Banned Hair: The Case of Dreadlocks / Dredlocs

“Bob Marley is the person who taught me to trust the universe enough to respect my hair.” ~ Alice Walker

In 2016 the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that it was not discriminatory to make hiring and firing decisions based on whether someone has dreadlocks.

The suit, brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against Catastrophe Management Solutions, argued that dreadlocks are a “racial characteristic” and that using them to deny the hiring of someone is inherently discriminatory and a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964’s Title VII.

The court of appeals ruled that hair is not an “immutable physical characteristic,” that a person’s appearance is, in this respect, changeable and therefore not protected. I suppose this is true, seeing as today all sorts of folks can don a head of locs regardless of race or ethnicity.

Image of a Sadhu in Varanasi, India, 2009. Via Wikimedia by Pierre-Emmanuel BOITON

Matted hair is a feature of Hindu sadhus and also familiarly associated with Rastafari, who adopted the style in the 1950s as an authentic expression of their faith and to reinforce their non-conformist ideology.1. For the Rastafari, dredslocs were potent symbol of both one’s spiritual commitment and cultural resistance.2.

Angela Davis. Photo by Andrew Stawicki, 1988, Toronto Star Archives

During the 1980s a number of prominent African Americans (such as Basquiat, Tracy Chapman, Angela Davis, Whoopi Goldberg, and Alice Walker) brought attention to the style, contributing to its adoption by the mainstream. There was pushback at the time to this “Americanization of dredlocs,” notably in a 1991 Essence editorial entitled “The Dreaded Decision” by Naadu Balnkson.  Did the fashionability of dreds come at the expense of their religious and cultural significance? Criticism was leveled at black Americans for secularizing a religious practice, and at those outside the African American community for cultural appropriation.3. 

This 2016 court decision shows that regardless of whether dredlocs are considered ‘mainstream’ or not, they continue to be used as an excuse to discriminate, harass, intimidate, and oppress.

L: François Fleischbein, Portrait of Betsy (his housekeeper, a free woman of color), 1837. The Historic New Orleans Collection, 1985.212 /  M: Source /
R: Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans, Creole in a Red Headdress, circa 1840. The Historic New Orleans Collection, 2010.0306

Afro hair has historically been demeaned -- an affront to white American culture. Laws against the public expression of natural, Afro hairstyles go back at least as far as the late 1700s in New Orleans, when women of African and multiracial heritage were banned from wearing their natural hair in public by Tignon laws.4. These sumptuary laws required Creole women to wear a headcovering (a tignon) and were implemented to curtail the growing influence of the free black population.5.

In The Hair Dilemma, an academic paper published by the Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy in 2007, the authors draw attention to other litigation around Afro hairstyles including McManus v. MCI Communications Corp. (2000), in which McManus, a Black woman, argued that she was fired for wearing her hair in braids and dreadlocks; Hollins v. Atlantis Co. (1999), in which the plaintiff who came to work with her hair in “finger waves” claimed that her employer’s policy prohibiting “eye catching” hairstyles was discriminatory; and Rogers v. American Airlines, Inc. (1981), where a Black woman was fired for wearing her hair in braids. “These cases demonstrate how “ethnic” hairstyles are not welcome in the corporate world.’

http://www.klassykinks.com/tiana-parker/

In 2013 seven-year-old Tiana Parker was sent home for coming to her Tulsa, Oklahoma school with dredlocs. The school claimed it went against their dress code, which stated, “hairstyles such as dreadlocks, afros, mohawks, and other faddish styles are unacceptable.”

And in Tennessee, you must have a license (acquired at great time and cost) to braid hair or face stiff fines, as reported just this week at Forbes.com. Author Minh-Ha T. Pham notes, “White designers like Marc Jacobs put fake dreadlocks on white models and make tons of money - all without permission - but Black women doing Black people's hair are being heavily fined for not having a license.”

Such legislation and work/school policies shame and degrade women for their hair. This institutional racism can lead to internalized racism, whereby women are made to feel their Afro hair is unkempt or unattractive. In order to conform to Western hair ideals and white standards of beauty, these women endure chemical straighteners or expensive weaves or extensions.

However, social awareness can change policy. Tiana’s school reversed their policy shortly after the student transferred. And interestingly, while the Army has long outlawed dredlocs (Army Regulation 670–1, 2014 policy stating: Any style of dreadlock (against the scalp or free-hanging) is not authorized. Braids or cornrows that are unkempt or matted are considered dreadlocks and are not authorized), a 2017 Army directive countered that prohibition with the following language:

Female soldiers may wear dreadlocks/locks in accordance with the guidance in paragraph 3-2a(3)(f) for braids, cornrows, and twists.

One Army Captain noted, via a New York Times article, “It caused a lot of unnecessary stress. It was an exhausting 14 years.”

Even when she worked to stay within the regulations, there was constant scrutiny by higher-ups, she said, adding that black women felt as if they were “walking targets” because the regulations were subject to interpretation.

But, without a doubt, written and unwritten rules about “grooming” and “dress codes” serve as means to discriminate and devalue Blackness. These rules have allowed schools, corporations, and even the United States military to distort social norms and limit the beauty of Blackness by condemning hairstyles such as cornrows, braids, twists, and dreadlocks.

Hair “not only symbolizes the self but, in a very real sense, it is the self since it grows from and is part of the physical human body.”6.

---

1. Barry Chevannes in Rastafari and Other African-Caribbean Worldviews, Rutgers University Press, 1997, p77 and p82)
In the late 1940s a Rastafari group called the Youth Black Faith believed leaving hair uncombed was the truer reading of the scriptures. (The Nazarite Vow in the book of Numbers states: “'All the days of his vow of separation no razor shall pass over his head. He shall be holy until the days are fulfilled for which he separated himself to the LORD; he shall let the locks of hair on his head grow long.” http://biblehub.com/numbers/6-5.htm)
Chevannes asserts that Rastafari embraced dredlocs to maintain associations with the unkempt and outcast and in opposition to White and mainstream Jamaican cultural identity. Another historical interpretation is that dredlocs were adopted by Rastafari “out of admiration and reverence for the fearless resistance of the Kikuyu soldiers of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya.” (see Hair Story page 121)

2. I use the spelling dredlocs over dreadlocks, in deference to those who ascribe the word’s derivation as being from the description of arriving slaves as “dreadful.” However, Chevannes explains that dreadlocks comes from The Dreadfuls (or the Warriors), named for those more aesthetic and disciplined. “The term Dreadful and Warrior reflected the manner in which the ascetics behaved: constantly ‘at war’ with the neglectful, in whom they inspired dread.” p84

3. Ayana D. Byrd and Lori L. Tharps, Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2014, page 123.

4. The word tignon, pronounced tiyon, was a regional term in New Orleans for headscarf. It derived from the French word chignon which, in the late 18th century, referred to a hairstyle where the hair was pulled back in twists or knots.

5. The tignon laws were intended to “force the free women of color to symbolically reestablish their ties to slavery by wearing the kerchief, the garment traditionally worn by slave women to signify their status as workers. (Plaçage and the Louisiana Gens de Couleur Libre: How Race and Sex Defined the Lifestyles of Free Women of Color” by Joan M. Martin in Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana's Free People of Color edited by Sybil Kein, p. 62.)

6. Anthony Synnott, ‘Shame and Glory: A Sociology of Hair,’ British Journal of Sociology, 38 (3), p404.

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

When Facial Hair Gets Political

“Any boy can become president — unless he’s got a mustache.” ~ Thomas A. Dewey

Yesterday The New York Times posted an article about how the new Speaker of the House Paul Ryan growing a beard has caused a stir.

Waiting on confirmation from the House Historian, but apparently, I’m the first Speaker to sport a beard in about 💯 years.

A photo posted by Speaker Paul Ryan (@speakerryan) on Nov 30, 2015 at 1:08pm PST

The power of hair as a vehicle to assert oneself in the world and to convoy unspoken values of any given age is undeniable. But who holds the answers to unlock these hidden hirsute rules? According to Tammy Haddad, a Washington media consultant and former political director of MSNBC, even though Mr. Ryan’s job “is the center of the entire political system, the beard shows that he’s not of Washington, he’s not part of the system.”

Did the beard always hold such outsider status? Perhaps not, but sporting facial hair was often seen as a political act. Beards among clergy were once serious, symbolic matters that at various times Church leaders either required or banned! And let us not forget that even clergy were not immune to the whims of fashion in their day.

Beards were fraught with shifting meaning in lay culture as well, as this 2013 article from The Atlantic points out. Considering a beard? It might serve you well to know your history.

"A Barber's Shop at Richmond, Virginia," from The Illustrated London News, March 9, 1861

 An 1853 Punch magazine sketch satirizes the "beard movement," an old lady is approached by helpful railway guards and
"concludes she is attacked by Brigands."

Hair: This Day in History

Today in 1968, the musical Hair premiered on Broadway and
came to symbolize the counter cultural movement.

She asks me why
I'm just a hairy guy
I'm hairy noon and night
Hair that's a fright
I'm hairy high and low
Don't ask me why
Don't know

But the hippies knew why they grew their hair. It was not only a symbol of rebellion, but a marker of political and cultural allegiance as well as a rejection of restrictive gender norms.

Give me down to there hair
Shoulder length or longer
Here baby, there mama
Everywhere daddy daddy

Hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair
Flow it, show it
Long as God can grow it
My hair

Let it fly in the breeze
And get caught in the trees
Give a home to the fleas in my hair
A home for fleas
A hive for bees
A nest for birds
There ain't no words
For the beauty, the splendor, the wonder
Of my...

Hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair
Flow it, show it
Long as God can grow it
My hair

I want it long, straight, curly, fuzzy
Snaggy, shaggy, ratty, matty
Oily, greasy, fleecy
Shining, gleaming, streaming
Flaxen, waxen
Knotted, polka-dotted
Twisted, beaded, braided
Powdered, flowered, and confettied
Bangled, tangled, spangled, and spaghettied!

Oh say can you see
My eyes if you can
Then my hair's too short

Down to here
Down to there
Down to where
It stops by itself

They'll be ga ga at the go go
When they see me in my toga
My toga made of blond
Brilliantined
Biblical hair
 

But let us now enjoy the abundance of wonderful poster illustrations of H-A-I-R!

Deluxe Play with Hair

An Ellen Gallagher (b.1965) show recently opened at Tate Modern. Running through September 1, 2013, Ellen Gallagher: AxME is the artist's first major solo exhibition in the UK. Of Irish and African American heritage, Gallagher appropriates source materials from science fiction, the vaudeville tradition of black minstrels, and advertising targeted to African Americans.

Of note is DeLuxe (2004-5), sixty individually-framed prints that hang in a rectangular grid arrangement. Each print is a re-working of a magazine advertisement from a publication such as Ebony, Our World or Sepia dating from the 1920s to the 1970s. The ads, aimed at African American consumers, "promote a range of beauty products for women and men, especially goods relating to hair including wigs and pomades."1   Gallagher has appropriated these images and modified them using a variety of techniques -- in particular, collage. To the prints she has added materials such as glitter, gold leaf, coconut oil, toy eyeballs, and molded plasticine in the shape of wigs.

Gallagher's interventions to these beauty ads parody the idea of "improvement" through a process of erasure and alteration and "underscore in particular the role of hair as a signifier of difference."2 While her work is often characterized as political art, as it investigates of social and racial identities, it also has a playful approach that “confronts issues of race...with clever, even antic, satire."3

This idea of playfulness resonates both in format (she "plays" with the traditional print) and in content (poking fun at hairstyles and appearance). In Gallagher's hands, looks that are intended to help us "conform" to an ideal become fantastical masks, jazzy helmets, or fanciful hats from outer space. "When viewed together, these prints offer a history lesson about modernism, fashion, mass media, and race in mid-century America."4

‘The wig ladies are fugitives, conscripts from another time and place, liberated from the “race” magazines of the past. But again, I have transformed them, here on the pages that once held them captive.’ 5

One of Gallagher's tropes is the grid. Not only is Deluxe installed in a grid formation, the wig ads themselves are laid out in rows and columns of wigged heads. "Gallagher was drawn to the wig advertisements because of their grid-like structure...[having been] influenced by the sublime aesthetics of Agnes Martin’s paintings, as well the subtle shifts and repetitions of Gertrude Stein’s writing."6

These grids reminded me of another work by another artist: Tom Sach's James Brown’s Hair Products (2009). I saw this work when it was on view at the Sperone-Westwater Gallery in 2011. While the Sachs work has little in common with Deluxe in regards to motivation and interpretation, the works do align themselves formally. Confronted by a grid of hair products, each a specimen of physical conceit and tool of identity construction, we might ask ourselves to look at how we fetishize our hair rituals.

1-2. Tate Museum object catalogue record
3. "In Black and White" by Mark Stevens. Feb 21, 2005 issue of New York magazine
4. Walker Art Museum object catalogue record.
5. Exhibition description
6. PBS series Art21 from the episode "play"

The Art of Hair

Oh my! There is a wonderful exhibition, The Art of Hair: Frivolities and Trophies on view in Paris at the Quai Branly Museum. It looks at the universal importance of hair in cultures throughout the world. A multitude of objects - 280 to be exact that include sculptures, paintings and photography - address how hair has been shaped, sheared, and sculpted to express loss, beauty, intimacy, sociability, ritual, religion, fashion, and style.

 J.D. Okhai Ojeikere, 1974.
Credit: Musée du Quai Branlyn.

The show combines western and non-western, ancient and contemporary pieces. Diverse items, such as a skull from Papua New Guinea, a photograph by Man Ray of Duchamp's star "haircut," and a limestone sculpture of Marie-Madeline from the earth 14th century, work together to reveal human history's overwhelming preoccupation with this organic material.

Preserved Skull. Iatmul, early 20th century / Musée du Quai Branly, photo Patick Gries.

(L) Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp tonsured by George de Zayas, 1919 / Credit: Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris, 2012

(R) Statue of Sainte Marie-Madeleine, by the Ecole Francaise. / Credit: RMN-GP/Jean-Gilles Berizzi

The objects in the exhibition show hair as a frivolous frippery for fashion but also its use as a political statement, a sexual symbol, a spoil of war, a fetish, a tool of sacrifice or punishment, an object of loss that symbolizes time passing, illness and death, or simply as vehicle for artistic expression.

Figurine from a Turkish shadow puppet theater show. The hair of the four men is being used as reins as they pull a figure in a carriage.
Claude Germain/Musée du Quai Branly

(L) Coiffe de chef Fang, Pahouin, avant 1899, Gabon, Afrique  / © musée du quai Branly, photo Claude Germain.

(R) Samuel Fosso, from his series “African Spirits,” 2008.

One of the themes of the exhibition is how hair -- blonde, brunette or red; straight or frizzy; long, short or shaved -- has been used to convey and establish standards of beauty.  Hair "is loaded with cultural meaning because it signifies an very human capacity for self-conscious manipulation, management and display."1  Examples in this section include wigs from Papua New Guinea,  photographs by JD Okhai Ojeikere (top photo) and Samuel Fosso (above), as well as paintings by Ingres, Jean-Louis Bezard, and an installation by Annette Messager (below). But is the quest for beauty a question of mere frivolity? Or is there something more serious below the surface? The rituals, the care, the modifications; do they not also betray a vital urge to create something out of the ordinary and cast off the ugliness of banality?2

The dance of the scalp
© Annette Messager - Adagp, Paris, 2012

With its metamorphic properties, hair can take on an infinite variety of physical and symbolic forms, varying between cultures and the social groups, trends and periods within each culture. Symbolically hair can represent normality and individuality, conformism and rebellion, seduction and repulsion. It classifies and differentiates people. But there are obvious paradoxes: shaved head or flowing long hair can be the hallmark of a rebel, a lout, an artist or a king, but also of a hermit, a mourner, a tramp... and colors come with their own stereotypes.

Bezard Jean-Louis (1799-1881) featuring Clotaire 1er, king of Francs.

Lighter colours are believed to have appealed to our prehistoric ancestors, with blond having reassuring qualities, evoking angels, saints and maternity. A common hair colour among northern Europeans, blond hair became a totem of the abhorrent theories regarding an Aryan race. Over-represented in the media, blond hair for women has sometimes come to be seen as a sign of superficiality. And many other clichés lie in the collective imagination -- brunettes are supposed to represent the opposite of blondes, being pragmatic or adventurous, while redheads are depicted as dramatic or even diabolical.

The Bouffant Belles, a running team from Texas, in the starting blocks, 1962.
Credit: Neil Barr

Obviously color, length and style of hair can also be a key component of seduction. From Antiquity to the present day, hairstyles have been in a constant state of flux, evolving hand-in-hand with fashion, convention, and discipline. Curls, fringes, long flowing locks...depending on the tastes of artists and their eras, hair has been used in different ways to represent seduction. The mythology and symbolism of hair help blur the boundaries between conformity and licentiousness, morality and sensuality, masculine and feminine.

(L) Brigitte Bardot and Alain Delon,  Sam Lévin, 1958. / Médiathèque de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine
(R) Evariste Vital Luminais. Norman pirates in the 9th century (1822) / Credit: Jérôme Mondière

(L) Marble bust of Catharina Frederika of Württemberg by François Joseph Bosio ©Château de Versailles et de Trianon.
(R) A 19th century bust of an African woman by Charles Cordier, who devoted his career as a sculptor to showcasing the diversity of human physiognomy.

Another theme of the exhibition deals with hair incorporated into relics, tokens, and talismen. In many cultures, hair retains the aura and energy of its owner and therefore some objects are considered "magical" or thought to be endowed with special powers. The practice of wearing belts made of hair is testament to this power. Acquiring hair which belonged to an important figure, and preserving this hair in a weapon or magic charm, is supposed to convey power and good fortune.

(L) An ornament for a man's belt, made of women's hair, from the Aguaruna tribe of the Rio Manarnon region in South America.
(R) A mask from the Makonde people of Tanzania

Both: Claude Germain/Musée du Quai Branly

Some societies place great value on physical trophies of victory, an extreme example being the practice of headhunting. Trophies, scalps and other totems are supposed to carry a certain energy, often associated with crop fertility, group prosperity and peaceful relations with deceased ancestors. 

takes on an infinite variety of physical and symbolic forms, varying between cultures and the social groups, trends and periods within each culture. This floating symbol can represent normality and individuality, conformism and rebellion, seduction and repulsion. It classifies and differentiates people. Faced with this enormous diversity of artworks and objects, we are struck by the obvious paradoxes: shaved head or flowing long hair can be the hallmark of a rebel, a lout, an artist or a king, but also of a hermit, a mourner, a tramp...

A shrunken head from Ecuador.
Credit: Claude Germain/Musée du Quai Branly

At times, hair is believed to be imbued with the power of its original owner, and worn as a symbolically-charged personal adornment. This was particularly popular in the nineteenth century, when hair jewelry, such as bracelets, lockets, and broaches, formed of type of dialogue between this life and the great beyond. These delicate creations were often souvenirs of long-lost childhood, or tokens dedicated to the memory of those who had passed.

S.E locket, circa 1900 ©Collection Jean-Jacques Lebel

The loss of hair is a powerful biological process, but hair when shorn for donation (as with reliquaries), punishment, or political resistance it is a powerful symbol of social codes and sexual politics. Deliberately renouncing one’s hair can involve a complex combination of commitments and conventions, as with hair lost by nuns entering certain religious orders, or in initiation rituals in Papua New Guinea. The phenomenon of shaving the heads of women accused of sleeping with the enemy was a notable feature of the conflicts which ravaged Europe in the period 1933-1945. These ‘carnivals of ugliness’, as Alain Brossat described them, took palce in Spain, Germany and of course in France, with the events in Chartres recorded for posterity by Robert Capa (below).

Hairpiece cut from a young woman named Emma when she entered the Carmelite order.  (Circa 1900)

André Malraux bought the object at a Paris flea market and gave it to a friend for his twentieth birthday.
Credit: Collection Jean-Jacques Lebel.

Robert Capa. Chartres, August 18, 1944.
Woman shamed for having a child with a German.

 Evariste-Vital Luminais (1822-1896).
Le dernier des Mérovingiens.
Musée des beaux-arts, Carcassonne.

Immune to decay, from birth to death and beyond, hair has the ability to straddle this life and the next, and acts as a quintessential symbol of both the superficial and the profound. 

 An ornament from the Marquesas islands.
Credit: Claude Germain/Musée du Quai Branly

The exhibition will be on display until July 14, 2013.

1. Geraldine Biddle-Perry and Sarah Cheang "thinking about hair," Hair, Berg, p10.
2. I've used substantial content from the English translation of the exhibition press release, available on Artdaily.org