[Here are the other two parts of the HairStories review, as promised. Scroll down for Part One, or click here.]
by Catherine King
The Art
The best pieces in the exhibition had a sense of impenetrable mystery and seemed to come from a Place of Pride. They respected hair, and human scale.
The grandest painting in HairStories is the barbershop tableau De Style, (1993) by Kerry James Marshall. The painting is infinitely rewarding to contemplate, but when one reads more about the vision of the artist, in his own words, you realize that this is a man who is actually, unlike Neal Lester, "persevering as though on a mission." Marshall's painting and writing are deep and wide because of all the thinking work he has done on a universal, but human scale.
Marshall (from his monograph): The characters in those paintings [Rembrandt, Raphael] could have been anybody. The overall theme of the work went beyond who was being depicted. I always wanted to do pictures with black people in them that did the same thing: where you recognized who the figures were, and then quickly went beyond that to much larger issues that implicated more than just the people represented . . . I didn’t want it just to be about what happened in the black community.
De Style is monumental (about 9 x 10 feet), but actual size; it needs to be as big as it is because behind its expansive metaphorical plate glass window it contains so much about humanity, like a Shakespearean stage. We are privileged to be granted a glimpse into a very special place of pride . . .
Kerry James Marshall
The high priest barber stands before his mirrored bar of magic elixirs, a Yang Manet at the Folies Bergiere. The tensely arched electric razor is tamed and guided by his masterful right hand. An anointed client sits in front in the barber chair. The high priest’s left hand is raised above the draped man’s head in a gesture of blessing. Joe Lewis’s powerful legs, leveraged liked two-edged scissor blades, balance in the barber magician’s fingertips, a macho hero witness to the awesome testosterone presentation going on in De Style.
The men in the shop have hair (virility) to spare. The barber magician can crop it way back. "It'll be back again in just a few minutes." Shorn locks land on the floor so full of energy they look like they're gettin' up to go get some -- right now!
Powerful currents of male energy circulate through the barbershop. The charged atmosphere is crackling with pink K7 explosions. This innermost sanctum of Masculinity is crowned with a snake-armed cross from which the juice flows abundantly. Electric black power cables twist and surge into room-sized fluorescent eyes. Another slinky cable has moved in on the wall clock, which surrenders, saying, “It’s 3:36 and Time itself stands back and defers to these Special/Smooth Operators.”
Emblems of female genitalia, the object of worship, are all over the barbershop -- swimming like little goldfish in neat rows on drawers. A pinup of a pretty pelvis maps the way to heaven. A nearby potted plant can't keep it's tendrils off of her. The climbing plant, darting snakes evoked by its ever-probing extensions, is just tuning in to the vibe of De Style. Everything and everybody in this place is The Man. We see it proclaimed all over: Super Groom, Zenith, Ultra, STUD.
Sonya Clark
Two Trees, 2003, wool, felt, cotton, and wire, 6 1/2" x 17 3/8" x 9 3/4"
Clark keeps everything human-scaled and there is the power in these pieces. There is such grandness in the Human, when you really stop to think about it -- and Clark obviously has.
Clark: I make symbolic headdresses that are acknowledgements of the sanctity, power and history of my African heritage. The sculptural headdress I create are metaphorical funnels for the fluidity of cultural heritage and cultural melding. (page 17)
Looking at this ancient-looking cap, one muses on . . . the right and left sides of the brain, growth, receptiveness and responsiveness, but also antlers, virility, thus both plant and animal kingdoms. Human-scaled, reminiscent of many nature religion headresses of many cultures and also prehistoric shamans' headdresses seen in cave painting (links showing) when the human race thought differently, perhaps a little more like animals, and universes away from the way we think now. And yet, even the reptilian part of our brain is still lurking deep inside our heads.
Two Trees is an uncanny power object. The definitive pathway of the part could lead the viewer to some remotely distant land that we likely deny exists inside our very own skulls, but it does. If the viewer were to follow that path all the way inside the very odd-colored skull that Clark has created . . . What is it about the color of that little bit of skin that seems so disconcerting, even though I've seen skin from the palest moonblush to the darkest moonless midnight? I don't know, it's a mystery. Could it be the chalkly translucency? No, Clark has captured the glow of real skin perfectly. What is it then? Two Trees is so very vulnerably human, and yet to be Human is the most uncanny experience of all.
It is difficult to construct a three dimensional tree, as Clark has done with her perfectly formed and small but perfectly sized trees. It's maddeningly, mysteriously difficult to replicate the branching. I know it's mysterious because when I was constructing a 3-D sculpture of a tree, I studied different kinds of tree structure for a long time, and for some reason, excellent diagrams and clear explanations of growth patterns don't help when a sculptor is trying to capture what is important about the way a twig branches off a stick branching of a bough branching off a limb branching off the trunk of a tree.
When sculpting a tree, it's about Branching, in an archetypal way, the way hair is about Power, in an archetypal way. The artist really needs to get that right. So, by way of contrasting images of trees: David Hammons's feeble attempt with Strang Fruit (1989) was so far off I can't imagine why he's not embarrassed to show it. Also, Strang Fruit has nothing to do with hair, so why is it in the show? Two reasons: Hammons is internationally, if undeservedly, famous; and because it evokes lynching, and the organizers of HairStories are primarily concerned with imparting White Guilt, not celebrating the beauty, the splendor and the wonder of black hair.
Wreath, 2002, human hair and wire, 13" x 13"
In Clark's second piece, Wreath, the energy here is circulating, as in De Style. The wreathed crown is dancing and alive -- like a furry crown of laurels, again symbolizing a uniting of plant and animal worlds, all small enough to dance on the head of a queenly woman. This crown is jewelled with micro and nano black receptors that jump up and down with excitement. Like Two Trees, Wreath is a Power Object as much as it is a work of art (especially because it's made from real human hair).
I'd like to crown Sonya Clark with her magnificent Wreath, because she'd probably be too modest to select herself Best in Show. With her two awesome pieces, she resisted the apparently overwhelming urge to get overblown, unlike artists Nadine Robinson, with miles of real human hair in China Shag, and Cathleen Lewis, with her irritating, room-filling, black-rope festooning: Extensions (Ethnic Signifiers).
Alison Saar
Nappy Red Head, (1997), paint, tar and found objects on wood, 26" x 16" x 14".
This piece (scroll down if you need to) is one of her "sculptures inspired by tribal objects," and includes a bird, combination lock, fish, flower, corinthian column, locomotive, car, scrub brush, angel, chess piece, pocket knife, butterfly, hand, plane, skull and crossbones, comb, wheel, key, bus, football player, and alligator, all nested in her wild hair. But no "tribe" contains all these objects except the biggest tribe of all.
Bold in form and rich in details. So solid, so phat, so much texture, movement and color. Writhing and spiky and firm and glossy. Strong with the power of Hair and the power of Red. Nothing is overworked; there's just enough tangle to make her Medusa-like. Her eyes are closed, emphasizing the affect of Feeling and blind instinct, but also memory.
So satisfying to the senses. Eyes and hands evolved to behold Beauty like Nappy Red Head. As big around as an embrace and you want to. But of course you must resist the urge to touch her.
Saar is biracial. The face on this piece reminds me of rough, Celtic countenances with their weird and foreign expressionless expressions. Perhaps as Red Head closes her eyes, she is accessing deep racial memories of her European forbears, the ancient Celts, who believed in the mysterious and all-important Cult of the Head. 21st Century humans will never be able to know what the Cult of the Head meant to its practitioners, but the present is just the finest branch of the Tree of Life and we now know, thanks to 21st Century science, that we are all Africans.
Saar's other contribution is Dark Roots, (1999), Wonderful title. It is chunkily formed from carved wood, plaster, tar, rope, and paint. This hanging sculpture shows a strange symbiosis: two shapely little women who are conjoined at the mutual tips of their long hair, which looks like tangled tree roots. Each one has one hand in her own hair. The darker woman on top, bound by her ankles, blond woman on the bottom. One woman is darker and one is lighter, but they're blendable, they are not polarized black and white.
The scale of this one is tantalizing. The women look so real, so perfectly formed, but just that odd scale-- half life-size. Are they the African and European aspects of Saar's nature that together they equal the whole woman?
Kori Newkirk
Legacy, 1999, polyurethane foam and pigmented resin, 72" x
This huge piece is black, mysterious, hard and impenetrable. Six-foot black hair picks arranged in a standing octagon. With their rounded shoulders and handles, these combs look like a Crown of Creation. One pick tine is broken off, leaving a small opening.
I'm sure that this piece is perceived differently by blacks with really kinky hair than by people who have straight, fine (in the sense of having a skinny shaft, not fine in the sense of being a value judgement) hair. These kind of combs don't even work in most white people's hair, emphasizing our differences. If I put a comb like that in my hair, for example, it would just slip right out and slide right down to the floor. It wouldn't stay where I put it. It wouldn't obey me and just sit there looking cool and jaunty.
The mysterious crown could also, in another sense, represent a closing of the ranks among black people. But, as with De Style Barbershop, I know that I can't enter, but I still admire their dignity.
Lorna Simpson
Wigs, (Portfolio), (1994), waterless lithograph on felt, 72" x 162 1/2"
The printing technique gives an enchanting effect, but everything is diffused, nothing preferred, and the ambiguous, irrelevant, indecisive dialog text only echos the whiny reluctance to make a single decision or commit to a self-determined act.
The voice is uncommitted, immature and lacking identity. No particular emphasis or indication that there is any move toward action. It's infuriating fence-sitting. Vapid, vague, flat and dry, but way overblown, like a gigantic greeting card-- like a Leslie Dill!
She should have done more with the beautiful printing technique, and left out the watered-down that contributed nothing. I guess she can't really think of anything to say . . .
Kehinde Wiley
Conspicuous Fraud Series #1 (Eminence), 2001, 72 1/2" x 72 1/2" and Conspicuous Fraud Series #2 (The Committee), 2001
I was disappointed with these. They are merely decorative. In one, the fabric did all the work in the background-- that is what activated the field. The space was not filled with significance, the way every square inch of De Style contains something that was put there for a reason. Kehinde Wiley lets the color or the material just sit there without doing anything interesting. Then he overpaints the flat surface with the depiction of an artist's model, in costume, posing, with the correct expression, Look like you have attitude!, lit in the predetermined way.
There is a complete lack of authenticity and nuance in his painting. I don't care that he's pretty good at rendering the human form, in an era when most artists can't draw the proverbial "stick figure." Personally, as a painter, I think I'd be embarrassed to paint figures that look so obviously like posed models. I would worry that my figure painting would look like art school stuff, straight out of Life Painting. There's no imagination or complexity in the presentation. (But then, it seems a lot of art school students feel they are ready for the big time without ever even figuring and working anything out). Anyway, I was disappointed, because I had heard Kehinde Wiley's work spoken of very highly, but when I saw the work itself, it was just plain flat, in spite of the skillful way Wiley has lit and modeled the faces. Somehow, the stylized, exaggerated way of painting dark-skinned faces that Kerry James Marshall has worked out over time is far more compelling, even though it's not as realistic. Marshall eloquently tells us about this nuanced phenomenon:
In the black community there's a great resistance to extreme representations of blackness. Some people are unable to see the beauty in that. So I've been very conscious of the way I render my figures. I try to give them subtlety and grace and there's a delicacy in the way I handle the features, especially the lines and contours. Extreme blackness plus grace equals power. I see the figures as emblematic; I'm reducing the complex variations of tone to a rhetorical dimension: blackness. It's a kind of stereotyping, but my figures are never laughable.
. . . When I first started with them, I tried to make them as flat as I possibly could, while maintaining a sense of dimension. That was the challenge: I was trying to see how solidly I could make those figures resonate without putting a lot of definition into them. I tried to figure out a way to construct the silhouette of the silhouette. That was very difficult to do: to try to build density out of something essentially flat. Ultimately, I had to bring out some dimeensions in the figure by adding planes, by shifting a value or two of the black, so that they were two-tone. But I think I came close, even in the flat figures, to having that blackness breathe. To try and get that density, sometimes I painted that black five, six, seven, eight, nine times -- trying to find every combination of warm and cool blackness I could, to make them breathe more. From the start, that was my objective: To be reductive and not reductive at the same time. (page 90)
Wiley was too reductive with his treatment of hair. He heavy-handedly dashes a few thick black arabesques over his effortless background and his carefully rendered angst-ridden executive, but I'm not giving him any points for boldness. It's about the hair. Wiley needed to show that he recognized how powerful Hair is, especially how powerful Mr. Attitude's hair would be if he really had that much. If Wiley had bothered himself to texture out the twelve yards of hair that he painted, all that black shape would have been so irresistable I might still be standing before Eminence, absolutely transfixed by the sight of thirty six feet of winding and unwinding fascination. The art would have been stronger if he had used the mesmerizing capabilities of hair.
Radcliffe Bailey Self-portrait, (2003), deadlocks and insects, acrylic on Plexiglas, 20" x 61" x 10"
The sculpture is basically a low-rent reliquary mounted to the wall, with curled dreadlocks piled inside a plexiglas box that has been painted in patches with tacky day-glo acrylic squares and rectangles.
This piece makes me think of 19th Century mourning jewelry. Locks of hair were clipped from the heads of departed loved ones before burial. The small snips of hair were then fashioned into lovely little buttons and wreaths, which were then encased in glass and fitted into broches and lockets to be worn next to one's heart, always.
Bailey's case, in spite of the long, thick locks in there, is crass and without feeling. I was struck by the contrast in size and lack of power in the object. Because even the smallest amount of hair is so significant it can mean the world to someone. The painted squares also obscure a lot of the dreads. Why not hang them proudly in a vertical case, maybe indicating important dates at certain intervals? It's supposed to be a self-portrait, after all.
Nadine Robinson
Self-Portrait #1 (China Shag), (2001), human hair on canvas, 102" x 90"
Kim Curry-Evans, page 14: " . . . a self-portrait fabricated from imported human hair extensions, worn and collected by the artist over a four-year period . . . Robinson questions the preoccupation with Eurocentric standards of beauty and thus the appropriation of characteristics of another race."
I'm not going to call it a self-portrait because it isn't. It's pieces of a whole bunch of commodified people. If you can't own the person, you can at least buy their scalp. So much hair representing life, all treated as a commodity. China Shag evokes vampirism, slavery, pimping, and cannibalism. It feels like those lampshades Nazis made out of human skin. Think about all those heads she scalped -- so presumptuous. She can afford to buy all that hair that Chinese people are forced to grow and sell. She's like Vanessa Beecroft. It's so like slavery, I don't get the irony (but I do see the hypocrisy). Is it post-black or pomo or what? It's so intensely creepy though, I really do wonder why everyone doesn't feel it. Vanesian, for example, loved it, and even went on about Ad Reinhardt.But you better believe this piece has very bad vibes, compounded and amplified by the artist's sustained intent over four years.
And the scale is so overblown -- if she had realized the power in hair, she would have "got" that it's too strong to use that much -- with no distinction, as if it was just about the color and texture, and "hey, more is better!" But not when it comes to buying and using other people's body parts. That's called harvesting, and it's exploitation.
[Part Three is here.]
Posted by Jerome at December 15, 2003 08:20 AM | TrackBack