The barber that wouldn't quit

The New York Times recently posted an obituary for Anthony Mancinelli, a barber who lived to 108. The Guinness World Records recognized him as the world’s oldest working barber when he was in his 90s. He loved being a barber so much that he refused to quit hair cutting, retiring only a few weeks prior to his death due to cancer of the jaw. 1911-1919 R.I.P.

 

Cutting Hair

Photographer Wallace Kirkland - "Cutting hair" - 1947. Public domain image.

Every summer from 1912 until 1963, children from the steamy and congested streets of Chicago's Near West Side ran and played amidst the wildflowers and trees at the Joseph T. Bowen Country Club. Located on 72 acres of forest, field, and ravine near Waukegan, Illinois, the Bowen Country Club was the summer camp of the world famous Hull-House social settlement house. Financed by philanthropist and social activist Louise deKoven Bowen, the camp sought to provide a sojourn in the country as a necessary antidote to the stresses of city life. Prominent Chicagoans donated funds to build sleeping cottages and children and mothers were invited to the camp for two-week rotations. Days were packed with activities such as swimming in the camp's circular pool, team and individual sports contests, classes in folk or rhythmic dance, games, parties, and art lessons. After a hearty meal in the Commons dining room, a campfire and sing-a-long often ended the day.

~ Via University of Illinois at Chicago Library

David Hammons

While some of the best known works by artist David Hammons are ephemeral performances (like Pissed Off 1981 or his Body Prints made by rolling his greased body on paper), Hammons spent a great deal of his career making art from found materials, including hair.

Hammons was one of a number of African-American artists creating assemblages in Los Angeles in the 1960s and '70s. (Others of note included Betye Saar and John Outterbridge.) Primarily using found materials, such as discarded chicken bones or barber shop hair clippings, Hammons's work rejected the 'clean' aesthetic of American Minimalism and embraced an aesthetics of refuse.

Untitled - 1992 - human hair, wire, metallic mylar, sledge hammer,
plastic beads, string, metal food tin, panty hose, leather, tea bags, and feathers
- Whitney Museum of Art, 92.128a-u

"The artist has often been characterised as a sophisticated junk dealer who breathes new life into paper bags, bottle caps, frizzy hair, snowballs, rocks, broken appliances, old clothes, rugs, grease and half-eaten ribs." 1.

The detritus Hammons collects is specifically selected "to evoke aspects, attitudes and sensibilities of black American culture.” 2.  His spider-like sculpture, Untitled 1992, consists of African-American hair wrapped around wires, that emulate the look of dreadlocks. There is no actual body represented, only a reference to the body, created by amassing discarded, kinky hairs. Artists that utilize human hair in their work evoke, consciously or unconsciously, the uncanny by re-contextualizing something with which we are so intimately familiar.

Pieces of hair inevitably fall beneath and around the work, evoking natural processes of change and decay. Like much of Hammons’s art, Untitled summons an uncanny sensation of the strangeness that often lies just below the surface of the familiar. 3.

Hammons frequently uses the visual trope of hair as a marker of African American racial identity. This is evident in his rock heads, works that combine a head-sized stone with hair collected from the floors of black barbershops and affixed to the stone in a manner resembling a head of hair. Art historian Blake Gopnik notes that "in its obvious echoes of Brancusi’s smooth forms, it takes modernism’s Africa fetish and reclaims it for black America." 4.

 Untitled (Rock Head) - 1998 - stone, hair, and shoe polish container
- from the collection of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris

Much of Hammons's work circles around representation, addressing a "politics of visibility, of who and what can be seen and explained." According to artist Lorraine O’Grady, “Hammons tries to make art in which white people can’t see themselves.” 5.  

Old dirty bags, grease, bones, hair … it’s about us, it’s about me. It isn’t negative. We should look at these images and see how positive they are, how strong, how powerful. Our hair is positive, it’s powerful, look what it can do. There’s nothing negative about our images, it all depends on who is seeing it and we’ve been depending on someone else’s sight … We need to look again and decide. ~ David Hammons, 1977 6.

 Rock Head - 2000 - stone, hair, metal stand - RISD Museum, 2001.31.1

If the hair on his rock heads clearly addresses racial identity, using hair on these balanced monoliths also nods to something more universal — the delicate dance of that which decays (the ephemeral) with that which appears to live on forever (the eternal).

While Hammons predominately employs hair for its symbolic, rather than personal, value — using African American hair from anonymous sources — in one of his earlier artworks, Flight Fantasy 1978, he used his own hair to offer a "critique of the dislocation of the black body in American society." 7. 

Flight Fantasy - 1978 - phonograph record fragments, hair, clay, plaster, feathers, bamboo, colored string.  Walker Art Center, 1995.24

Hammons's work often offers sight-gags — visual one-liners that riff off dominant cultural signifiers. "He's distorting all of these stereotypes to produce something which is a critique of the way this community has been seen." 8.  One of his most powerful works in this vein is Hair Relaxer, a visual pun that plays with ideas of power, privilege, art history, sex, and ideals of beauty. 

In Hair Relaxer, African American hair rests-reclines-relaxes on a recamier — an item of furniture associated with western European luxury, and by extension privilege and power. 9.  It's an ironic statement since the black struggle against oppression and injustice can never rest. Hair Relaxer addresses many contested positions for African Americans in art history, culture, and society.

 Hair Relaxer, 1998 - chaise-longue and human hair.

This item of furniture also recalls a specific painting by Jacques-Louis David—a painting of Juliette Récamier who was considered one of the great beauties of her day. The painting, from 1800 depicts Juliette reclining on a divan and epitomized an ideal of feminine elegance. It inspired painters and poets, and came to be riffed-on by artists, such as Magritte and Manet, in particular. 10.  In ironic homage, Manet's Olympia 1863 was famously provocative for the sexually aggressive gaze of its reclining odalisque, despite how she hid her public hair with her hands (addressed in an earlier blog post). Hammons joins the art-historical-parody party, arranging curly hairs in the seam of the recamier — down its crack, so-to-speak—playing with the cultural inappropriateness of publicly visible pubic hair.

But Hair Relaxer is far more than part part of an art-historical running joke about beauty ideals. African Americans have long endured exorbitant pain trying to accommodate Caucasian standards of beauty. Hair straightening treatments (relaxers) use toxic lye and cause great pain and suffering.

I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man’s hair. I had joined the multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are “inferior” — and white people “superior” — that they will violate and mutilate their God-given bodies to try and look “pretty” by white standards. ~ Malcolm X 11.

Like most of David Hammons's artworks, Hair Relaxer works on many parallel tracks to address a shared black experience and situate it against and within both black and white cultures. Hammons "works off familiar, highly charged iconography ... and his puns conjure up some of the more contradictory and even painful aspects of contemporary black life." 12.

In a 1986 interview, the art historian Kellie Jones asked David Hammons why he makes art. Because, Mr. Hammons offered, art is about symbols and “outrageously magical things happen when you mess around with a symbol.” 13.  Hair, which is imbued with magical properties from cultures throughout time and place, is a significant medium for Hammons and serves as a versatile fiber for art-making.

For further reading about David Hammons, I invite you to explore the Mnuchin Gallery website, where the recent exhibition, Five Decades (March 15 - May 27, 2016) generated many articles about the artist and his body of work.

---

1. Coco Fusco, “Wreaking Havoc on the Signified”, Frieze online, May 7, 1995.
2. ibid.
3. Collections record from the Whitney Museum of Art.
4. Blake Gopnik on Art, Tumbr, Jun 5, 2014.
5. From Andrew Russeth, “Looking at Seeing: David Hammons and the Politics of Visibility”, ARTnews, February 17, 2015.
6. From the label text from the exhibition Art in Our Time: 1950 to the Present, Walker Art Center, September 5, 1999 to September 2, 2001.
7. From the label text for David Hammons, Flight Fantasy (1978), from the exhibition Black History Month, Walker Art Center, February 1999.
8. Philippe Vergne, curatorial comment, Walker Art Center, September 1999. 
9. Other names for this item of furniture are a divan or a chaise lounge. 
10. Philippe Segalot, Carte Blanche, Phillips auction house, November 8, 2010. 
11. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, New York 1965, p. 64.
12. Coco Fusco, “Wreaking Havoc on the Signified”, Frieze online, May 7, 1995.
13. Holland Cotter, "David Hammons Is Still Messing With What Art Means", New York Times, March 24, 2016

Artistic hair cut

Jackson Pollock cutting his father's hair, 1927. From the Archives of American Art.

Tallulah Gets a Haircut

August 1923 Actress Tallulah Bankhead, star of the play The Dancers,
wearing black dress and pearls, looking away from camera. Via Conde Nast

It is 1923 London. Tallulah Bankhead has been cast in a ten-month run of The Dancers.  A number of female fans dubbed the “Gallery Girls” flocked to her every performance and wanted to emulate the larger-than-life star known for referring to everyone as “dahhling”.1.  In the middle of one of the performances Bankhead surprises her co-star (and playright) Sir Gerald Du Maurier by cutting her hair into a bob. A surprising response...many of her fans sheared their own hair during the performance, tossing their locks onto the stage.2.

image source

1. http://www.thevintageguidetolondon.com/famous-londoners-tallulah-bankhead/ 
2. Frances Osborne, The Bolter, Knopf (June 2, 2009), page 135.

One Single Strand of Elvis Presley Hair

One single strand of Elvis Presley's hair is on sale today!
(Well was on sale as it was on English time)

 

But one single stand, mounted in the middle of a gold record, was up for auction in Northumberland. And it came with a significant letter of authenticity.

Apparently a man named Thomas Morgan was friends with the crooner's hairdresser, Homer Gilleland. Homer would go on tour with Elvis, bagging and saving his hair clippings. Seems like there should be thousands of these framed mementos out there, if the hairdresser had a whole bag bagged. (and yes, there are. "As he worked with Elvis off and on up through the 1970s, Gilleland kept locks of Presley's hair, attaching them to business cards and ultimately giving large collections to friends.")

Julien's Auctions, June 2012. Winning bid: $4,160

As it turns out, today was not the only time Elvis fans had the chance to own the hair of their favorite rock star. There have been a number of offerings, but in 2009, a clump of the Rock and Roll singer's hair fetched $15,000 at a Chicago auction. The hair clipping, which belonged to the late Gary Pepper who ran an Elvis fan club and was a friend, was believed to have been trimmed from Elvis Presley’s head when he joined the Army in 1958.

And if you're asking yourself if Elvis is the only famous singer whose hair people covet, well you'd be correct to think there must be. Justin Beiber, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, and Keith Richards have all had their locks up for sale.

There is such a long history of fetishizing hair and other body parts, and it makes you see the ceremony around religious reliquaries as being in the same camp of hero- and celebrity-worship. The times have changed but folks' behavior and the song remains the same.

So how much did Elvis' precious single strand sell for in the end?    ..... drumroll ....    about $250.

A Little Girl Gets Her Hair Cut

How many of us, when we were young, took scissors to our hair, thinking it would look pretty and ended up in an operatic tragedy?

This little girl was just "trying to cut off the curls" but ended up giving her sister a drastic a-symmetrical look. When her partner-in-crime put the scissors down she realized something had gone wrong. She said, "uh-oh. this is bad, bad, bad, bad."

The take-away? "Hair-cutting takes a lot of concentration."

The Hand-Me-Down Beard

DJ and producer Tim "Love" Lee has one of the best, most joyous, beards I know.

I've often encouraged him to enter the World Beard and Moustache Championship. Well, today it turns out his beard is not just a choice; Tim actually has a genetic marker for beard-growing. His great-grand dad, Wilfrid Arthur Bevan, sported a wonderful beard, as this painting from 1870 shows. A remarkable resemblance in the eyes, don't ya think?

 

Tim was recently interviewed while getting a haircut by the Village Voice and noted, 

I really like the idea of 'putting a beard' on something and making it a bit shabby and left of center. But now I'm trying to go for more of the 'Successful Businessman' look until I make my first million, and then I'll go back to the 'Crazed Woodsman.'

 Intriguing how the signifiers for beard styles change over time.

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.

____________

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.

Snip Snip Sniff Sniff

When I was young, my British mum cut her long hair. She had let her hair grow most of her life and it cascaded down her back to her rear. When she decided to cut her hair, she chose to get a graduated bob at the Vidal Sassoon salon on Maiden Lane in San Francisco. (This was around 1974). The cut epitomized elegant, hip modernity. And it has survived the test of time....as my mum continues wearing that style to this day.

Left: October 1963 issue of British Vogue. Actress Nancy Kwon with a Sassoon bob.
Right: Grace Coddington in her sculptural "Five Point", circa 1965, with Vidal Sassoon

Vidal Sassoon died a week ago today. He was 84 years old.  Sassoon was a elemental figure in the "Swinging London" scene of the 1960s, creating iconic looks such as the graduated bob (above left) and the five-point cut, sported by model (and current Vogue editor) Grace Coddington (above right).  He transformed women's styles to such a degree that the designer Mary Quant donned him the "Chanel of hair."

"His timing was perfect: As women's hair was liberated, so were their lives," Allure magazine Editor-in-Chief Linda Wells told The Associated Press in a written statement. "Sassoon was one of the original feminists."

Vidal, in London, surrounded by models showing his new cuts for 1976 called,
clockwise from lower left: The Hummingbird, Question Mark, Feathers, Tomboy and Silver Lady

Sassoon was a sensation because his sassy wash-and-wear cuts freed women from towers of teasing and hours of hairspray. “My idea was to cut shape into the hair, to use it like fabric and take away everything that was superfluous,” he said in 1993. “Women were going back to work; they were assuming their own power. They didn’t have time to sit under the dryer anymore.”

His hairstyles provide a remarkable legacy, but Sassoon also became a global success because he  understood marketing. He developed hair care and styling products, opened salons in the US (and elsewhere), and established Vidal Sassoon Academies to teach aspiring stylists how to envision haircuts based on a client's bone structure. He also transformed the haircutting experience by making it glamorous.

Sassoon founded a system of hair cutting that worked, and has lasted, because his hair dressers always take into consideration the person who will wear the style. They tailor looks to help realize a woman's beauty regardless of her age.

"Actually short hair is a state of mind … not a state of age."

This is precisely why his bob looked good on my mom, and continues to look good on her as she enters her 70s. Genius. "If you don't look good, we don't look good."

(A good obit with details on his life can be found here.)