A Fetish Cut

The online fashion website ShowStudio is running an online series called Fashion Fetish as a component to their exhibition Selling Sex. Fashion Fetish includes performances, fashion films, and essays made solely by women working in fashion.  The video "Is My Mind For Me" by Sarah Piantadosi and Ellie Grace Cumming (assistant stylist to Katy England) depicts Sardé Hardie using large shears, to slowly cut off her long black hair.

The film is described as addressing trichophilia, being sexually aroused by hair (or specifically its subset of being aroused by hair cutting). It depicts a girl taking scissors to her long hair in a Junya Watanabe sweater with "Hymn Eola" by Tonstartssbandht providing the soundtrack. The sexual significance of hair as fetish is obvious, but somehow I just don't think there is much eroticism in the 2 1/2 minute video, unless you happen to be a trichophiliac.

There is a strong relationship between women and their hair. Hair is often a symbol and tool of feminine sexuality and power. Cutting off one's long locks has paradoxical meanings: it is an act of renunciation of power, submission almost, as well as an act of fearlessness. And hair cutting is an apt action since fetish is about power/powerlessness and presence/absence.

But fetish is also about arousal, that of either the subject or audience. While the camera's eye is operating voyeuristically, it doesn't seduce the viewer. There is no scopic pleasure. And the actress (who evokes a bit of Kate Moss) shows little emotion. Not fear, joy, or ecstasy. Things improve a bit when, as she takes the shaver to her head, her fingers gently touch the crewed cut, and she caresses her scalp. But when the camera shifts to her toes and the hair gathering on the floor, I think the filmmakers missed the opportunity to have her curl her toes. This one small gesture would have said it all.

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The ShowStudio website provides this essay to contextual the works:

If, historically speaking, a fetish is a manufactured object which has magical powers, or one that people are irrationally devoted to, fashion is a veritable fetish-factory of 'It' shoes, 'Now' bags, and garments that magically propose to make your life indefinably better. On a less abstract level, fashion has been obsessed with sexual fetishism for centuries. The subtle constraint of the corset, the snugly-gloved hand, a shiny boot of leather - all staples of the well-dressed man or woman, and equally the well-equipped Sado-Masochist. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Pandora's Box of fashion fetish was blown apart - from Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren's proposal of 'rubberwear for the office' in their seminal London boutique SEX, to Gianni Versace's sanitised 'Bondage Chic' of 1992, to the power of John Galliano's 'Sado-Maso' haute couture collection for Christian Dior in 2000, designers articulated the sexual peccadilloes of a select few across the international catwalks. It's fetish as fashion.

Fashion Fetish hands the power entirely to female fashion professionals, asking them to address the notion of Fashion Fetish and examining their individual visions of women. In contrast with Selling Sex, which reimagines the female relationship with sex, Fashion Fetish focuses on a woman's relationship with clothing. Although as fashion historian Anne Hollander has asserted, the nude in art always wears 'The fashion of her time' - fashion's influence can be felt across the naked flesh, her body as 'fashioned' as a corseted ball-gown. Dressed or undressed, this project offers a clear field, a blank canvas and an open mind to a selection of some of the most important women working in fashion today - designers, stylists, models and image-makers - inviting them to present their own interpretation of Fashion Fetish. Their visual interpretations of the Fashion Fetish theme are then used as the inspiration for a host of female authors, journalists and cultural commentators to 'unpick' fetish in a series of accompanying essays, each written to correspond with a particular piece.

A Tale of Long, Long Hair

Miss Grace Sutherland, ca. 1890, albumen print, George Eastman House Collection

It is generally agreed that women’s hair is a symbol of sexual power, seduction, and eroticism. Was it not the luxuriant long hair of Medusa that threatened the goddess Minerva’s own claim to be most beautiful? When contrasted to being tied-up atop the head, long hair signifies being sexually ready, as the time to go to bed.

The more abundant the hair, the more potent the sexual invitation implied by its display, for folk, literary, and psychoanalytic traditions agree that the luxuriance of the hair is an index of vigorous sexuality, even of wantonness. ~ Elisabeth G. Gitter, The Power of Women's Hair in the Victorian Imagination. 

The spectacle of hair that is the Sutherland Sisters' was, and continues to be, hard to ignore.
I first learned about the Seven Sutherland Sisters at the 2008 Whitney Biennial where the video installation piece Cheese by Argentinean artist Mika Rottenberg was on view. Ms. Rottenberg alludes to the Sutherland Sisters in her work which consists of a dilapidated, wooden barn-like structure with video monitors visible amidst its architecture. The monitors display longhaired “maidens” in white nightgowns “working” on a farm. Their seductive hair is a natural gift yet also the cause of their labor. The women are objects of desire and exploitation, their hair a product to be consumed both visually and materially.

This wonderful artwork simultaneously suggests grooming, farming, production, fairy tales, and carnival sideshows. The women’s toil is an amusing and sinister mixture of an elaborate hygiene ritual, magic ritual and seduction ritual as they “milk” their locks and the goats they live with to generate cheese.

In one sense, this piece refers to Marxist ideas. Rottenberg has said she was thinking about “this creepy idea of the body as this land, or this territory, and growing stuff of the body and extracting value from nature and this idea of labor as a process between a person and nature, making this kind of product.”

In another sense, however, this piece is more magical. One thinks of the fairy tale Rapunzel, of a woman whose freedom is gained through her hair, by her body. Rottenberg investigates feminine magic as related to Mother Nature, “the ability to ‘grow things out of the body’ as she says, as the ultimate, wondrous physical mystery.” 1.

The women represented in Ms. Rothenburg’s video were based on the Seven Sutherland Sisters of Cambria, New York (Niagara County). During the late 1800's and early 20th century the sisters were an illustrious singing act with the Barnum & Bailey Circus (c. 1892-1907).  However, the Sutherland Sisters were likely known more for their exceptionally long hair than for their musical talents. They would notoriously end their performance by letting down their hair to thunderous applause. It is said that the collective length of the sisters’ hair measured 37 feet!

Having garnered a modicum of fame, their father, Fletcher Sutherland, developed “The Seven Sutherland Sisters Hair Grower,” a mixture of alcohol, vegetable oils, and water. Having an intuitive sense for marketing, Mr. Sutherland sent the Hair Grower to a chemist for endorsement, receiving the following testimonial:

Cincinnati, Ohio, March, 1884: - Having made a Chemical Analysis of the Hair Grower prepared by the Seven Long Haired Sisters, I hereby certify that I found it free from all injurious substances. It is beyond question the best preparation for the hair ever made and I cheerfully endorse it. -- J.R. Duff, M.D., Chemist.

In its first year, the Hair Grower made the family $90,000 (as it was likely most popular with balding men!). They followed it shortly thereafter with a Scalp Cleaner and Hair Colorator. These hair products eventually made the family wealthy but their lavish spending and the vogue for the bob after World War I would leave the family penniless.

The curiosity of the Sutherland Sisters’ hair has inspired other artists besides Mika Rothenberg. Alyson Pou developed a performance/installation called A Slight Headache, a work presented in the manner of a 19th century dime museum/sideshow at the South Street Seaport Museum.

Replicating a carnival sideshow, an introductory gallery displayed freaks-of-nature / wonders-of-the-world in glass bell jars. Specimens such as the bearded piranha and the mummified alligator were presented in good humor to prepare you for the forthcoming performance, which itself revolved around a mother and daughter connected supernaturally by their exceptionally long hair.

A Slight Headache and Cheese both use the device of freakishly long hair to elicit connotations of the erotic and the strange as they relate to a bygone era. However, the fascination with women who have exceptionally long hair did not end with the PT Barnum act of the Sutherland Sisters. Today the internet brandishes a trove of sites featuring women with floor-length tresses. Woman’s long hair has been (and still is) seen as a source of beauty and temptation.

http://www.amazing-hair.de/
http://www.longhairyo.com/
http://www.longhairfoto.de/frame.htm
http://www.tlhp.de/links.htm

Art Snatch

The progressive concealment of the body that goes along with civilization keeps sexual curiosity awake. This curiosity seeks to complete the sexual object by revealing its hidden parts. It can however be diverted [“sublimated”] in the direction of art, if its interest can be shifted away from the genitals on to the shape of the body as a whole.  ~ Freud

In the scopic field everything is articulated between two terms that act in an antinomic way – on the side of things, there is the gaze, that is to say, things look at me, and yet I see them. ~ Lacan

 Francisco Goya  - La Maja Desnuda - circa 1797–1800

Representing pubic hair on women was taboo for centuries in Western art. While a number of paintings did reveal a bit of bush, Goya's painting (above) is considered one of the first depictions of pubic hair because he scandalously painted an actual woman rather than one cloaked by the subject of mythology. As a result, Goya was summoned to the Spanish Inquisition to expose his model and patron for the painting. One may wonder what all the fuss was about in our current porn-on-demand culture, but clearly hair below the belt was not appropriate for representation.

 Lucas Cranach the Elder - Venus and Cupid - 1508

Titian - Venus of Urbino - 1538

In Art/porn: a history of seeing and touching, Kelly Dennis points out that "the male "pubes" referred to the adolescent growth of pubic hair that traditionally signaled the coming of age of the public male: historically, the moment that initiates participation in citizenship, property ownership, and the legal control of women. By contrast, the female "pudendum" named that of which "one aught to be ashamed" and thus that which must be hidden and kept private."   

 Jean-Leon Gerome - Phryne Before the Areopagus - 1861

Édouard Manet - Olympia - 1863

Similar to Goya's painting, Manet's Olympia depicts a real woman who exposes herself without modesty and fixes her gaze onto the viewer. Despite her hand covering her beaver, Olympia was condemned as ‘immoral’ and ‘vulgar’ by its contemporaries. Baudelaire wrote to Manet regarding Olympia, stating "you are only the first in the decrepitude of your art." 

But Goya and Manet were still painting within a tradition of idealized nudes and odalisques. It would be Corbet who opened the door to the graphic representation and revelation of pubic hair and its power to shock with L’Origine du monde, 1866. The painting had been commissioned by a Turkish diplomat, Khalil Bey, for his own private viewing who, understanding the power of the image, hung the painting behind a green veil. When the diplomat went bankrupt, the painting was sold and went missing for a time. It was later discovered hanging in the country home of Jacques Lacan, also veiled, although this time by a sliding wooden panel constructed and decorated by the artist André Masson. However such covering, with its implicit revealing, is itself an erotic device.

Why does a man paint a fragment of a woman’s body? Why the vagina? Why does he repress her name? It is not easy to represent in painting a loved object; it produces anxiety. It seems likely that Courbet split her body, cropped it in order to represent her. Removing her name seals the objectification. Here is a psychotic moment. On the one hand there is beauty in the rendering of the flesh. On the other hand emotional intimacy is denied by the erasures. ~ Juan Davila - Courbet’s “The Origin of the World Renamed”

Gustave Courbet - L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World) - 1866

While the Japanese woodblock prints imported to the West after the opening of Japan to trade in 1854 did not directly influence Courbet, it is known that Hokusai's work in particular was available and relevant to many of Courbet's contemporaries (James Tissot, Camile Pissaro, Monet, and Manet). Baudelaire wrote in a letter in 1861: "Quite a while ago I received a packet of japonneries. I've split them up among my friends.." The visible pubic hair in Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (along with the advent of photography) cannot be ignored as influencing a shift away from the hairless snatch.

 Hokusai - The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife - 1814

And so followed others...

Egon Schiele - 1910

 

 René Magritte - Le Viol - c. 1934

 Jenny Saville - Plan - 1993