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| Hair today
Contemporary artists go to great lengths to explore its power and meanings By Christine Temin, Globe Staff, 9/29/2002 Delilah chopping off Samson's hair, the source of his strength. Medusa's snake hair, symbol of her malevolence. The hair shirt worn in penance. Rapunzel's golden tresses, so long her lover could climb up them to reach her tower. The human hair on statues of the Virgin in churches in Mediterranean countries. The hair of the deceased turned into mourning jewelry worn by the bereaved in Victorian times. The 1960s musical ''Hair,'' which summarized a generation's rebellion through long, unkempt locks. ... Examples of the power and meanings of hair, from the Bible to Broadway, are endless - and endlessly intriguing to contemporary artists, several of whom have current local shows on the subject. ''I collect myths and legends about hair,'' says Anne Wilson, who has a solo show at the Massachusetts College of Art. Hair is the primary material of this work, which is both personal and universal. What people do with their hair - Muslim women and Catholic nuns covering it completely, Orthodox Jewish men wearing long curls down the sides of their heads, African-Americans wearing dreadlocks, feminists electing not to shave their legs - helps define them. It also provides more fodder for art, in works such as ''Rock Head,'' a recent acquisition of the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. The piece's creator, African-American artist David Hammons, looks at what it means to be a black man in America through works that explore stereotypes. Yet the subject of hair can elicit impassioned, even illogical, reactions. In 1990, Cambridge artist Mags Harries launched a project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology involving a large, suspended domelike form to be made of hair donated by students. ''It triggered incredibly irrational hostility,'' recalls the artist. An irate letter to the campus newspaper The Tech insisted that ''the notion of a gargantuan hair ball hanging in the atrium next to the Lobdell dining room will certainly be the last straw for many trying to avoid perpetual digestive upset.'' The project fizzled. Harries was ahead of her time. Hair has now become a relatively common material in the work of such well-known contemporary artists as Ann Hamilton and Kiki Smith. In today's art world, nearly half a century after Robert Rauschenberg had some explaining to do when he incorporated a family quilt in a painting, any material is fair game. Strands of meaning Artists have seized on hair for its multiple meanings. It can be both beautiful and disconcerting. Hair separated from the body that grew it makes you wonder what part of that body it came from, and that, of course, brings up sex. In her MassArt show, Wilson combines antique white linens with hair that she laboriously sews onto them. Her work forces you to think of pristine cleanliness defiled, of the hotel room or restaurant table where you find someone else's hair. In one series, she painstakingly outlined holes in white linens with dark hair. Conventional mending would have done the opposite, attempting to hide the holes. Wilson's subversion calls attention to the orifices, which become extremely erotic. Around the corner from MassArt, in the Trustman Art Gallery at Simmons College, is ''Hair Stories and Other Stories,'' Williamstown artist Karin Stack's poignant photographic chronicle of the regrowth of her own hair after chemotherapy. Her black-and-white photos hang in horizontal borders around the room, arranged chronologically and coolly, like a form of medical documentation. One series focuses only on her forehead and scalp, starting with a smooth, shiny orb gradually covered by hair that eventually reaches a couple of inches in length, looking like a lawn overdue for mowing. Another series focuses on her pubic area, which appears vulnerable and bare at first, like a little girl's, then is finally hidden by a thick triangle of hair. The views are cropped, maintaining Stack's anonymity and turning her into an Everywoman. There's even humor here. Stack's pates are droll rather than morbid, more like Boston artist Emily Eveleth's paintings of the backs of bald heads than the grim photo documentation the late Hannah Wilke made of the erosion of her own body by cancer. Illness and recovery are the subjects of Stack's hair works; wellness is the idea behind Kate Gilbert Miller's ''Strength and Stamina'' series at the Revolving Museum in Lowell. Miller manipulated strands of hair coated with resin to recreate nine yoga positions. The flexibility of the hair was intended to mirror the flexibility of the yoga-trained body. The announcement card for ''Sally Curcio: Hair Trigger,'' at the Hampden Gallery of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst features a particularly repellent image: a bar of soap with hairs sticking out of it. The contrast of materials casts hair as dirty, sinful, the antithesis of the cleansing soap. Curcio also makes sculptures of hair flowing from faucets and drainage pipes. The ''yuck'' factor comes partly from the realization that in places such as public restrooms, hairs from different people, complete strangers to one another, end up mingled in wet clumps. Part of the resistance Harries encountered at MIT was because many students' hair was to be incorporated into the structure, which meant, to them, a loss of privacy and identity. Decades of exploration Like mourning jewelry, Wilson's work evokes the past. And like Curcio's, it pits purity against the detritus of persons unknown, substances that may be dirty or even diseased. Wilson, 53, a teacher at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1979, has long been fascinated with fiber, eventually focusing on hair, although not exclusively. Her largest piece to date - ''Topologies'' - is a 36-foot-long white table studded with deconstructed bits of black lace, pinned in place lest they escape and regroup. (MassArt is the first venue with enough room to show the complete work, half of which was in the Whitney Biennial earlier this year.) Wilson is a product of the rebellious '60s and '70s, when fiber art was in the ascendancy. ''It had more leeway,'' she says, ''because it was not traditional high art. It was out of the hierarchy, connected to domestic and feminine spheres.'' Not that she was weaving place mats. She has always considered herself a sculptor; even as a teenager, she was making string and mesh constructions a la Eva Hesse. Pioneering fiber artists such as Magdalena Abakanowicz were big influences on her during her years in various art schools. It was a dozen years ago when one of her Art Institute students, a young Japanese woman, came to class with a gift for Wilson: The student had cut off her extremely long black hair, which she presented to her teacher. ''My reaction to it was completely visceral,'' Wilson recalls. It sparked a series called ''I Cut My Hair,'' framed lengths of hair braided, dyed, and otherwise manipulated. The mere fact that the Japanese woman had cut her hair herself, that she hadn't been a passive body in a beauty shop, resonated with Wilson's feminism. Wilson addresses the cosmic through the personal. The hair comes from friends and family, the linens from her mother and aunts; the results speak to us all. Her work is labor-intensive: She spent two years stitching ''Lost,'' which is in the MassArt show. It is a shroudlike garment draped over a chair; the body that might once have inhabited it is truly lost, leaving only the black hair behind, sewn onto the cloth. In ''A Chronicle of Days,'' Wilson methodically stitched hairs onto 100 fragments of white linen, one a day, like a Colonial-era girl dutifully stitching her sampler - or like On Kawara and other contemporary artists whose work keeps track of time. The ornate patterns on the white-on-white linens are obscured by patches of hair dyed in various hues, some unknown in the natural world. They're like stains, the remains of human presence - and reminders that we ourselves spoil the perfect, idealized elegance we create. This story ran on page N1 of the Boston Globe on
9/29/2002. |