeling of immense satisfaction and at the same time resounding emptiness.
It's hard to imagine that a collection of t-shirts could hold the attention of an audience for two hours.
A man of few, often poorly selected words, Neil Phillips has, surprisingly, produced gems of observation on the human condition from the comfort of his own living room.
A stand-out comment made during his daily tirades on life, work and family found its way onto a t-shirt, and more followed. These eight original garments began to form a subtle sub-text to his life.
In June 2011, a small book was acquired for collecting more soundbites from Phillips' ineffectual rantings, with view to creating 'A T-shirt for every day of the year'.
Ploughing the same comedic furrow as Karl Pilkington, '366 T-shirts' has been variously described as 'painfully dull', 'definitely not art', 'a terrible waste of virtual reality', 'sick' (in a good way), 'sick' (in a bad way), 'bad' (in a good way), 'f***ing b*****ks' (in a bad way), 'mad' (in a certifiable way), and 'magic - he has made t-shirts pants'.
closeAfter coming 'first in year and third in school' for house-points at the age of nine, Phillips has struggled to regain the same intellectual kudos - until possibly now. The release of satirical concept albums, 'Appendectomy' and 'Supermarket', however, has propelled Phillips into a creative niche where he is comfortable and well-stocked with Thin Arrowroot and Assam loose leaf tea - undoubtedly paving the way to '366 T-shirts'.
Once found sitting in a cupboard in the sixth form common room, and having existed on a capsule wardrobe of 7 items of clothing since the economic downturn, Clarke has always been a reluctant human being. After years spent crafting technical articles about bush hammering and the restriction of thermal cracking in modified concrete, '366 T-shirts' was an inevitable aberration.
An IT specialist with a penchant for cheese and computer syntax, Perry designed and manages the 366 website. Perry is the architect of the nifty, although rennet-tinged programming behind the auto-posting of the daily t-shirt and slogan which has run without a hitch during the project's year-long installation.
closeThe completed 366 t-shirts installation will be exhibited for the first time at 'An Audience with 366 T-shirts' in January 2013.
For one night only, face of 366, Neil Phillips, will attempt to strip bare the intellectual sinews of the project through audience Q&A, Powerpoint presentation, film vignettes and the debut performance of a 366 T-shirts single.
There will be free soup.
Ambient projection will be provided by IT man, Tom Perry, the independent cinema people, Kinokulture, and clever young film dudes, FilmGrade.
'An Audience with 366 T-shirts' takes place at the Ironworks in Oswestry on January 11, 2013, from 8pm. For updates, go to our Facebook event page.
close'A T-shirt for every day of the year', aka '366 T-shirts', is an installation of t-shirts created over the course of 2012, a living blog of one man's struggles with the unassailability of bankers' bonuses and the senseless attacks by neighbourhood slugs on his high yielding courgettes.
For the 366 days of 2012, Neil Phillips wore a different t-shirt with different words 'cut and pasted' from personal and observed conversations. Each new t-shirt appeared on this website at midnight, and was simultaneously shared with the world via Twitter & Facebook.
The body of work is now complete. The seemingly unordered and witless utterings of the shirts now crystallised into a fantastically lucid dissection of Cameron's Britain.
Is it art, genius, insanity, an incitement to revolution, the self-portrait of an artistic mute, a pastiche in brushed cotton of 21st century living, the promotional campaign that failed to impress in the Fruit of the Loom boardroom?
You decide.
“This is not worthy of art or valuable space on the internet. Please stop.”
John Smith, August 2012.
