Told & Retold: an inquiry about hair

Artist Statement

Anne Wilson and A.B. Forster, 1999

A Translation of Forms

The "an inquiry about hair" Web site provided a vast forum for the exchange of intimate, private narratives and confessional experiences in response to questions about hair loss and cutting. The research was recontextualized by changing the medium of communication from Internet mail to sound excerpts in the physical installation Told and Retold, presented at The Museum for Textiles. Interactivity is key to both the Web site and the installation.

Within the installation, the act of putting on a covered headset elicits a sensory response that collapses the space between viewer and artwork: one's hair, or lack thereof, is implicated. Interactivity between participant and the audio contributor moves between confession and eavesdropping. The private nature of listening may be offset by the public context of an institutional setting. Much like a hair salon, one is observing others while simultaneously being observed.

The final translation of the hair inquiry is in the form of an audio CD. In an edition of 25, the CD project is the combination of object, audio and interactivity. A circular lens-like box contains all audio parts; a slip-covered headset; black silk-covered cords, and; a CD player within a silk-cushioned, cinched bag. The sensuality and tactility of this object can be experienced while listening to a sequence of selected audio tracks excerpted from the hundreds of contributions to the source Web site, and extending from the sound installation. In a world of multi-faceted, inundating information, this CD project provides the most private of interludes - a solitary space where the participant becomes confident.

We wish to sincerely thank the many individuals who have given their stories and time in contributing to the richness and diversity of the Web site, gallery installation and CD projects.

© 2007 Textile Museum of Canada

Narrative Strands

By Sarah Quinton, 1999

Anne Wilson admits the obsessive and sensual associations human hair has with codes of fashion, gender and traditional sewn work such as embroidery, dressmaking and mending. She has made many artworks using human hair as mending threads to repair stained and torn domestic linens that exhibit signs of wear and tear. The impulse is to pick at the hair. Get rid of it. (From Wilson's artist's statement, "the visceral nature of human hair is in contrast to the formality of white linen, and sets up an aesthetic of oppositional tendencies.")

In Areas of Disrepair (1993-99), Wilson mends worn spots on formal, starched table linens with human hair and presents them as archival remnants, or mementos of repeated use and the passage of time. In Mendings (1995), a series of lacy fragments is identifiable as a shirt cuff or collar handkerchief, dresser scarf or towel edge. A Chronicle of Days (1997-1998) is a daily practice of 100 stitched entries that emanate from white-on-white patterned damask where peculiar, beautiful and morbid marks reveal a whole universe of scars and pox, moles and beauty spots. Wilson gives birth to a new, inexplicable genealogy by integrating highly valued and symbolic heirlooms with fine hair filaments - human remains culled from a wide scope of specimens, both anonymous and familiar. She crossbreeds gene pools. Wilson's fecund and hairy stitchery injects human or messy qualities into an otherwise ideal(ized) condition.

Angela Forster's artistic domain is found in classified personal ads, a lonely-hearts arena of fantastic future-building and present-moment gratification. Her 1996 Poetry Magnets is made up of small magnetized strips imprinted with words and phrase-bites that have been lifted from the personal ads section (of a newspaper, for example). The magnets can be reconfigured on a moment's notice so that top qualities and interests can be restated as the spirit moves.

"Harley Rider," "Honest," "Touch of class," "Open mind," "Advanced," "Articulate," "Warm hearted," "Low Mileage," "Passionate," "Full figured... I am," and "You are Similar" are excerpts uttered in SWF-ISO Dreaming Between the Lines (1997) (SWF-ISO stands for Single White Female - In Search Of), a multimedia sound installation where Forster broadcasts actual responses to personal ads; second- and third-listening stations pare the responses, stripping them of emotion and retaining little more than guttural monosyllables, though still intelligible. These ersatz Romeos and Juliets have been caught thinking out loud.

In a similar vein, Told and Retold: an inquiry about hair performs a litany of intimate day-to-day chronicles against a backdrop of high- and low-tech communication channels, from the World Wide Web and email, the post office, fax machine and telephone, to the tape loop and slip-covered headset that nestles into our own (aspiring) heads of hair, with its wire-cord tendrils trailing over our shoulders. Testimonials circulate throughout the whole body. What are these acoustic vibrations? Sound is materialized here as spoken language in a topsy-turvy place where late 20th-century information systems have evolved into storytellers spinning fireside yarns. We know that these recorded voices have bodies; their surrogates speak viva voce, with an authentic voice rather than as an invocation of romantic idealism. Told and Retold absorbs and exudes a flow of conjecture and (self-)portraiture. The power of the piece resides in its subjectivity and in the split, even polarized responses embodied in the narratives. Indeed, everybody has a story to tell. Could it be that "The very hairs on your head are all numbered?" (St. Matthew v. 30)

The gallery that houses Told and Retold: an inquiry about hair is furnished with tape recorders encased in black cinch bags, audio head-sets, hanks of cables and strands of cords - all slip-covered with various fabrics. The gallery is dressed up as an automated production or communication system, bringing to mind computers, mailboxes, weaving looms and telephone switchboards. Tape loops circulate personal and cultural reminiscences about social belonging, the physical body, and family histories that have been gathered through Anne Wilson's Internet Web site: a no-holds-barred information crucible. We are invited to don headsets and listen to recorded voices that yield an unrelenting climate of storytelling. Told and Retold recounts tales of love, violence, disease and, of the imagination.

Human hair is both symbolic and useful - a tactile, psycho-sensual fibrous substance that penetrates the epidermis while it offers protection and identity. Beehives, mohawks, ducktails, flips, ringlets, dreads, buzz-cuts, lemon-yellow dye jobs, pink tips and blue rinses - even as they remain affixed to their life source, these styles key us in to the transformative powers of hair, and a single lock can shriek of personal significance. Enervating effects of disease and medical treatments cause hair to fall out. Daily plucking, trimming, waxing and shaving is undertaken by neat and tidy, conscientious consumers who are, perhaps, fearful of being too closely aligned with their earthbound, bestial origins. (The hair on our body is an indication of human connectedness to the animal world.) Hair shapes a social body through exaggeration, whimsy and expressions of outrage.

In the European Middle Ages, hirsute, mythological wild women and men (represented in medieval illuminated manuscripts, engravings, tapestries, paintings, etc.) were considered to be a monumental threat to moral and psychological well-being, as well as to external social canons. These inarticulate "monsters" embodied madness, messiness and wanton behavior. "Wild" families, depicted in isolated wooded settings, had hair covering all but their faces, breasts (in the case of women), elbows, hands, knees and feet. Various - and at times chaotic - renditions of these allegorical figures appear over time, and the significance of their hairy attributes is explained both in terms of repulsion and of attraction. These salacious human-types symbolized the untamed world of base instincts, at times feared, and at times revered.

Paradoxical meanings of hair are also interwoven throughout Victorian hair work. Victorians made a mind-boggling assortment of ornamental objects out of human hair: bracelets, necklaces, pictures, autograph albums, lockets, brooches and hair wreaths. The melodramatic Victorian predilection for mourning often eclipses other significant aspects of this trend in handwork. Made from the hair of both the dead and the living, hair jewellery was fashionable as mourning jewellery, but it was also a great signifier of friendship and loyalty. The wreaths remind us of death because of their shape's affinity with grave markers and, quite likely, because of the dark and wondrous qualities the hair manifests once it has been so intricately and laboriously worked. In fact, the wreaths were intended as portraits of life. They were made of the hair of many different individuals by people with a discerning eye for materials of various shades and tones. At times they took on the significance of a family tree, when strands of family members' hair were intertwined to create a symbolic portrait. A woman's dressing table often included a hair tidy or hair receiver, a small container in which she saved her hair. Locks were snipped from the heads of babies and the recently deceased, as well as from friends and families in mourning. Hair work was often intended as memento mori - constant reminders of life's fleeting nature. This surely puts a new twist on the verse:

Hair is an idiosyncratic protagonist, able to express fear and passion, as well as death and transcendence, word by word, strand by strand.

© 2007 Textile Museum of Canada

Introduction

Human hair can be seen as a metaphor for the body: in its presence (and in its absence), we find ourselves considering its many (but seldom spoken) physical, spiritual, emotional, sexual and cultural associations. Told and Retold: an inquiry about hair is a sound installation that procures an invitation to consider, experience and contribute to the corpus of matter that has been collected about the fibre most closely connected to our corpulent, living souls. Histories tumble in and stories spill out, constant and cyclical as breathing.

Hair is a material that can be worked. It can be twisted, braided, woven, layered, knotted, plaited, stacked and stitched into seemingly limitless forms. For example, a circa 14th-16th century Anasazi hair pouch, located in an Arizona museum, was painstakingly woven and thought to be used to hold objects of great personal value; the remains of a 2,000-year-old Woodlands cloth fragment from the American Midwest, made of spun hair combined with other plant and animal fibres, draws a ready picture of human tenacity and resolve; a woven crown or hat made from the hair of a Korean groom's deceased paternal ancestors links several generations together, and; ritualistic talismans and fetishes made of human hair often represent vivacious or spiritual affirmation.

On view in the gallery neighbouring Told and Retold are artifacts made from human hair: from the Museum's collection we have a Japanese paper stencil with individual strands of hair used as reinforcing filaments and a recently made, stiffly woven Peruvian "underbelt" made from a woman's long dark tresses. Victorian hair ornaments -symbols of mourning, love and friendship - are seen here in the form of a hair wreath and 19th-century hair jewellery. Bundles of human hair - a wig maker's raw material - from the archives of The Toronto Human Hair Supply Company will now likely never take their final form. They are a sign of ephemeral beauty and the fashionable, even big business, attributes of the material.

The Museum for Textiles' contemporary exhibitions frequently mark alliances between today's arts practitioners and the provenance of historic textiles. Precedents for Told and Retold are many. In her 1998 exhibition, Barbara Todd created To the Lighthouse, a temporary installation of several of the Museum's early quilts (made from used clothing and handmade fabrics) placed in proximity to her own - a poetic yet decisive acknowledgment of her answerability to traditional quilt making. The 1998 exhibition Small World drew a link from the stitched and painted textiles (made by Sara Hartland-Rowe, Darrel Morris and Richard Purdy) to the narrative "crazy quilts" and stitched samplers made for display by women and girls in 19th-century Europe and North America; the quilts portrayed their memory, sentimentality and worldliness. Mindy Yan Miller's melancholic and highly laboured Untitled (Hair Wall) (1993-94) was exhibited in Textiles, that is to say. Yan Miller pinned strands of long dark hair to the wall, floor-to-ceiling, in a dense atmospheric mass that called up the Victorian practice of preserving the hair of departed companions or relatives, as well as an observance of lengthy periods of bereavement. In the presence of human residue such as hair, old clothing or family heirlooms, we are called upon to elaborate our complex relationship with history.

Hair Epiphanies

By Jennifer Fisher, 1999

Told and Retold: an inquiry about hair grew out of two questions: "How does it feel to lose your hair?" and "What does it mean to cut your hair?" There is no actual hair in this installation, which instead presents an oral culture of hair. Of the hundreds of submissions received by email from around the world, 60 were posted to the Web site. Initially "told" in electronic text, they were edited and "retold" on the 17 audiocassette loops that comprise the installation. The collaboration of Anne Wilson and Angela Forster works to situate the arena of the private in art's public domain. They have found that questions concerning hair provide entry into people's personal issues and elicit evocative and often poignant "sharings." The materiality of hair becomes a means of inquiring into its experiential dimensions, expanding from the immediacy of the tactile to grasp a range of emotive and intuitive feelings.

The feelings involving the separation of hair from the body are complex, often occurring at epiphanic thresholds in life. These range from traumatic loss due to chemotherapy, to the emancipatory effects of haircuts and head-shaving, to the experience of social connection at the hair salon or barbershop. In contrast to additive procedures such as extensions, dyeing, perming, or even hair replacement and wigs, this project focuses on the voluntary and involuntary surrendering of hair: the subtractive processes of "loss" and "cutting." Each story reveals a particular negotiation of identity at a moment where individual experience intersects with larger narratives of beauty, community, creativity, abuse or reckoning with "leaving the world."*

The materiality of hair relates to its quality as a fibre produced by the body.¹ Hair warms and protects the body, and functions as an antenna for the nervous system, as in a response to a "hair-raising" event. The texture of hair is a marker of ethnicity, even when skin colour fails to function as a sign.² Hair can be thick, fine, wavy or frizzy; it can be worn straight, curled, nappy or in dreadlocks. While white Western dictates of beauty have held that the "best" hair is straight and long, these assumptions are slowly giving way to different kinds of beauty.³ African-American women have fought the tyranny of such hierarchies, even taking employers to court to defend their right to freely wear corn rows and other styles of adornment.

Hair's texture also pertains to its tactility, that is, how it is touched. Stroking, flipping or "‘letting down" one's hair can play a role in the rituals of attraction and seduction. Touching another's hair is an act of intimacy. Several stories posted to the hair inquiry Web page describe the touching of hair: the affection of a young boy messing up his uncle's impeccably styled hair,* or a lover's delight in hair that is smooth ‘‘as a veil of silk."* Likewise, a haircut and shave provide an experience of tenderness usually lacking in male rituals. Australian traveller, Neil Roberts, describes the gentleness of a Toronto barber named Luigi in his portrayal of the barbershop as a place where men can touch other men without competition.*

In addition, the cultural politics of hair engage with issues of personal power. In diverse spiritual traditions, hair signifies the vitality of an individual. A Sikh respondent, for example, describes how her tradition prohibits both women and men from cutting their hair, as it is believed to be a sacred conduit of the kundalini, or life force.* Likewise, Hoo Sateow, a Thai tribesman, links his lengthy unshorn hair to his ability to "heal the sick and call up ghosts."* At the turn of the 21st century in the West, superstition dictated that a boy's hair should not be cut until seven years of age if he were to grow into a strong man. Conversely, patriarchal customs of numerous religions require that women cover or even shave off their hair. Hair, once separated from the body of a person, holds her or his energy. On the one hand, hair locks are valued as treasures; the Victorians carefully wove hair into jewellery, which was worn in memory of a loved one. On the other hand, detached hairs are deplored as abject; the hair in one's soup or the furball in the drain raise visceral reactions of apprehension and disgust.

Hair is exhibited on the self as part of an ongoing negotiation of "style." It can be coded to diverse cultures: corporate, punk, hippie, beat, or greaser.⁴ Hair can also hold political significance. At different times in history, for example, "big hair" indicated importance. Marie Antoinette's inflated "do" signified her aristocracy. And more recently, porn queen Annie Sprinkle claimed that "the bigger the hair and the higher the heels, the bigger the star." "Power hair" confers the ability to turn heads and commands acceptance. In contrast, a bad hair day, "hat head," balding, comb-overs and straggly hair conventionally engender aversion, ridicule and self-condemnation. Contravening the conventions of taste, these stories show how the social censure of the hair-challenged is being resisted and redefined. A woman shaves her head as "a protest of the White American beauty standards,"* and balding men jump to the end point of the process shaving their entire heads to effect a hip, unfettered hairlessness.*

The stylist - the agent entrusted with the actual cutting - holds the role of the magician with the power to transform us, to keep us in style, and thus assure us a "cutting edge." People cut their hair at significant thresholds in their lives, before or during travel, to mark a special birthday, to purge oneself after a bad affair.⁵ For both men and women, cutting hair is a chance to transform oneself, to make a different impression, or* to take control of one's life. Significantly, the cutting of hair by women corresponds with radical social movements throughout history. In post-revolutionary France, women wore a short Titus cut, a style appropriated from classical statuary. During the 1920s, women demonstrated their emancipation by bobbing their hair. In the free-spirited climate of the 1960s, Vidal Sassoon's graduated bob was designed to "wash-and-wear" as an alternative to the high maintenance bouffant.⁶

Just as a self-motivated haircut indicates individualist freedom, so, too, the coercive cutting of hair demonstrates oppression. Instances of forcible cutting act to symbolically curtail the agency of individuals. Sampson lost his legendary strength when Delilah cropped his mane. Several Web stories relate details of violent shearing by parents attempting to regain control of wayward daughters,* and one text from a Holocaust museum describes the horrific practice of shearing prisoners arriving at the camps, whose hair was then sold to make felt, bumpers for boats, and stuffing for mattresses.*

Told and Retold documents numerous instances of traumatic hair loss as the result of physical illness such as malnutrition, mange and chemotherapy. Such accounts relate the despondency of feeling "horribly ugly and unattractive," but also reckon with what ultimately counts in life and hold important wisdom for transforming prejudicial social conventions. They evoke both empathy, by recounting touching conversations about hair with those undergoing cancer therapy, and sympathy by relating the story of an entire Grade 5 class who shaved their heads to reassure a friend returning from the hospital.*

The setting of this installation recalls that of the salon or barbershop. Set in front of 14 wall-mounted listening stations are three seats with earphones. At each acoustic site, visitors place headsets over their hair to be "contained" by the technological embrace, much like going under the hair dryer. Silky black slip covers soften the hard edges of the electronic components. Rather than chatting with stylists, beholders listen to their headsets. In contrast to the mobile, museum audio-tour, these stations are immobile, so the viewer must be. One moves among stories as through the processional stations of the salon: from shampooist, to colourist, to stylist, to cashier. Like the oral culture of the beauty salon, Told and Retold's time-based stories give reason to slow down, and to listen to strangers. There is an intimacy to participation, but at the same time, the experience involves being staged to see and be seen. This creates a mode of affiliation beautifully described in a post by Sonya Clark who, while able to cut her own very short hair, returned to the hair salon every month for "the community and jokes, the teasing and life lessons." Foregrounding a similar connectedness, Told and Retold weaves affecting hair stories to reveal the textures and bonds of identity.

Notes:

1. James Yood. "Anne Wilson," Artforum, May 1994, p.106.
2. Deborah R. Grayson. "Is It Fake?: Black Women's Hair as Spectacle and Spec(tac)ular," Camera Obscura, No.36, Spring 1995, pp.13-30.
3. Lola Ogunnaike. "Some Hair is Happy to be Nappy," The New York Times, Sunday, December 27, 1998, Section 9, p.1-2.
4. For more on the cultural politics of hair style see Dylan Jones, Haircults: Fifty Years of Styles and Cuts, London: Thames & Hudson, 1990.
5. Susan Brownmiller. Femininity, New York. Fawcett Columbine, 1984, pp.53-76. Brownmiller explains how women choose to cut their hair after a crisis or to make a change in life by instantiating a new approach.
6. Mary Trasko. Daring Do's: A History of Extraordinary Hair, Paris and New York. Flammarion, 1994.

© 2007 Textile Museum of Canada