Marks of the Genuine Man

Boru O'Brien O'Connell - Marks of the Genuine Man (Emerson) - c-print - 2008

Hara Kiri: Using Hair to be Satiric & Offensive

The 1960s satiric French magazine Hara Kiri is known for its outrageous covers, sporting the subtitle, "Journal bête et méchant" ("Stupid and vicious magazine").  As a predecessor to Charlie Hebdo -- published by humorist Georges Bernier, author François Cavanna, and artistic director Fred Aristidès --  a number of the cover images, as one might imagine, portrayed hair as grotesque, repugnant, or distasteful.

 "The mode for summer has hair on the beach" - July 1974

  "Is the hair obscene?" - March 1972

  "What, aren't you gagging? Ben, and that, then?" - March 1989

The Belly of the Beast

While Martin Magiela made a splash in spring 2009 with his wig jackets (below), I was unaware of his Fall 2005 Artisinal Collection that included a jacket, top and collar utilizing the reverse of wigs. By reversing the wigs, the patterning and decoration produce a wonderful tactile texture, formed by the wigs' interior stitching and elastic construction.

"Artifice is a standard tool of the fashion system, but Margiela is uniquely adept and willing to expose it for all to see. Just as Margiela turns a garment inside-out to flaunt its construction, so the artifice behind contemporary beauty itself is revealed and hence called into question."1

While Margiela is no longer involved with his namesake company, while he was a designer he consistently questioned orthodox notions of beauty and attraction. In both his 2005 and 2009 collections those questions relate to the seduction and revulsion of hair. Sure, this is not real hair. Rather it's fake hair but with the finest level of workmanship applied to it, thus calling into question an essential paradox of luxury - that its value rarely lies in anything of literal material worth. 

Are these wiggy fashion objects really something we should want to wear? Margiela taps into cultural anxieties about taste, attractiveness, and being "cool." Oh no, could fake really be better than real? What would it mean if i wanted to wear human hair? Am I grotesque? Am I hip? Is this fashion? These objects sit uneasily on a narrow ledge between that special and elusive sensation of desire that is called up by fashion and the revulsion fed by the common subtext of self-hatred we feel towards our body, its features and its functions.

1. "Mind Games" by Alex Fury,  December 11 2008, showstudio.com

Masking

I just love that the signature image for the upcoming ICP exhibition Perspectives 2012 (Jan 20 - May 6, 2012) is Anna Shteynshleyger's Covered (2008). Images of women with their faces covered by hair seem to be abundant these days, especially in fashion. Covered, with its mass of hair out of place, evokes the freakish and outsider as well as the play of identity politics, whether that be of troubled youth or in relationship to gender. A sense of shame, embarrassment, and shyness can all be read in this powerful image of isolation - a girl, in profile, hidden by the cascade of hair over of her face. But the edginess of the image becomes stranger as we notice that there are two tones of hair color. Is that a wig? A fall? Is what we are looking at staged or natural? Real or digitally manipulated?

Other images of faces or heads covered by hair suggest ideas of masks, in particular:

Herb Ritts, mask, Hollywood, 1989 

© herb ritts photography inc., courtesy fondation cartier

Irving Penn, Issey Miyake Fashion: Face Covered with Hair, New York, May 1991
via Art Institute of Chicago

Irving Penn for Vogue magazine, July 1995
(L to R: Valerie and Irina)

Levi van Veluw, Natural transfer III, II, and I, 2009

http://dianepernet.typepad.com/diane/2009/04/amsterdam-interview-with-levi-van-veluw.html

Seb Patane, Four Generations, Ballpoint pen on printed paper, 2004.
via MOMA

Seb Patane deserves a blog post of his own. Using found images, he turns them into ghostly, yet humerous, portraits.

Charlie le Mindu, Fall 2010

The runway hair stylist Charlie le Mindu is also going to get his own blog post! His outrageous hair work transforms models, by frequently distorting or concealing the head.

Gerhard Richter, Betty, oil on canvas, 1988

Saint Louis Museum of Art

However, it is Betty by Gerhard Richter that appears most like Covered, even though the portrait is less about the hair. What Betty shares with Covered is the subject's withheld intimacy. Both images ask us to look, yet deny us the ability to see or to know.

Technological Reliquary

Paul Thek - "Untitled" - 1966-67, from the series Technological Reliquaries.

Credit: Watermill Center Collection

“Afflict the comfortable; comfort the afflicted” ~ Paul Thek

The Brooklyn artist Paul Thek (1933-1988) was a sculptor, painter, and one of the first artists to create environments or installations. As he frequently used perishable materials, Thek accepted the ephemeral nature of his art, and was aware, as writer Gary Indiana has noted, of “a sense of our own transience and that of everything around us.”

 Paul Thek - "Meat" - 1964 - from the 1966-67 series Technological Reliquaries.

In the mid-1960s, Paul Thek began a group of artworks that presented meat in vitrines. He followed these sculptures with ones utilizing casts of his body parts. Both sets of works he called Technological Reliquaries.

“The mold castings, also those of his own body parts, wax replicas of human tissue, hair, teeth, and bones in Plexiglas cases, which he produced between 1964 and 1967 as Technological Reliquaries, in their mixture of desire and repulsion, decay and pathos, held up the truth of the body to the world of commodities and the transfiguration of the everyday, as well as the idealization and dramatization of corporative minimal art.”
    ~ From the exhibition catalogue for Paul Thek in the Context of Today’s Contemporary Art
        Sammlung Falckenberg (May 31 - September 14, 2008)

These works were a direct critic of the commercialism and the cool detachment of Minimalist and Pop Art, movements that removed the visible hand of the artist. Thek was also protesting the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

"I was amused at the idea of meat under Plexiglas because I thought it made fun of the scene--where the name of the game seemed to be 'how cool you can be' and 'how refined.' Nobody ever mentioned anything that seemed real. The world was falling apart, anyone could see it." ~ Paul Thek, 1981 

Enshrining his work in reliquaries, objects designed to hold and make precious, sacred objects, Thek used both the literal entropy of meat and the suggested decay of the body to ask viewers to contemplate the fragility of life that is our shared human experience.

He began to do these glass and steel vitrines but they were filled with corrosive flesh, which he was sculpting out of something called dental moulage, which is a very quick setting wax, and putting these horrifying lumps of flesh or in some cases beautifully crafted arms and legs that were sheathed in things like butterfly wings. So, it was either these limbs of heroes from this impossible mythological past or this raw flesh. It was really his response to an art world that he thought was completely incapable of responding to the urgency of the culture in which it existed. ~ Richard Flood via Walker Art Center

The piece he was to be most infamous for was his 1967 sculpture The Tomb (later refered to as Death of a Hippie by critics), a life-sized effigy of the artist laid to rest in a pink ziggurat. A full-size cast of his body lies entombed dressed in a suit jacket and jeans, painted a pale pink, and adorned with jewelry made of human hair and gold.

Fred W. McDarrah

Paul Thek Sitting Shiva for Dead Hippie (Effigy), September 16, 1967

stevenkasher.com

The Tomb was destroyed after languishing in storage. Thek had grown tired of the work, saying, “I really don’t want to have to do that piece AGAIN! Oh God no! Not THAT one. Imagine having to bury yourself over and over.”

In 1979, Thek wrote to a priest, "I am OK, still trying to be 'an artist' in the secular world . . . as you know, the world is the world, very 'worldly,' etc., etc."

Paul Thek: Diver, a retrospective which opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in October 2010, was on view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles until September 4, 2011.

Hujar's images of Paul Thek's The Tomb are featured in the exhibition Influential Friends by Peter Hujar November 1 – December 10, 2011 at John Mc Whinnie @ GBH Gallery in NYC.