My most recent attempt combines my love of French with my love of singing. I’ve decided to learn some French songs by heart. I’m sure it will be a fun project, and I believe it will improve my French language skills. At least I’ll be more dangerous at karaoke.

Check out my song list on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3RwVOSpcVo&list=PLE781ADD0BB25088A&index=1&feature=plpp_video

Something like….

Dear Adam,
I’m your biggest fan. Can we get coffee while you’re here?
Your friend,
Melinda.

No…that won’t work.

Howzabout…

Dear Adam,
I am in San Francisco’s premier Adam Ant tribute band, Madam and the Ants, and we would love to meet you while you’re in town for your show at the Regency on February 24. While you’re visiting, we’d be happy to show you around to some of our favorite San Francisco hangouts.
In fact, we’re playing the following night, Feb 25, at 111 Minna, which is a cool venue that’s part music venue, part bar, part art gallery, and part performance space. It’s one of my favorite venues. Our show is a special event in honor of your visit to SF, and we warmly invite you to attend.
xo,m.

Maybe some of that could work.

Maybe this tactic…

Dear Adam,
Call me! OMG OMG OMG we must meet! I love you I love you I looooooove you!!!! I’ve been obsessed with you since I was 12 years old! Did I mention I knew Heather Graham before we hit puberty? Call me!!!!!
xoxo,Madam Ant.

That’s probably the best one. Sigh.

I agree. But I also recognize that touchscreens are here to stay. They’re, forgive the term, handy.

Teams and projects develop over time. With time, there is a storyline. Any good story needs strongly developed characters, or roles. Some of the archetypal characters include the one who instigates action, the one who gives comfort, the one who doubts, the voice of reason, the fool and the village idiot (sometimes confused, but quite different roles). There’s often a cameo appearance by someone who imparts wisdom at a key moment – an angel or fairy godmother or wise old man, and of course there’s usually someone who provides comic relief.

A dynamic, well-functioning team includes people who play the right roles to develop a good story. Chemistry is important and elusive, but crucial to keep the narrative flowing. Without responsibilities, a project can’t move forward. But without roles, a team falls flat.

People usually fall into their roles naturally, and those roles are understood at a subconscious level. That’s normal and ideal. But sometimes, particularly when team members feel shy or insecure or have been warned to be on their best behavior, natural personalities are stifled. This is when a dynamic leader can make all the difference. The primary responsibility of a leader (or sometimes a sub-leader) is to set the tone, put everyone at ease, and allow their natural personalities to emerge.

Personalities shouldn’t be allowed to run wild. We live in a civilized society (for the most part), and implicit rules of decorum must be obeyed. But within the flexible confines of public politeness, people should feel comfortable slipping into their natural roles. When people are allowed to be themselves, they are more predictable and reliable. This removes anxiety and uncertainty, and allows teams to work smoothly and have fun with each other.

Judith, Salome, and Delilah are linked together throughout art and art history. They are all strong women associated with varying degrees of heroism, deceit, horror, and revenge, but regardless of their individual tales, they are connected by their common ability to overpower men. Judith was the Jewish widow who tricked the Assyrian assailant Holofernes with a display of feminine beauty, and then decapitated him, ensuring victory for the Jews. Her story receives the most attention in the art and art history that is the focus of my paper. However, I would like to always keep in mind how her story is linked with images of other symbolically decapitating women. Delilah betrayed her husband Samson when she accepted money from his enemies to cut off the source of his strength—his hair—which led to his capture and ultimately, death. As a reward for her dance of the seven veils, Salome could request anything she wished from her stepfather Herod; in consultation with her mother Herodias, Salome demanded the head of John the Baptist. Art history tells the stories of other incidents of decapitation. Medusa was the Gorgon of Greek myths with hair of snakes who could turn men to stone by her frightening appearance, until Perseus, aided by the goddess Athena who was inspired by jealousy, was able to confront and decapitate her. David was the biblical young boy who heroically defeated the giant Goliath and decapitated him.
What is the appropriate way to depict these stories? How are images of the first three stories—women overpowering men—different from the latter two—victorious men? How did the men writing circa 1900 see these Renaissance images? How do these depictions fit into the general corpus of Renaissance painting and sculpture, or that of depictions of women, or that of images of strength, power, and betrayal? How do writers in the latter half of the twentieth century look at these images? How and why did the change occur from seeing these images as examples of a single artist’s oeuvre to examples of different perspectives on a single story? As I am writing this paper to examine the thematic concerns of Renaissance art and not the formal variances therein, does this preclude me from treating those formalist art historians from the beginning of the twentieth century in a fair manner? I will attempt, throughout this paper, to understand how the formal and narrative concerns of Renaissance images of powerful women inform and rely on one another.
In 1922, Freud wrote “To decapitate = to castrate,” forever loading these images with undeniable connotations of frightening sexuality. Do the writings that predate this assertion affirm or negate it? All of the artists I discuss are male, as are most of the writers circa 1900. Are they victims of Freud’s idea of castration anxiety, vicariously enacting their fears through the creation and study of these decapitation scenes? Psychoanalyst Karen Horney accounts for this sublimation of fear into creative output in her 1932 article on men’s dread of woman. “…He…tries by every means to deny [his dread of woman] even to himself. This is the purpose of the efforts…to ‘objectify’ it in artistic and scientific creative work. We may conjecture that even his glorification of women has its source not only in the cravings of love, but also in his desire to give the lie to his dread.” In recent years, art historians have analyzed these images using Freudian and feminist techniques. Addressing these findings, I will also try to understand the difference in focus of earlier writing.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, Judith, Salome, and Delilah all enjoyed fame and visibility in popular media. Each attracted the attention of the creative spirits of the time. Sarah Bernhardt played Judith on stage and Isadora Duncan danced Salome’s dance of the seven veils to her audiences. The three female protagonists were the subjects of operas at that time: Samson et Dalila was written by Camille Saint-Saëns in 1877, Richard Strauss composed Salome in 1905, and in 1925 Arthur Honegger wrote Judith. Thomas Bailey Aldrich wrote two poems about Judith in 1896 and 1904. Oscar Wilde wrote a play about Salome in 1893, which Aubrey Beardsley illustrated (Fig. 1). Edvard Munch, Gustav Klimt, Gustave Moreau (Fig. 2), and other Symbolist artists painted images of these powerful, man-conquering women. In 1908, at least 24 Salomes were dancing on stage in New York at the same time. These women were impossible to avoid or ignore around the year 1900.
Yet, for the most part, art historians around this time chose not to address the narrative subjects of these characters in their writing. The prominent art historians of the time treated an artist’s body of work as a whole, and in this method, discussed images of Judith and other powerful women as examples to compare with contemporaneous works, usually not as special subjects to compare with other images of the same theme. How did images of these protagonists fit into the scheme of Renaissance art history as these writers organized it?
Berenson writes about specific works of art only as they illustrate a general formal quality displayed by an artist. It is my goal to sift through his writings to single out his attitudes toward strong women such as Judith. Berenson regards women as beautiful, passive objects to behold. When they take on active roles, indicating a more independent spirit than simply adoring the Christ child, for example, they are an anomaly. Confronting these spirited women, Berenson must choose between deprecating or denying their power.
Berenson uses this portrait of a Couple (Fig. 3) to illustrate Lorenzo Lotto’s sense of humor in his painting. He writes that, “One cannot look at the broad, smiling face of the young bridegroom, or at the firm mouth and clever eyes of the young bride, without sharing the amusement of the roguish little Cupid who maliciously holds a yoke suspended over their necks.” Is this true? Can one look at it differently? Berenson continues, “Lotto had studied the psychology of this Bergamask couple too well not to interpret the situation somewhat humorously; and, in fact, a psychological humour of this kind is by no means rare in his works.” Is this a funny image? Berenson goes on to describe another shrewish woman irrationally overpowering those around her. Is Berenson accurate in his description of this couple; is he correctly interpreting Lotto’s painting, or is he revealing his own biases toward marriage and women?
The couple is young and innocent to the trials of marriage. But will her relative determination to his passivity be the source of their troubles, or will it assist their interactions throughout their marriage? To my late twentieth-century feminist mind, her strength will be an advantage in their marriage, and I feel that Berenson overemphasizes the humor of this painting. But perhaps Berenson’s take on the composition is more in keeping with Renaissance ideals than mine. Perhaps I’m guilty of having no sense of humor, as feminists are often accused of. Berenson’s own idea of marriage involved a headstrong, intelligent woman for a wife, and several affairs outside his own marriage. Did he imagine a similar Cupid standing over himself and Mary Berenson? Would she have found this painting so funny?
Berenson more clearly approves of the kind of woman who is beautiful, motherly, sweet, and more easily classifiable as feminine. He speaks of a madonna by Alessio Baldovinetti (Fig. 4) as if she were a living woman with whom he is in love. He refers to the picture as “she” and “her,” forgetting that it is a painting and not a living woman about which he writes. Or does he forget that living women are not just painted images? He speaks of the madonna in the voice of a lovesick suitor. “…I asked myself rather sadly if I should ever have the pleasure of seeing her again, and where.” Berenson is attracted to the woman in the painting because she is “majestic, hieratically majestic, but she is very refined, very delicate: she is neither massive nor monumental.” Here, Berenson reveals his prejudice for women of lofty purposes (the worshipping of a male god, preferably) whose inner strength is tempered by a tranquil and feminine external appearance. He scoffs at the wife in the Couple for revealing her strength which outshines her husband’s. A woman must appear fragile and delicate at all times. But how should a woman look when her situation calls for strength and action?
Looking at Francesco Morone’s painting of Samson and Delilah (Fig. 5) in The North Italian Painters, Berenson ignores the narrative implications of the visual story, and considers only the tranquil style in which it is painted. He writes, “His ‘Samson and Delilah’ at Milan transports one to a world of sweet yearnings, of desires one would not have fulfilled, into a lyric atmosphere which tempers existence as music does.” While this description accounts for the serenity of the composition and beauty of the figures therein, it denies the ambiguity with which Delilah is depicted. With one hand she holds her cloak around the Philistine who cuts Samson’s hair, while she rests her other hand tenderly on Samson’s arm. Her expression reveals nothing—she is neither wicked nor regretful, but she is calm, alert, and aware of her actions—she has the perfect poker face. Berenson ignores Delilah’s duplicitous nature and the imminent defeat of Samson implied in the painting, seeing only the superficial beauty of the figures in this work.
In his 1902 “The Drawings of Andrea Mantegna,” Berenson speaks of Mantegna’s Judith images, preferring the Uffizi drawing (Fig. 6) over the others for both “the specifically artistic effect [and] the presentation of spiritual significance.” He compares this drawing to another image of Judith in the collection of Lord Pembroke, (now in the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.) (Fig. 7) attributed to Mantegna, according to Berenson, dubiously, apparently because of its lower quality. The Pembroke Judith is overworked so that the figures appear to be made of marble, not flesh, lines are overemphasized, and Judith wears a bored, expressionless face, not revealing any of her motives or emotions for the deed depicted in the image. “…Mantegna, if indeed it was he, seems to have forgotten what he had started to do; and has given but a sorry interpretation of his theme. Judith holds the gory head in her hand, but she feels neither hatred nor exultation. She shows the face of Faustina, morose with the lassitude of a disappointing orgie.” In contrast, the Uffizi Judith has both facial and bodily expression appropriate for her situation. “From head to foot her tremulous frame is quivering with loathing; and for disgust her fingers will scarcely touch the hated head.” Berenson praises the technique of the Uffizi Judith over the Pembroke one, admiring its plasticity and chiaroscuro. He quotes Vasari’s accolades of this drawing, to lend credence to his own championing, and to defend his attribution of it, which are, in the end, his two main goals in discussing any art.
Berenson also looks at Mantegna’s Judith in the Dublin Gallery (Fig. 8), ranking it second only to the Uffizi Judith. This one is worked over more painstakingly, thereby losing some of the spontaneity and life-communicating quality of the Uffizi Judith, but nevertheless, it remains a masterpiece of composition to Berenson. A female critic in 1906 regarding this image sees “a grave majesty in the figure of Judith.…A look of restrained sorrow alone fills her eyes, tempered perhaps with something of contempt.” Berenson’s psychological reading of Judith in this image is enigmatic. “No fierce rebound from stifling oppression is depicted here, but the self-pity and lassitude of one tasting the futility of revenge, and foreseeing further wrongs.” How is Judith’s revenge futile? And of what further wrongs is he thinking? By decapitating Holofernes and bringing his head back to her city of Bethulia, Judith ensures the survival and victory of the Jews. Her action was anything but futile. And the Book of Judith speaks of the peace that followed Judith’s deed for generations thereafter. Is Berenson speaking of later modern attacks on Jewish people? Keep in mind, this text is written in 1902, predating the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. Is Berenson thinking of further wrongs of women? But Judith’s actions are justifiable, admirable, and heroic—she has not acted wrongly. Are the thoughts Berenson discerns in the Dublin Judith hers, Mantegna’s, or his own?
Berenson does consider the Judith story to be a “great theme,” and admires Mantegna’s choice to repeatedly depict the narrative at the moment after she has decapitated Holofernes when “at last, after such tension, her fever-strung nerves relax, and she gives way to her pent-up feelings.” But he neglects discussion of Mantegna’s other images of the Judith and Holofernes story. Mantegna returned to the Judith theme at least seven times, as registered in Paul Kristeller’s 1901 monograph on the artist. In some of these images, Mantegna chose a different moment of the narrative to illustrate, such as Judith showing the head of Holofernes to the people of Bethulia.
How does it aid Berenson’s thesis to limit his scope of attention to Mantegna’s Judith theme to those immediately following the decapitation? In these scenes, Judith is displaying herself to the viewer without being otherwise engaged in any important activity. We do not see her in the gruesome act of cutting off Holofernes’ head, nor do we see the bloody aftermath of her action. These images show the beautiful and pious Judith, who despite the sword she carries, does not seem to possess enough physical strength to cut through the flesh and bones of a large man. Her deed is sterilized and prettied, in keeping with feminine decorum. In Berenson’s favorite Uffizi drawing, Judith raises the pinkie on the hand that holds Holofernes’ head in a dainty, ladylike manner, showing that despite her actions to the contrary, Judith has delicate, feminine sensibilities. How reassuring that this extraordinarily powerful woman does not seem to be the type who would repeat her actions on any other unsuspecting man.
In his monograph on Mantegna, Kristeller only discusses Mantegna’s Judiths in passing, to briefly discuss their provenance and rank them against one another in formal terms. His book illustrates numerous Judiths, which Kristeller describes in a few sentences, and sums up by saying, “The subject in any case occupied him greatly, and moved him to a whole series of different sketches, which are preserved in contemporary copies or engravings.” Why doesn’t this important theme in Mantegna’s work hold greater concern for his biographer? Kristeller refers to these paintings as “decorative” or “ornamental,” devaluing them in the scope of Mantegna’s oeuvre.
Although the stories of Judith and David are linked both iconographically and thematically, Kristeller separates Mantegna’s Judiths and Davids. He considers Judith an allegorical picture, while David is a religious subject (Fig. 9). What is the basis for his separation? Jewish art consistently portrays Judith as a heroic protagonist associated with other heroes of the religion. She is the feminine counterpart to David, who also cut off his enemy’s head, and it follows that imagery of the two of them would display certain similarities. In Jewish art, Judith is not only associated with David because of obvious parallels in their stories, but also with other Jewish heroes such as Samson. However, Christian art of the Renaissance and thereafter often ignores Judith’s heroic qualities and confuses her iconography with that of the villainous temptress Salome. Panofsky goes to great lengths to differentiate between the iconography of Judith and Salome. Through a careful study of images too complicated to relate here, he concludes that there is a fixed association of visual types that indicates whether the image of a woman with the head of a man is Judith or Salome. However, written accounts of these visual images easily conflates the two female characters. Therefore, it is the literary and not the visual sources which stem confusion as to Judith as a hero or as a sinful woman. By separating Judith and David, Kristeller propagates the anti-heroic idea of Judith.
On the other hand, Kristeller includes Judith in the same chapter as Delilah, whose stories he compares (Fig. 10). Quoting the inscription on the tree in the Samson and Delilah piece, which translates as, “a bad woman is three times worse than the devil,” Kristeller writes, “Just as Donatello’s statue of Judith in Florence (Fig. 11) could become the token of the people’s freedom, so has the betrayal of Samson by Delila been taken as symbol of the power of female cunning over the physical and intellectual force of man.” Notwithstanding the fact that nowhere in the story of Samson and Delilah is there any mention of Samson’s intellectual force, I question how Kristeller sees these examples as parallel. This is the first time Donatello’s Judith is mentioned—it was not a point of comparison earlier in Kristeller’s writing to which to return. This pointed contrast and bringing in another artist’s work with no apparent influence on Mantegna is a curious way to elevate the status of Mantegna’s small painting to the monumentality of Donatello’s prominent sculpture. If he had simply wished to compare the Judith and Delilah stories, Kristeller could have chosen any of Mantegna’s own Judith images to discuss. But Kristeller was interested in the public significance of Donatello’s Judith, and likens it to Delilah’s metaphorical impact. Although Kristeller gives Mantegna’s Delilah more attention than Berenson, who felt that this work had “nothing new to teach us,” he leaves his comments open for interpretation.
Looking back on the subject of Delilah in 1972, Madlyn Millner Kahr studies Mantegna’s Delilah again to fill out the understanding of this painting. She suggests that “the vine that twines around the tree may symbolize the lethal woman, while the amputated limb of the tree may relate to the symbolic castration that Samson is undergoing at the hands of Delilah. Furthermore, the grapes indicate Samson’s drinking alcohol before Delilah had his hair cut, and Kahr considers the image to represent the vice Luxuria. Which, in light of Edgar Wind’s article of 1937 and H. W. Janson’s book of 1957 on Donatello, indicates a solid reason to compare this image to Donatello’s Judith. Both of these studies of Donatello’s Judith assert that Holofernes represents Luxuria and Judith signifies Humilitas, as confirmed by the bacchanalian imagery on the sculpture’s base and by the metaphoric implications as a symbol of the politics of Florence. So, in both of these images, the artist has depicted a woman who is able to conquer a strong man because she tricked him into trusting her and making himself vulnerable with drunkenness. These works both serve to moralize against Luxuria, although in the case of Delilah, the woman is responsible for corrupting her male counterpart, whereas in the case of Judith, she conquers the corruption of the man she is with.
Donatello’s Judith has its own history of placement and replacement with other sculptures of male-female interactions. Its earliest recorded location was in the Medici garden in Florence, where it stood until it was seized by the operai in 1495 and placed in prominent display on the ringhiera in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. In 1504, Michelangelo’s sculpture of David (Fig. 12) took Judith’s position. At the time, Francesco di Lorenzo Filarete, the herald of the Signoria, suggested this substitution because “the Judith is a deadly symbol (segno mortifero) and does not befit us whose insignia are the cross and the lily, nor is it good to have a woman kill a man…” Thus, the sculpture of a woman decapitating a man was replaced by a man decapitating a man. Judith was eventually moved to another corner of the Piazza de Signori, in the right-hand arch of the Loggia dei Lanzi. In 1554, these two decapitation scenes were joined by Cellini’s Perseus with Medusa (Fig. 13), a man decapitating a woman, which was placed in the left-hand arch of the Loggia dei Lanzi. Judith was moved to a different arch in the Loggia dei Lanzi in 1582 when it was displaced by Giovanni Bologna Rape of the Sabines (Fig. 14).At this point, the Loggia contained three powerful sculptures of gender relations: Judith is a woman overpowering a man, Perseus is a man overpowering a woman, and the Sabines are women overpowered by men. Meanwhile on the Piazza, in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, are sculptures of male interactions: Michelangelo’s David, and Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus. Judith, the only powerful woman in this group of sculptures, was repeatedly displaced and subordinated by portrayals of conquering men (Fig. 15).
Addressing the imagery of Judith from a moralizing, religious perspective, Ruskin was another art historian circa 1900 who downplayed the strength of women portrayed in art, even when necessitated by their narrative circumstances. For Ruskin, Renaissance art is thematically organized according to its compliance with the Christian canon. Therefore, when he looks at a work of art, he considers it not only how it fits in with an artist’s oeuvre, but how it effectively expresses Christian devotion as he understands it. Ruskin’s discussion of Botticelli’s Judith (Fig. 16) offers a description which is respectful to the story of Judith, concerned with her personality and motives more than her action. He claims to base his assessment of the painting on careful reading of the Book of Judith, and advises his readers to do their homework so that they too will be informed viewers, and thus will undoubtedly reach the same conclusions as he. Not only should Ruskin’s audience read the Book of Judith, but they are assigned to copy out in their own handwriting pertinent verses from the story. Ruskin wants no confusion about the meaning of the story and its heroine.
Ruskin writes that “…at first glance—you will think the figure merely a piece of fifteenth-century affectation. ‘Judith, indeed!—say rather the daughter of Herodias, at her mincingnest.’” He goes on to correct this initial reaction to Judith. “…There is somewhat more to be thought of and pictured in Judith, than painters have mostly found it in them to show you: that she is not merely the Jewish Delilah to the Assyrian Samson; but the mightiest, purest, brightest type of high passion in severe womanhood offered to our human memory. Sandro’s picture is but slight; but it is true to her, and the only one I know that is; and … you will see why he gives her that swift, peaceful motion, while you read in her face only sweet solemnity of dreaming thought.” But I question why it is appropriate that Judith should look sweet and dreamy, and, how does Botticelli’s Judith have such a significantly different expression than, for example, Mantegna’s Pembroke Judith?
Ruskin offhandedly notes, while I call attention to the fact that he found this painting just under an image of Medusa, which he takes to be by Leonardo. Is the placement of these images of powerful women significant or just chance? Within the space of three pages, Ruskin conflates an image of Judith with Medusa, Salome, and Delilah. In his standard biography of Botticelli, Horne likewise conflates this image of Judith with Salome. In speaking of influences, Horne writes that this Judith less resembles the style of Fra Filippo, and is more similar to the figures of Pollaiuolo’s tapestries. But the figure he chooses to compare Judith to is Salome, “not only in attitude, but in the whole conception of the form, proportions, and movement of the tall, alert figure…” I am willing to accept Horne’s formal comparison, but how could a Judith bear any resemblance to a Salome “in attitude?” The two women have completely antithetical attitudes—one is a hero and the other a villain. Is it that the imagery is similar, or the perception of the art historian?
For Ruskin, Botticelli’s Judith is the only acceptable presentation of a decapitating woman—the only one who looks pious and feminine, palatable to fragile masculine sensibilities. While her drapery is fluttering and “affected,” revealing to Ruskin Botticelli’s weak nature, her face displays all that is virtuous in Botticelli. Her facial expression of passive beauty compensates for the evidence of her deed and for her lascivious costume. Had her face revealed repulsion, fright, relief, nervousness, victory, or any other emotion expected of a woman in her situation, would Ruskin have admired her so much? Her expressionless visage keeps her securely in place as an unchallenging, unthinking feminine creature. Ruskin emphasizes his preference to disempower and objectify this powerful woman when he writes that she is “the idea of Jewish womanhood…grand and real as a marble statue,—possession for all ages.” Ruskin never mentions the image of Holofernes’ decapitated body (Fig. 17), evidence of Judith’s violence, painted on the reverse of this work. What Ruskin admires in Judith is that she is a beautiful object of art, not that she represents a real woman.
In Berenson’s appraisal of Botticelli’s painting, the use of line is more significant and expressive than any attempt at depicting facial expression. Berenson disagrees with Ruskin that Botticelli would have even been concerned with the subject of a painting, much less aim to portray emotions expressive of anything other than formal artistic communication. “In fact, the mere subject, and even representation in general, was so indifferent to Botticelli, that he appears almost as if haunted by the idea of communicating unembodied values of touch and movement.” Berenson holds that Botticelli’s attention to representative expression was equally unimportant in fanciful, religious, political, and allegorical images. While not specifically addressing Botticelli’s Judith as an example, Berenson would certainly maintain that Judith’s facial expression is less significant than the lines and forms of the figures, drapery, and hair in the image.
Warburg synthesizes Ruskin’s and Berenson’s opinions of Botticelli, along with a history of the portrayals of women in art, to reach another understanding of this figure. Looking at her expressive qualities both formally and as representing a specific narrative, Warburg understands Judith to be a Christian interpretation of a pagan theme. Her fluttering drapery identifies Judith as a member of a group of women throughout visual history that Warburg classifies as the Nympha or maenad (Fig. 18). His fascination with the Nympha archetype begins with an examination of the servant woman in Ghirlandaio’s Birth of St. John the Baptist (Figs. 19, 20). In his correspondence with Dutch scholar Jolles, Warburg describes his interest in this figure and other figures like her. From their first study on this character, Warburg and Jolles associate her with the type of powerful woman in art history who resists easily classifiable femininity. Jolles fantasizes about her in a letter to Warburg. “Enough, I lost my heart to her and in the days of preoccupation which followed I saw her everywhere…In many of the works of art I had always liked, I discovered something of my Nymph. My condition was between a bad dream and a fairy tale.…Sometimes she was Salome dancing with her death-dealing charm in front of the licentious tetrarch; sometimes she was Judith carrying proudly and triumphantly with a gay step the head of the murdered commander…” The female servant could be a precursor to Salome, visiting St. John the Baptist at his birth with a charger on top of her head rather than carrying his head on a charger at his death.
With these associations, Warburg attempts to contextualize images of the Nympha into a cultural background conducive to the visualization of such elusive and frenetic femininity. He suggests that Ghirlandaio’s servant, or Botticelli’s Judith, or any such image of a woman in motion, is a Christianized revision of the pagan maenad. She is the frenzied “head-hunter” controlled and sublimated by the Christian male mind into harmless femininity, by dressing her otherwise eroticized body in flowing drapery or, as in some of Mantegna’s Judiths, by painting her in grisaille. The idea of a powerful woman is strong enough to pervade visual imagery throughout art history, but threatening enough for artists to develop these tactics to keep her power under control. Artists objectify and contain these frightening women within their art.
In images such as Mantegna’s Dublin Judith, the artist harnesses his anxiety with the subject matter by thoroughly objectifying it. The strength of pagan forces, the fascination with the maenad figure, is pervasive and beckoning, yet at the same time, threatening and taboo. Through the use of grisaille, the artist denies any semblance of reality in the art work, and reinforces and reassures that the painting is in fact just a man-made object.
Gombrich elucidates Warburg’s understanding of this artistic dilemma. “Unless the artist handles these ‘memories’ with care and keeps them at a safe distance, he will be overpowered by the intense life they radiate. One way in which Renaissance artists kept these dangerous charges in the proper sphere was through the use of grisaille, the deliberate detachment of the classical quotation from realistic evocation. By tempering any imminent threat of these strong women through the denial of their humanness, artists such as Mantegna could Christianize and moralize the subject of feminine power. For, in these cases, it is not a woman who conquers a man, but a work of art demonstrating religious devotion. The maenad is not in the act of frenzied murder, but is a static sculpturesque form frozen in her male-designed pose.
Warburg identifies these maenads by their characteristic drapery. Generally, nakedness in art is used as a sign of passive beauty, as in typical images of Venus, or as a display of physical strength, as in common depictions of David. How, then, would a strong woman’s nude body look? Artists wrap these nude female bodies in especially stylized clothing, thereby solving/avoiding this seeming paradox.
Addressing Warburg’s thoughts on power and nudity in art, Gombrich writes, “They showed the agony and the passion of man in all its fascinating and fearful nakedness. That same nakedness was experienced as beauty in the liberated gods returning from their transformation into monstrous demons; yet it was also a threat in the images of frenzy and aggression.” This statement suggests that men may be depicted nude to show their heroic passion or fortitude. But when coupled with images of frenzy and aggression, adjectives Warburg consistently applies to his maenads and Nymphas, nudity poses a threat. Hence, these “head-hunting women” are clothed, but their drapery is unstable, blowing in some imaginary wind, emphasizing the threatening nudity of their bodies beneath their clothes.
Gombrich continues to discuss Warburg’s idea of the fearful nakedness in images of frenzy and aggression. “We have seen that the idea of this threat was identified in Warburg’s mind with certain motifs. The emphasis on the ‘head-hunting woman’ reveals the subsoil of fear that underlies Warburg’s fascination with the ‘Nympha,’ but the same ambivalence…may also account for his identification with Perseus, the hero who brandishes the head of Medusa.” Here we have an art historian who is fascinated with and afraid of the decapitating female character in art, and identifies with and heroicizes the male figure who is able to decapitate such a woman. His stance on the issue is rather more clearly presented than those of other art historians circa 1900 I have discussed, but in the end, I believe that their goals are all similar. Berenson, Kristeller, Ruskin, Horne, and Warburg alike are disturbed by the power possessed by female characters like Judith, as are the male artists who depicted them, and therefore they seek, with visual or verbal tools, to disempower these women.
I would like to return now to my earlier question as to whether or not Freudian theories could be demonstrated or revealed in the writings of art historians around the year 1900, even though they themselves were not yet exposed to Freudian psychoanalysis. I hope that I have pointed to areas in the writings of this largely formalist group of art historians which indicates that issues of gender and sexuality were significant factors in what they chose to address and avoid in their studies. For example, discussions of Salome circa 1900 are limited to the most brief analyses of Renaissance works. And yet, the idea of Salome was raised in conjunction with so many images of other strong women, as I demonstrated in my essay. Indeed, how could these art historians avoid the subject of Salome at this time, with imagery of her surrounding them throughout popular media? Why was Salome a safe subject for popular culture around the year 1900, but not academic inquiry?
Art historians since the theories of Freud and his followers became widely known have looked at the art of the Renaissance with new objectives. Mary Garrard reads the history of depictions of Judith as masculine objectification of feminine power, as opposed to the Judith paintings by the female artist Artemisia Gentileschi, which she understands to be differently constructed so as to empower the female protagonists in the image. Madlyn Millner Kahr reinterprets imagery of Delilah as revealing the male fear of castration in her article, which is, incidentally, reprinted in a book on feminist art history co-edited by Garrard. Laurie Schneider’s considerations of images of decapitation utilize Freudian techniques to explain masculine anxieties and erotic interests implicit in these works. Her articles have engendered much response, and have been printed in a journal established by Sigmund Freud himself. Perhaps not coincidentally, these writers who reconsider images of strong women using psychoanalytic and feminist theories are themselves women.
So, I will now attempt to summarize the historiography I have established, beginning around the year 1900. First, we see a group of male art historians writing about male artists, carefully choosing how and what to write about portrayals of women. Then, Freud, who is male, and his followers, particularly Horney, who is female, discuss sexuality and sublimation to arguably account for the masculine inspiration of these images. Following, a group of female art historians reinterpret images of women as done by mostly male artists to determine attitudes revealed about gender roles. I am last in line, a female art historian discussing male art historians who write about male artists depicting women. It is my hope that this process has not only clarified our understanding of these images, but more importantly, that I have explained certain ways in which we have come to understand these images the way we do.

Bibliography

Barb, A. A. “Diva Matrix: A faked gnostic intaglio in the possession of P. P. Rubens and the iconology of a symbol.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 16, nos. 3–4, (1953): 193–238. Studies the imagery of the decapitated Medusa head as a symbol of the mother goddess.

Barelli, Emma. “Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes: An Extreme Moral Instance: A ‘Response’ to Laurie Schneider’s Article (G.B.A., Feb. 1976).” Gazette des Beaux-Arts (October 1978): 147–48. Sees a connection in the attitudes of Judith and Holofernes. Argues that Donatello’s Judith acts out of lustful passion; she is not the purely devout and chaste woman commonly deemed appropriate for the subject.

Berenson, Bernard. The Italian Painters of the Renaissance. London, Phaidon Publishers, Inc., 1952, 1953. First published between 1894–1907. Describes artists’ styles as they fit a personality, not a painting. Therefore, an entry on any given artist contains generalizations about how the artist achieves form, composition, expressiveness, and the like, but rarely uses particular works of art as examples to analyze.

———. Lorenzo Lotto: An Essay in Constructive Art Criticism. London: George Bell and Sons, 1901. This monograph reveals Berenson’s own biases regarding representation of women in art.

———. The Study and Criticism of Italian Art. Second Series. London: George Bell and Sons, 1902. Contains essays on Mantegna’s Judith drawings and on Alessio Baldovinetti’s Madonna.

Bergmann, Martin S. “Love That Follows upon Murder in Works of Art.” American Imago 33, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 98–101. Addresses the difference in the homoerotic nature of the David story as opposed to the heterosexual eroticism in the Judith story.

The Book of Judith. From the Bible Apocrypha. Tells the story of Judith saving the Jewish people by deceiving the leader of their assailants with a false show of feminine charm.

Duncan, Ellen. “The National Gallery of Ireland.” The Burlington Magazine 10 (October 1906–March 1907): 7–23. Discusses masterpieces of the collection, including Mantegna’s Judith and Holofernes. Considers Judith’s expression to be superb.

Freud, Sigmund. “Medusa’s Head” [1922]. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 18. Translated and edited by James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, 273–74. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. Considers the image of Medusa, and in general, all images of decapitation, to represent the male fear of castration.

Friedman, Mira. “The Metamorphoses of Judith.” Jewish Art, 1987. Judith is always depicted heroically in Jewish art, but when transformed into a subject of Christian art, her iconography is confused with that of Salome, and she becomes one of many sinful women in art.

Frizzoni, Gustavo. “Certain Studies by Cesare da Sesto in Relation to His Pictures.” The Burlington Magazine 26, nos. 139–144 (October 1914–March 1915): 187–94. Discusses drawings of Judith and Holofernes, Herodias and John the Baptist, and David and Goliath.

Fry, Roger. “Aubrey Beardsley’s Drawings.” Anthenæum, 1904. Reprinted in Vision and Design. New York: Meridian Books, 1956. Originally published 1920. Describes Beardsley’s Salome illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s play. Sees the influence of Pollaiuolo for his use of line and Mantegna for his depictions of depravity. Calls Beardsley the “Fra Angelico of Satanism.”

———. “Exhibition of Old masters at the Grafton Galleries—II.” The Burlington Magazine 20 (October 1911–March 1912): 161–67. Examines a Judith and Holofernes for compositional and detail qualities to ascertain its attribution to Titian.

———. “Giotto.” Monthly Review, 1901. Reprinted in Vision and Design. New York: Meridian Books, 1956. Originally published 1920. Addresses the formal and expressive qualities in Giotto’s painting. Considers the psychological expression in Giotto’s Salome.

———. “On a Painting by Antonio da Solario.” The Burlington Magazine 7 (April–September 1905): 75–76. Attributes a painting of the head of John the Baptist to Antonio da Solario, a previously unknown artist. Addresses the lack of skill with which the painting was rendered; not the subject of the work.

Garrard, Mary D. Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Chapter on Judith gives a feminist reading of the Judith narrative in visual art from the Medieval through the Baroque period.

Gombrich, E. H. Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography. London: The Warburg Institute, 1970. Addresses Warburg’s study of the Nympha motif throughout art history, of which Judith, Salome, and Delilah fall into the category. Also speaks of Warburg’s fascination with the Perseus legend. Unlike his contemporaries who are concerned with the stylistic, formal, and individual qualities about art and artists, Warburg looks at art as indicators of an entire culture.

Hill, G. F. “The Whitcombe Greene Plaquettes.” The Burlington Magazine 30, nos. 166–71 (January–June 1917): 103–10. Studies a plaquette of Judith derived from Mantegna’s paintings of the subject.

Horne, Herbert P. Botticelli: Painter of Florence. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Originally published as Alessandro Filipepi, Commonly Called Sandro Botticelli, Painter of Florence. George Bell and Sons, 1908. Gives formal descriptions of Botticelli’s Judith paintings. Propounds that these paintings are influenced by Pollaiuolo’s tapestries of Salome. Ranks Botticelli’s paintings according to their inventiveness, linear qualities, and composition.

Horney, Karen. “The Dread of Woman: Observations on a Specific Difference in the Dread Felt by Men and by Women Respectively for the Opposite Sex.” The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 13, part 3 (July 1932): 348–60. Explains the recurrence of man-conquering women in art as evidence of men controlling their dread of women by objectifying it.

Janson, H. W. The Sculpture of Donatello. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. The section on Donatello’s Judith reveals the statue as a symbol of civic pride, an object of political metaphor for republics prevailing over monarchies. Includes sources of the first writings on this sculpture. Janson also writes on Donatello’s Feast of Herod, speaking of it as an demonstration of spatial and perspectival rendering.

Kahr, Madlyn Millner. “Delilah.” In Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, 119–45. New York: Harper and Row, 1982. Originally published in The Art Bulletin 54, September 1972, 282–99. Studies why the betrayal of Samson by Delilah is a favorite subject in Renaissance art. Using Freudian techniques, analyzes how Delilah embodies the male fear of castration.

Kleinschmidt, Hans J. “Discussion of Laurie Schneider’s Paper.” American Imago 33, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 92–97. Considers the viability of castration anxiety being inherent in images of decapitation. As an outsider to art history (Kleinschmidt is a medical doctor), he recognizes his own interest in art stemming from subject rather than form.

Kristeller, Paul. Andrea Mantegna. Translated by S. Arthur Strong. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1901. Includes images of Samson and Delilah and Judith and Holofernes in chapter on mythological and allegorical pictures, although they represent biblical stories. Gives only cursory attention to Mantegna’s numerous Judith paintings.

Lightbown, Ronald. Sandro Botticelli: Life and Work. New York: Abbeville Press, 1989. Examines Botticelli’s Judith paintings.

Lippmann, F. W. “A Bronze Statuette Attributed to Benvenuto Cellini.” The Burlington Magazine 16 (October 1909–March 1910): 40. Attributes a sculpture of Minerva to Cellini on the basis of comparison to his Perseus.

Loeser, Charles. “Minerva Bronze Attributed to Cellini.” The Burlington Magazine 16 (October 1909–March 1910): 165. Attempts to re-attribute a sculpture of Minerva (see article by Lippmann) to Jacopo Sansovino.

Looper, Matthew G. “Political Messages in the Medici Palace Gardens.” In press, Journal of Garden History. Describes the original placement of Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes, and its implications in Florentine politics.

Martineau, Jane, editor. Andrea Mantegna. London: Royal Academy of Arts, and New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992. Comprehensive and most recent catalog of Mantegna’s work.

Miller, Heidi. “Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes (1456–1457): Expression and Reception.” Unpublished paper. Gives a history of the sculptures placement and reception in Florence.

Panofsky, Erwin. Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes In the Art of the Renaissance. New York: Harper and Row, 1939, 1972. Addresses the conflation of images of Judith and Salome in Christian art. Determines that the sword is solely an attribute of Judith, but that the charger may be used for Judith as well as Salome.

Pressly, Nancy L. Salome: La belle dame sans merci. San Antonio, Texas: San Antonio Museum Association, 1983. Discusses the history of representations of Salome in art, primarily focusing on the turn of the twentieth century.

Purdie, Edna. The Story of Judith in German and English Literature. Paris: Librarie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1927. Traces the theme of Judith throughout literary history and questions why the subject is both popular and pervading.

Ruskin, John. Mornings in Florence: Being Simple Studies of Christian Art for English Travellers. Fourth Edition. London: George Allen, Sunnyside, Orpington, 1894. This book primarily is concerned with describing and explaining the expressive qualities of Giotto’s work. In addition, Ruskin spends considerable time discussing Botticelli’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes, which he considers to be the most accurate representations of Judith’s character.

Samuels, Ernest, with the collaboration of Jayne Newcomer Samuels. Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Legend. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987. This biography of Berenson accounts for some of his attitudes regarding women that are manifested in his writing.

Schleif, Corine. “The Roles of Women in Challenging the Canon of ‘Great Master’ Art History.” Unpublished paper, 1995. Describes the patriarchal structure of the standard art history, and how women have interjected their concerns into that pre-organized context. Calls for a reworking of the narrative of the story of Renaissance art history, but offers no alternatives.

Schneider, Laurie. “Donatello and Caravaggio: The Iconography of Decapitation.” American Imago 33, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 76–91. Discusses the homoerotic qualities found in images of men decapitating men—Donatello’s and Caravaggio’s Davids.

———. “Some Neoplatonic Elements in Donatello’s Gattamelata and Judith and Holofernes.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts (February 1976): 41–48. Considers both of Donatello’s sculptures as protectors of their cities. The decapitated Medusa head depicted on the Gattamelata’s armor offers a classical idea of protection, and is conflated with the iconography of Eros. She reads Judith and Holofernes as a metaphor of humility conquering extravagance, or the city republic defeating monarchy. Associates Bacchanalian references on pedestal with the downfall of Holoferne , and by association, that of tyrannical government.

Shearman, John. Only Connect…: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Analyzes the reception of Cellini’s Perseus and its placement in Florence as a replacement of other sculptures of decapitation or male-female interactions.

Wilde, Oscar. Salome. Illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley. Translated by Lord Alfred Douglas. New York: Dover Publications, 1967. Originally published 1894. This one-act play and illustrations by two of the most renowned creative spirits of the time represent the extreme popularity of the subject circa 1900.

Wind, Edgar. “Donatello’s Judith: A Symbol of ‘Sanctimonia.’” Journal of the Warburg Institute 1, no. 1 (1937): 62–63. Associates Judith with Humilitas and Holofernes with Luxuria and Superbia.

Illustrations

1. Aubrey Beardsley, Design from “the Studio”—The Climax, illustration for Oscar Wilde’s Salome

2. Gustave Moreau, The Apparition (Dance of Salome), Fogg Art Museum, Boston

3. Lorenzo Lotto, Messer Marsilio and His Bride, Prado, Madrid

4. Alessio Baldovinetti, Madonna and Child, Louvre, Paris

5. Francesco Morone, Samson and Delilah, Poldi-Pezzoli Museum, Milan

6. Andrea Mantegna, Judith and Holofernes, Uffizi, Florence

7. Andrea Mantegna, Judith and Holofernes, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

8. Andrea Mantegna, Judith and Holofernes, National Gallery, Dublin

9. Andrea Mantegna, David and Goliath

10. Andrea Mantegna, Samson and Delilah, National Gallery, London

11. Donatello, Judith and Holofernes, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence

12. Michelangelo, David (copy), Palazzo Vecchio, Florence

13. Benvenuto Cellini, Perseus and Medusa, Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence

14. Giovanni Bologna, The Rape of the Sabine Woman, Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence

15. David, Perseus, and Hercules and Cacus, view from the Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence

16. Sandro Botticelli, Judith and Holofernes, Uffizi, Florence

17. Sandro Botticelli, Holofernes Found Dead in his Tent, Uffizi, Florence

18. Aby Warburg, screen depicting images of the “Nympha”

19. Ghirlandaio, Birth of St. John the Baptist, Santa Maria Novella, Florence

20. Ghirlandaio, Birth of St. John the Baptist, detail of servant “Nympha,” Santa Maria Novella, Florence

The Weak Never Started (and it never ended either)
The perpetuation of western art in a Western discipline

In my discussion, I will analyze the image and implications of The Weak Never Started, a western painting in the University of Texas Art Museum from the collection of C. R. Smith. On a broader level, I will talk about the genre of western painting and its tenuous status in the scheme of Western art, art history, and art collecting. But already, I must backtrack and define my terms. Studying western art immediately leads to the confusion of differentiating western, as in cowboys & Indians, and Western, as in the European tradition. During my talk I will generally be referring to the former, but when I do employ the broader definition, the capitalized Western, I will try to make the distinction clear.
Also, in keeping with the standard language to discuss western painting, I will use the term Indian when referring to Native Americans. The nineteenth century western genre generally objectifies and typifies Indians, keeping them securely in place as the “other,” and never recognizing their true Americanness. This inherently politically incorrect context prohibits the use of the modern preferred vocabulary.
So now, without even having looked at the main focus of my paper, The Weak Never Started, I already have stated reasons to object to a statement in the Introduction to the first catalog of paintings in the C. R. Smith collection. Nicolai Cikovsky writes, “It is almost pointless to comment on this, or any other…paintings of the West, for the simple reason that the works largely speak for themselves.” (1 LEFT) But this painting does not have a voice of its own, and it is my goal to speak to the issues implied by and inspired by The Weak.
J. M. Boundy’s The Weak Never Started , painted in 1861, is a copy of a copy. Judging from certain formal elements in the painting and from the likelihood of having ready access to a print easier than an original work, it seems certain that Boundy copied The Weak Never Started from this lithograph by Leopold Grozelier, published by J. H. Bufford, as On the Prairie (1 RIGHT). The original painting designed with the same specific formal traits is Carl Wimar’s Attack on an Emigrant Train (2 RIGHT), painted in 1856.
Boundy and Grozelier are not the only artists who found a source for their art in Wimar’s Attack on an Emigrant Train. The image was directly copied and its theme widely adopted by numerous artists in the nineteenth century, including Wimar’s teacher Emanuel Leutze (2LEFT). The work also influenced Felix Darley (3 LEFT) and Thomas Hill (4 LEFT)for their paintings of white-Indian confrontations on the frontier.
Artists have repeatedly used the narrative message of the Attack on an Emigrant Train because of its effective incorporation of unifying concerns of white Americans. The Attack addresses the issues of Manifest Destiny in a reassuring, supportive way for the white Christian expansionist.
In this image, the band of Indians takes on the role of savage antagonists. The painting adopts the white point of view, ignoring the fact that the Indians could be seen as defending their land from what they consider an invasion. Such acts of aggression were to be interpreted as attacks on the progress of civilization itself.
The Attack on an Emigrant Train adeptly answers the American desire to see itself as a rising nation, yet it does so not by mirroring reality, but by creating a myth of the pioneer experience. It was more important to show the essence rather than to record facts of the pioneer saga. From the wagons themselves to the cloth of the Indian attire, the painting exhibits no evidence of first-hand exposure to actual western accouterments. By the 1840s, Indians had adopted the use of the rifle, but here they are shown using primitive weapons. Furthermore, Indians picked their targets carefully; it was extremely rare for Indians to attack a long wagon train like the one depicted in Wimar’s image.
In fact, Wimar did not paint the Attack from direct observation. Rather, a passage in a book written by a French author inspired the painting, Wimar himself was not even in America when he made the painting, having lived in Germany for most of his life. The Attack is the product of European imagination—even its reinterpretation into lithography was done by a French artist—yet it was presented in a narrative, documentary style and adopted by Americans as the quintessential reality of the American frontier experience.
The European imagination was not only interested in learning about the American frontier, but in appropriating the manners of frontier life. Upon his arrival in the United States, the young Karl Wimar himself changed his name to the anglicized Charles or Carl, and altered the pronunciation of his surname from the German sounding “Vee-mar” to “Why-mer” with a distinct American accent. He adopted a manner of dress and demeanor that made him appear as an Indian, (5 LEFT), was referred to as “the Indian painter” during his schooling in Düsseldorf, and gave his daughter the Indian name Winona.
There is an ongoing discussion in writings about American art as to what extent it relies upon the European tradition. When attempting to define American art as a whole, the majority of art historians ignore the western genre. In The History of American Painting, Isham refuses to discuss American art with western subjects because he considers it to be of such low quality. “Their worst work, which is far commoner than their best, no sympathy can save… Even at their best they lacked the indefinable quality of style, inseparable from great painting.”
Writers who focus on western art tend to analyze the work for its narrative message and ignore its stylistic qualities. To a large degree, this tendency derives from the desire to understand western art as historical documents about America’s past and ideology. Isham’s dismissal of even the most renowned western painters as illustrators and not artists shows in what light western painting is often viewed—as documentation, historical truth, ethnographic study, geological report, or other factual representation. Western art is therefore often judged by how accurately it portrays details of frontier existence.
But art critics, ethnologists, and historians alike have historically criticized the Attack and its copies for not paying attention to factual detail. This leaves me to decipher the popularity of the Attack on an Emigrant Train. Wherein lies its appeal? The Attack clearly spells out for its American audience, in no uncertain terms, that the American spirit will prevail, that the white American family is stronger than the Indian, the trials of an arduous journey, or nature itself. Its academic style aids the Attack in communicating its message as undeniable truth. Its repetition by countless artists cements its reputation as the visualized American past. To nineteenth-century viewers, the Attack on an Emigrant Train displays not only the ideal American scene, but the true American scene. They accept it as reality because of its repeatedly reinforced narrative, precise and straightforward academic style, and finally, because it conformed to the progressive American self-image.
The Weak Never Started came from the collection of C. R. Smith (3RIGHT). Smith was a typical collector of western images—he was not interested in western paintings for any artistic merits, but as signifiers of information from a romanticized era in American mythology. His collection spans 150 years but the paintings are all stylistically quite similar. (6 LEFT). He referred to the pieces in his collection as “things” and took advice on acquisitions from other businessmen or his celebrity friend Will Rogers rather than arts experts. Smith and his western collecting peers have similar attitudes about their acquisitions—they buy what they like without regard for aesthetic quality, but with copious funds and business savvy.
As western painting spans such a long era—from the mid-nineteenth century to the present—and does not neatly fit into stylistic categories, art historians often shy away from studying it. Even in the original catalog of C. R. Smith’s collection, aesthetics is a forbidden subject of discussion. Nicolai Cikovsky states in his introduction that it is “pointless to discuss the aesthetic merits of these works—not only is it merely beside the point, but it violates the spirit in which they were conceived and frame of mind received.” For the main part, these factors leave western art to study by specialists in fields other than art history, such as American history or ethnography. What results is an unspoken refusal to admit western art into the scheme of Western painting.
Although traditional western painting perhaps does not lend itself to analysis in the standard art historical methods, it still holds an undeniably valuable place in art history. The Weak Never Started (10LEFT)is certainly a poorly executed work as far as connoisseurship is concerned in the scheme of Western painting, and in western painting as well. But regardless of its aesthetic failings, the Weak is an icon of nineteenth-century American ideology. It is the quintessential frontier image, and provides a glimpse into the values, goals, and beliefs of the world in which it was created.

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

The University of Texas at Austin
August 1998

Acknowledgements

A number of people were crucial to my sanity and coherence during the writing of this hair-do. First of all, my advisor Ann Reynolds encouraged and calmed me throughout the entire ordeal. Her hair grew several inches while I wrote this, and it looks great. My second reader, Richard Shiff, and the other professors who supported this hairbrained scheme: Susan Rather, Adam Cohen, and the goddess and saint Linda Montano, all look fabulous in wigs. I thank them for appreciating the coexistence of wit and academia. Fellow thesis-writer Stephen Varnado gave me excellent feedback on an early draft, for which I am grateful. Not art historians, but gifted reporters, Robert Tharp and Joshua Fischer read and gave useful comments on individual chapters. The omniscience and laughter of Gwen Barton made her the rock of stability of the art history department and a healthy reality check for friends and fans. Those who distracted me from the single-minded purpose of research and writing deserve huge hugs and kisses for reminding me to have fun and play. Special thanks go to my parents who still call me the Short Blonde Kid even though I’ve been none of those things for some time now; my sister Dr. Jill, who’s already gone through this and could commiserate; Ted Cho, who is my Austin family; and the gang of Rachael Shannon, Sharon Comunale, Tom Holmes, and Alan Tull, for reminding me to keep the art in art history. My family and friends are the silliest and smartest people around. Some of them even let me give them haircuts.

August 13, 1998

Abstract

Off the Top of Your Head:
Hair as Subject and Medium in Art at the
End of the 20th Century

Melinda Hillary Klayman, M.A.
The University of Texas at Austin, 1998

Supervisor: Ann Reynolds

This thesis investigates the connotations of hair and how artists exploit those associations to address topical issues in art. Hair takes on different meanings depending on texture, color, cleanliness, and context—its (dis)association with the human body. Through interrelated discussions, this thesis reveals various methods and meanings of hair as a subject and medium in contemporary art. This thesis addresses three themes associated with hair—race, gender, and body consciousness, using as case studies the work of three artists—David Hammons, Janine Antoni, and Mona Hatoum, respectively. The common strand that braids these artists together is their use of hair as a talisman of power to confront and transcend social and physical boundaries.

Table of Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Chapter 1 Introduction 1
Chapter 2 Hair as a Signifier of Racial Difference: David Hammons’s Hair Pieces 14
Chapter 3 Hair, Fetishism, and Feminism: Janine Antoni’s Loving Care 36
Chapter 4 The Physicality of Disembodied Hair: Mona Hatoum’s Recollection 59
Chapter 5 Conclusion 77
Illustrations 82
Bibliography 127
Vita 135

List of Illustrations
Figure 1: Advertisement. “Sassoon Care. For Hair That’s Simply Moving.” 82
Figure 2: Advertisement. “Announcing freedom from unwanted hair…” 83
Figure 3: Advertisement. “Discover how hair transplants can help you.” 84
Figure 4: Anonymous, Memento mori: Hair bracelets, second half of the nineteenth century. 1 x 2 1/4 in. (Hair, 25.) 85
Figure 5: David Hammons, Rocky, 1990. Rock, hair, wire. 37 x 13 x 13 in. Jack Tilton Gallery, New York. (Dan Cameron, 68.) 86
Figure 6: David Hammons, Fragment of the Milky Way, 1992. Photo Jules Allan. (Parkett 31, 31.) 87
Figure 7: David Hammons, Haircut, 1992. (Parkett 31, 42.) 88
Figure 8: David Hammons, Esquire, 1990. Hair, stone, railroad tie. 45 x 9 x 5 in. Installation view at “Rousing the Rubble,” P. S. 1 Museum, 1990. (Rousing the Rubble, 63.) 89
Figure 9: Constantin Brancusi, Beginning of the World, c. 1920. Marble, metal, stone. 30 x 20 x 20 in. Dallas Museum of Art. (Dallas Museum of Art, 130.) 90
Figure 10: FBI Wanted Poster: Angela Yvonne Davis, 1970. (Angela Davis, 170.) 91
Figure 11: Fashion layout, Vibe magazine, 1994. Photograph Albert Watson. (Angela Davis, 172.) 92
Figure 12: David Hammons, How Ya Like Me Now?, 1988. Tin, plywood, sledgehammers, Lucky Strike cigarette wrapper, American flag. Installation view from “Rousing the Rubble,” San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, 1991. (In the Hood, 13.) 93
Figure 13: David Hammons, Bag Lady in Flight, 1982/1990. Shopping bags, grease, hair. 48 x 113 x 5 in. (In the Hood, 15.) 94
Figure 14: Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (no. 2), 1912. Oil on canvas. 57 1/2 x 35 1/16 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art. (Marcel Duchamp, 257.) 95
Figure 15: David Hammons, Injustice Case, 1970. Body print. 40 1/2 x 62 1/2 in. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (Rousing the Rubble, 22.) 96
Figure 16: David Hammons creating a body print. (Rousing the Rubble, 10–11.) 97
Figure 17: David Hammons, Higher Goals, 1983. Fifty-five foot tall basketball poles. 121st Street and Frederick Douglas Boulevard, Harlem. (Rousing the Rubble, 32.) 98
Figure 18: David Hammons, House of the Future, 1991. “Places with a Past,” Spoleto Festival, Charleston, South Carolina. (Dan Cameron, 71.) 99
Figure 19: Mimi Smith, Steel Wool Peignoir, 1966. Steel wool, nylon, lace. 59 x 29 x 8 in. Collection the artist. (The Power of Feminist Art, 80.) 100
Figure 20: David Hammons, Untitled, 1992. Copper, wire, hair, stone. 60 in. high. Whitney Museum of American Art. (Abject Art, 78.) 101
Figure 21: Janine Antoni, Loving Care, 1992–. Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, Spain, 1995. Photograph Jordi Calafell. (Wadsworth pamphlet, n.p.) 102
Figure 22: Janine Antoni, Loving Care, 1992–. Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, 1992. Photograph Prudence Cumming Associates Ltd. (postcard) 103
Figure 23: Janine Antoni, Loving Care, 1992–. Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, 1992. Photograph Prudence Cumming Associates Ltd. (Wadsworth pamphlet, n.p.) 104
Figure 24: Janine Antoni, Loving Care, 1992–. Performance and photographer unknown. (Slip of the Tongue, 25.) 105
Figure 25: Hans Namuth, Jackson Pollock, 1950. Photograph. (L’atelier de Jackson Pollock, n.p.) 106
Figure 26: Janine Antoni, Chocolate Gnaw, 1992. 600 pounds of chocolate before biting, marble pedestal. (Slip of the Tongue, 9.) 107
Figure 27: Hannah Wilke, Super-t-art and “Beware of Fascist Feminism,” 1974. (RoseLee Goldberg, 175.) 108
Figure 28: Yves Klein, Anthropometries, 1960. Nude models, blue paint, canvas. (RoseLee Goldberg, 146.) 109
Figure 29: Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Inside, 1973. Performance at Wadsworth Atheneum. Photo courtesy the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Inc. (Wadsworth pamphlet, n.p.) 110
Figure 30: Mona Hatoum, Recollection, 1995. Hair balls, strands of hair hung from the ceiling, wooden loom with woven hair, table, soap. Dimensions variable. Installation Beguinage St. Elizabeth, Kortrijk, Belgium. Collection De Vleeshal, Middelburg, the Netherlands. (Mona Hatoum, Phaidon, 92.) 111
Figure 31: Mona Hatoum, Recollection, 1995. Hair balls, strands of hair hung from the ceiling, wooden loom with woven hair, table, soap. Dimensions variable. Installation Beguinage St. Elizabeth, Kortrijk, Belgium. Collection De Vleeshal, Middelburg, the Netherlands. (Mona Hatoum, Phaidon, 104.) 112
Figure 32: Mona Hatoum, Recollection, 1995. Hair balls, strands of hair hung from the ceiling, wooden loom with woven hair, table, soap. Dimensions variable. Installation Beguinage St. Elizabeth, Kortrijk, Belgium. Collection De Vleeshal, Middelburg, the Netherlands. (Mona Hatoum, Phaidon, 101.) 113
Figure 33: Mona Hatoum, Recollection, 1995. Hair balls, strands of hair hung from the ceiling, wooden loom with woven hair, table, soap. Dimensions variable. Installation Beguinage St. Elizabeth, Kortrijk, Belgium. Collection De Vleeshal, Middelburg, the Netherlands. (Mona Hatoum, Phaidon, 103.) 114
Figure 34: Mona Hatoum, Corps étranger/Foreign Body, 1994. Video installation with cylindrical wooden structure, video projector, video player, amplifier, four speakers. 350 x 300 x 300 cm. Collection Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. (Mona Hatoum, Phaidon, 72.) 115
Figure 35: Mona Hatoum, Corps étranger/Foreign Body, 1994. Video installation with cylindrical wooden structure, video projector, video player, amplifier, four speakers. 350 x 300 x 300 cm. Collection Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. (Mona Hatoum, Phaidon, 143.) 116
Figure 36: Richard Artschwager, Hair Sculpture—Shallow Recess Box, 1969. (Vogel Collection, 80.) 117
Figure 37: David Hammons; Foreground: recreation of untitled 1981 work, 1990. Hair, rubber bands, popcorn, eggs, and wire. On wall: Flight Fantasy, 1980. Records, hair, plaster. Placed over refabrication of Lady with Bones, 1983. Shopping bags, grease, rib bones. Installation at P.S. 1, 1990. Photograph Dawoud Bey. (Nancy Princenthal, 79.) 118
Figure 38: David Hammons, Don’t Follow Her Smile, 1993. Wire, hair, two teardrop prisms on stenciled wall. Installation at “David Hammons: Hometown,” Illinois State Museum, 1993. (In the Hood, 44.) 119
Figure 39: David Hammons, Nap Tapestry, 1978. Hair and plexiglass. Collection A. C. Hudgins. (Yardbird Suite, 25.) 120
Figure 40: Janine Antoni, Deficit, 1991. Office furniture, fabric, hair. 42 1/2 x 58 1/2 x 64 in. Courtesy Sandra Gering Gallery, New York. (Hair, 41.) 121
Figure 41: Janine Antoni, Butterfly Kisses (detail), 1992. CoverGirl Thick Lash ® mascara on paper. 22 1/8 x 15 in. (left panel). Collection Susan and Michael Hort. (Slip of the Tongue, 27.) 122
Figure 42: Mona Hatoum, Hair Necklace, 1995. Hair, wood, and leather. Bust: 12 1/4 x 8 1/2 x 6 2/3. Collection Eileen and Peter Norton, Santa Monica. Photograph Edward Woodman. (Mona Hatoum, Chicago, 46.) 123
Figure 43: Mona Hatoum, Jardin Pubic, 1993. Painted wrought iron, was, pubic hair. 88.5 x 44 cm. (Mona Hatoum, Phaidon, 25.) 124
Figure 44: Mona Hatoum, Van Gogh’s Back, 1995. Color photograph. 50 x 38 cm. Collection Tate Gallery, London. (Mona Hatoum, Phaidon, 75.) 125
Figure 45: Mona Hatoum, Pull, 1995. 2-hour video performance. Künstlerwerkstatt, Munich. (Mona Hatoum, Phaidon, 74.) 126

1
Introduction

When I was young I had long stick-straight pale blonde hair. When I hit puberty, it gradually turned darker and curlier until I finally looked like the rest of my family and was no longer the “shiksa daughter.” Hair has always been important to me.
Mine was beautiful. Long, wavy, and sunstreaked, my hair was a great source of pride for me as a teenager, and I resented not winning the “best hair” category in my high school yearbook. I dyed a streak purple as a rebellious gesture. My hair defined my identity, constructed my self-esteem, and communicated my thoughts.
People were always complimenting me, “You have such gorgeous hair; I want it.” So I gave it to them. I saved up clippings and strands that collected in my hair brush for months until I filled a dozen jars with “Genuine Melinda Hair.” I signed and numbered each and gave them to people as gifts. I was surprised and amused with their reactions, which invariably expressed disgust. What had been so desirable on my head was rendered dirty and disturbing when disembodied and displayed as jarred specimens.
In my early twenties, I cut my waist-length tresses down to a pixie crop cut. The new look completely altered my social interactions. Suddenly I looked older, more sophisticated, and tougher. Despite the same wardrobe, mannerisms, and personality, my appearance no longer communicated “California Valley Girl,” but now “New York Sophisticate.” People I knew treated me differently, and new people were likely to approach me. My new short hair opened avenues for experimentation. I played with different hair colors—I needed to find out first hand if blondes really do have more fun, if redheads are wild, and if raven locks would make me mysterious and seductive. I toyed with wigs—my favorites were a mass of Marilyn Monroe-inspired platinum curls and a large black Angela Davis-style afro. With every new look I discovered a new identity, a new stimulus for outside response. It amazed me that a simple hairstyle alteration could influence my status and identity so directly, when in every new look, I was still the same young, white, privileged American woman.
Recently, I’ve noticed a number of gray hairs on my head. I look forward to experiencing interactions as a mature woman. I guarantee that people’s reactions will vary depending on how gray I become, whether or not I dye my hair, if I allow a line of gray roots to be seen underneath the dye, if I wear the classic helmet-head coiffure, or if I grow my gray hair long and stringy…and I plan to test each option.
The more I think about hair, the more symbolism I see in it everywhere I look. Goldilocks’s youthful purity and innocence is reflected in the blondeness that is her namesake. Compare Heidi’s straight blonde braids with Pippi Longstocking’s curly red braids as indicators of their respectively sweet and wild personalities. From an early age, children are taught that hair is a malleable constructor of identity when they play with toys like the “Play-Doh Fuzzy Pumper Barber Shop” and the myriad of Barbie hair toys. What kind of society creates these toys, makes a body part into an expressive and identifying tool? Hair is integral to our lives, to the ways we present ourselves.
In the business to market the ideal human form, contemporary Western advertising and health propaganda set standards for the acceptable presentation of hair (figures 1–3). Advertisements obviously fill our minds with hair propaganda, focusing on a hair ideal and implying that anyone whose hair is not thick, soft, and flowing is flawed. The vast majority of human beings fall short of the criteria for ideal hair—which means that they can either live with the shame of their imperfection, or rebel against the prescribed hair aesthetic with willful pride, or even strive to change the general perception of a preexisting ideal. Advertising condemns dirty hair, too little or too much hair, manipulating consumers to buy hair products as they literally buy into the hair ideal. Fitting into the hair ideal also elicits problems of status and identity. Wearing perfect hair means bearing an object of desire—it renders its owner objectified and potentially fetishized, which may be at odds with a person’s greater concerns. And if the ideal hair is obtained artificially through chemical processing, does that imply shame or dishonesty in its wearer?
I must now make the shameful admission that I have discovered on my very own head of hair the dreaded split ends. Far more distressing than gray hairs, which are natural and noble in their maturity, split ends imply improper care and maintenance of hair. This flaw is something I have brought upon myself, something I could have prevented. Split ends are controllable, and the huge amounts of marketing aimed at this condition could have lead me to the newest and best shampoos, conditioners, and treatments to control this terrible infestation. Why are split ends considered the worst possible affliction, when they could be seen positively, as a 2-for-1 deal, for example? Why is there a fulsome amount of information on meeting the standards of ideal hair, but virtually no written discussion on the hows and whys of the emergence of a hair ideal? Although huge amounts of mass media focus on hair, it’s all propaganda—how to make it thicker, stronger, straighter, curlier, darker, lighter. Everybody knows the difference between a “good hair day” and a “bad hair day.” But how did hair get categorized into good and bad? These labels seem to be accepted without question.
Unlike hair advertising, which propagates the myth of an ideal hair type, investigations of hair in art and culture reveal a multivalent, deeply symbolic substance that is employed as a metaphor for broader social issues. Mythologies of all cultures ascribe mystical powers to hair. Medusa’s snaky hair rendered men impotent, Samson held all his strength in his hair, and Rapunzel’s long locks were her route to freedom and sexual liberation. The list of hair stories continues throughout the ages and civilizations. Hair is the quintessential fetish in both the original sense as a powerful magic talisman (as found on African fetish objects), and in the modern Western psychoanalytic sense as a displaced focus of sexual attention.
Artists throughout history have used hair to represent social status, sexual innuendo, and body consciousness. Egyptian pharaohs were entombed with their wigs. In ancient Greece, philosophers were denoted in portraits by their bearded faces. Ancient Romans designed their statues with interchangeable hairdos so that a portrait would never look out of date. Hairstyles indicate social and political status in Assyrian statues. During the Italian Renaissance, Botticelli painted hair like drapery and Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa with a carefully plucked hairline and eyebrows. Hair in pre-Revolutionary France demonstrated the extraordinary decadence of the age in both the size and detail of elaborate wigs for both women and men. During the nineteenth century, the Pre-Raphaelites fetishized hair in their drawings and paintings while women wove memento mori—rings, lockets, and other small trinkets—from their own hair or the hair of their deceased (figure 4).
This art historical sampling, with the exception of the memento mori, illustrates the significant representation of hair rather than the incorporation of actual physical hair. Real hair in an art piece is an intrusion of reality into what is more comfortably viewed as a discrete art object. The inclusion of hair recalls human presence, social interactions, and physical mortality. Memento mori means, literally, memory of death. Unlike paintings or sculptures that emphasize hair, the memento mori is able to signify issues of human life and death without any literal imagery, but solely with its medium, human hair.
When hair is removed from the body, it acquires morbid and base connotations quite different from the associations with a healthy head of hair. A wayward strand is dirty and insidious, independently finding its way into your food, your clothes, your bathtub drain. A plaguing source of anxiety, hair loss implies aging, disease, and loss of virility. That which signifies health in life is also uniquely capable of indicating a visceral mortality.
Looking for hair, I have noticed how frequently I find it unexpectedly or disturbingly—in my food, in the corners of my room, on a bar of soap, on a woman’s face, growing from a mole. Like the memento mori, disembodied hair is a reminder of human mortality, of death and decay. Somehow hair becomes disgusting as soon as it is removed from its privileged status on the head. Detached or misplaced hair is dirty and diseased, even though the same substance signifies youth and health when rooted on the scalp.
Hair is fascinating because everyone grows it, but no one’s is the same. And although it comes from our bodies, it exists outside ourselves. Hair is somewhere between fashion and nature. We can alter and style our hair, but it always maintains its natural inclinations. Hair is fibrous, not fleshy like the rest of our bodies. It is at once human and inhuman, living and dead, part of us but separate. Hair communicates messages of status and identity when it is on the head. Hair reminds us of mortality when it is off the head. It seems such a superficial concern that it is an unlikely suspect for the deep rooted issues it represents. Hair is powerful.
Given my own hair history, my hairstory, it seems a natural progression to be attracted to art that incorporates hair. Hair inspires, confuses, and contradicts varied emotions in contemporary Western people. Artists are able to employ the contradictory reactions evoked by hair in order to address broader issues of discrepancy, marginalization, power struggles, and boundary issues. Hair indicates an ideal, and by association, a misfit. Hair can make people react in different ways—desire, comfort, fear, disgust, whatever. Yet in each case, it marks and performs in boundaries. Contemporary artists eager to challenge the boundaries of artmaking incorporate hair into their work as a tool to evoke very personal, visceral reactions. It is impossible to respond to such a human and intimate substance with the same cool detachment traditional inanimate art mediums elicit. Hair not only tests the parameters of traditional artmaking, but also provides immediate associations to the prevalent issues hair raises—such as status, sexuality, and mortality—thereby offering an efficient means to grapple with identity both as an artist and as a member and critic of society.
As my interest in hair became more deeply rooted, I found countless artists who incorporate hair in their work, but very little text that seriously investigates the medium. Artists as well-studied and diverse as Vito Acconci, Janine Antoni, David Hammons, Mona Hatoum, Robert Rauschenberg, and Hannah Wilke have made art that incorporates hair, but in general, the writing on these and other hair artists mentions their use of non-traditional media, yet combs over and brushes aside the reasons and complexities behind their choices.
As I began the writing stage of this thesis, I browsed through the most recent issue of Artforum (September 1997) to discover five images or mentions of hair art, but no text that discusses them. Artists everywhere are using hair in their work. I am aware of one attempt to critically investigate the contemporary artistic predilection for using hair as a medium. A 1993 catalogue from a show simply titled, Hair, at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin, collects a broad scope of contemporary art that utilizes hair either physically or in photography. The brief essays address some of the common themes in hair art, such as human mortality and sexual fetishes, but unfortunately the text is all too short and the issues and artists that I find most engaging are not discussed in any depth. One outstanding exception to the general dearth of writing on the subject is in the area of African American or black hair, which is far more understood as a signifier of status and identity than hair of other ethnicities. I find it telling that one culture sees cultural magnitude where other cultures are blind. The subject of hair is seemingly everywhere to be seen but only rarely and minimally analyzed.
A recurring theme appears throughout the various forms of hair art: not only do hair artists test the boundaries of traditional art by using non-traditional media, but they tend to push their own personal boundaries. Hair artists usually identify themselves with marginalized communities and allow hair to serve as a metaphor for their struggles within, and emergence from, social, political, or cultural restrictions. Because hair is an intrinsic element of Western culture and personal identity, natural but somewhat malleable, and importantly, removable, it is an ideal subject and medium for artistic exploration. Hair is unique in its inherent ability to foster human connections while maintaining an aura of self-contained mystery, to serve as a synechdochal reminder of the entire body, to embody the Other. Hair stands in for the artist’s body while its removability disturbs the integrity of the self.
The multivalent layers of meaning embedded in hair are combed through and rebraided into complex pieces by artists who grapple with different fundamental concepts of hair, the body, and identity. Specifically, I have identified three areas in which artists exploit the connotations and associations of human hair to engage in explorations of status and identity: racial difference, gender identification, and bodily alienation. For these issues, which sometimes overlap, hair highlights the artist’s liminal status as misfit. They do not fit into a safe category, but are not fully content in any marginal category either, and constantly shift back and forth. Hair describes and defines categories, but it may also be used as the tool to break down barriers. I intend to unknot the tangled strands of hair’s significance in contemporary art using the work of three artists as case studies. I will discuss themes of race and racism through the hair pieces of David Hammons, gender and feminism using a performance by Janine Antoni, and physicality and alienation through an installation by Mona Hatoum.
With David Hammons, black hair defines the boundary between black and white. The soft and flowing ideal virtually excludes the coarse and kinky texture natural to African American hair. David Hammons seeks a visual and tactile parallel for racism with his work in black hair. His art emphasizes the differences between the races while refusing the racist stigma of inferiority. Hammons uses hair to aggravate the stereotypical perceptions and rejections of black integration in white society with irony and wit.
The oldest and most established artist of the three I discuss in my thesis, David Hammons’s work with hair spans the last three decades. Taking various shapes and guises, Hammons’s hair art consistently incorporates African American hair collected from salons in predominantly black neighborhoods such as Harlem. A recurring preoccupation in writing about black hair is its difference in texture from white hair, and the processes African Americans undergo to achieve the smooth texture desirable in a white-dominated culture. Hammons exploits the fears of a predominantly white society along with the natural, unprocessed texture of black hair to associate it with non-human materials. In one sculpture, tufts of hair appear as cotton awaiting harvest. In another, dreadlocks join together to form a massive spider. A recent work features a rock sprouting hair as would a head. These sculptures trouble what otherwise should be a natural human feature; instead, they ask, is this substance animal, vegetable, or mineral? What is more, they locate and reconsider objects of African American oppression.
Hammons employs hair in several objects and installations in his ongoing examination of race and social politics. However, it is his graphic work (body prints) and public sculptures in African American neighborhoods (House of the Future, 1991) that have received the bulk of critical attention. Unlike his widely seen graphic work or public art, Hammons’ hair sculptures are specifically rooted to the gallery, where they are seen by a predominantly white audience. Perhaps it is due to this factor that these works readily connote the issue of a black artist operating in a white discipline and a still-racist America.
The reception of Hammons’ work with hair, which has been relatively ignored, stands in contrast with Janine Antoni’s wildly popular and controversial hair performance that I discuss in Chapter 3, which has become one of her most recognizable signature works. These opposite critical reactions reintroduces the problem of hair as a product of consumption, and offers an opportunity to investigate the trading of images among popular culture and the art world.
Janine Antoni’s beautiful hair positions her into the category of sex object, and prevents her from joining the ranks of serious artmakers. Like Hammons, Antoni emphasizes difference as defined by hair while refusing inferiority. Antoni explores the roots of ideal hair and the values implicit in hair maintenance in her 1992– performance, Loving Care, alternately called I Soaked My Hair in Dye and Mopped the Floor With It. Antoni’s piece teases out all the insecurities and technical challenges women contend with because of the modern notion of ideal hair. At the same time that Antoni demystifies the private beautification ritual, she revels in the process. Her work is at once dirty and sensual, fully exploiting the potentials of hair.
Antoni uses the hair on her head in her performance Loving Care in a way that truly involves all aspects of artmaking—the action of the artist’s body, the tactile process of the artist’s tool and pigments, and the reception and interaction of the viewer to this piece. Painting the gallery floor with her hair soaked in dye, Antoni crawls and mimics motions of modern dance, her exaggerated gesticulations calling forth associations of Jackson Pollock’s action painting. The hairs on her head are like the hairs of a sable brush multiplied to excess. Soaking the gallery floor with hair dye, she gradually pushes the audience out of the room, forcing them to view her actions through the doorframe; art mediated by distance.
With her poignantly disconcerting performances and objects, Antoni grapples with constructions of identity—the postmodern artist’s role in reference to twentieth century precedents, the female and feminist body in response to media-induced notions of beauty and acceptability. This was Antoni’s first piece to achieve wide public acclaim. Photographs of this performance are indeed compelling, both sexy and troubling. They utilize precisely the same elements that comprise effective advertisements—an attractive woman, a product, and snappy photography. The seductive attraction of this performance disconcerts art theorists and critics who strive to place her work in a spectrum of sexy to sexist, or feminine to feminist. Loving Care does not lie comfortably in such linear framework. Hair is evocative of often opposing and interconnected ideas. Attempting to comb through those issues can be a confusing and unruly task.
Mona Hatoum uses her own hair to draw attention to alienation from one’s own body. In her 1995 installation, Recollection, hair marks the boundary between self/other, human/inhuman, life/death. Hatoum searches the physicality of hair itself. She uses detached hair to create an existence unto itself, to alternately attract and repel, alienate and include the viewer. Recollection addresses the insidious nature of disembodied hair. The work involves scores of human hairballs shed across the floor and scattered into areas outside of the installation space, like so much gathering lint. From the ceiling hang nearly invisible single strands of hair which brush against the skin of the unsuspecting participant in the installation. These hairs bring to mind the disturbing errant and ownerless strands encountered in daily activities, not the welcomed touch of the healthy hair of a loved one.
When hair becomes separate from the body, it seems to take on a life of its own, which is at odds with the body it originated from. Mona Hatoum explores her own body, from both inside and out, in order to decipher and blur its boundaries. Her own hair in Recollection floats freely without its owner. This absence of a body and mobile activity of independent hair balls and strands implies the dispensability of human presence. Hatoum is at once present and unnecessary in this installation consisting of her own hair. She has made her own memento mori, a “permanent” of her own self-isolation, rendering herself obsolete.
A native of Beirut who emigrated to London to escape political upheaval, Mona Hatoum explores themes of loneliness, isolation, and prison in her technologically advanced art. She makes use of geometrical metal constructions, video technology, and exploratory medical practices; mediums which match the strength of the moral and emotional content of her work. Primary concerns of medium and isolation indicate hair as a logical site for artistic exploration, but the hi-tech quality of Hatoum’s work seems to stand at odds with hair as an earthy, visceral substance. Her hair piece is both a successful and anachronistic evolution compared to her regular hi-tech work.
The same stuff produces totally divergent reactions depending on where it is found. Artists play with that unique property of hair when they incorporate it into their work. When hair is removed, as with the work of David Hammons and Mona Hatoum, it is creepy and not quite human, but when still on the head, as with Janine Antoni’s work, it is too human to be art. The common strand that braids these artists together is their use of hair to address the ways in which they are marginalized in status. Hair becomes a metonym for the body of the artist, undergoing in concentrated form the same ordeals that substantiate the artist’s work.
These artists also share a concept of irony and mortality in their work. For all their seriousness, these hair artists never forget how perverse a world it is that attaches so much significance to a few strands of dead cells. Popular presuppositions about hair and the nature of these artistic projects have resulted in diverse reactions both within the art world and in general media. Perceptive and sensitive to the tendencies of society, artistic focus on hair as a medium and subject necessitates an inquiry to the substance itself. A human by-product that also seems to live independently from the body, hair is uniquely suited to address the most personal and universal issues of identity, status, and human mortality.

2
Hair as a Signifier of Racial Difference:
David Hammons’s Hair Pieces

Neri: Everyone knows the iconography of hair.
Hammons: But no one guessed that it was hair. They all called it “steel wool,” even in writing about it.

Everyone does not know the iconography of hair, and not all hair connotes the same messages. Hair holds multiple meanings and associations that vary according to hair texture, style, placement, origin, as well as who is viewing or touching the hair. All too often, hair in art is addressed with the same dismissive statement that its associations are equally understood by all viewers. The associations of hair are unique to its circumstances, offering a visceral substance that not only signifies the traditional fetishistic iconography of hair, but also raises issue with Western notions of aesthetics, culture, and politics.
The hair art of David Hammons works through tangled and ambiguous issues and connotations raised by contemporary black hair in Western society. In his hair pieces, the substance of hair is only occasionally associated with the human form. One of these, Rocky (figure 5), 1990, takes on a decidedly human male form. Kinky black curls cover the top and back of a head-shaped rock, growing sparser at the crown in accordance with male-pattern baldness. This “head” perches on top of a rusty painted plant stand. Hammons has produced several variations on Rocky, including Fragment of the Milky Way (figure 6), 1992, in which a Rocky-like “head” sits atop three mattress springs, Esquire (figure 7), 1990, where the base is an upright railroad tie, and Haircut (figure 8), 1992, where another Rocky-variation visits a Harlem barbershop for a trim.
That the black male is recognizable in these minimal pieces attests to the powerful associative force of the texture of black hair. This is not the first time a human form has been detectable in such a simple shape—Constantin Brancusi endowed the pure egg shape with human feeling in sculptures throughout his career in the early 20th century (figure 9). But with Rocky, the now hairy shape not only signifies the human form, but specifies gender and race, as well as indicates class and culture. Brancusi intended his work to be pure and timeless. Hammons applies found objects from a specific culture to invest his creation with individuality. The found plant stand and mattress springs derive from the mundane urban waste that provides the environment and materials for most of Hammons’ oeuvre. That a black person’s head sits atop these objects indicates a particular ownership. Hammons specifically links African American presence with inner city detritus and the solitary dignity of urban artifacts. Together, the elements create a proud and humorous look at a quality of life in contemporary African American communities like Harlem.
Hair is the hinge upon which comprehension of this piece rests. Without hair, the unsculpted rock would not be a head. A rock on a plant stand or mattress springs holds no significance, whereas an abstracted yet specific human head invests the pieces with meanings and connotations aligned with Hammons’ artistic concerns. The hair reinvests what was discarded with new life, new human sensitivity, and a specific cultural home. These pieces embody an essence of black life, joining objects used by black folks in their neighborhoods with the very real bits of their bodies. Hammons repeatedly explains that he prefers to incorporate used material like hair and junk in his art because in them he can sense the spirit of the people who owned them previously, and that spirit is infused into his art. One could argue these pieces contain the souls of the anonymous people included in them.
Given this, the unshaped rock seems to contradict the very the humanistic embodiment it is a part of in Rocky. After all, nothing is more devoid of life or personality than stone. Unlike a head (or the associations with a carefully sculpted likeness of a head), rocks cannot think, speak, look, or hear. A rock is silent, undifferentiated, uninteresting. Placed in the mostly white museum context, Rocky becomes a passive African American artifact, quietly displaying features of black culture without confrontation. But there is a tension between the head’s stony silence and its very human quality. Rocky is not entirely passive, and does confront the viewer, white or otherwise, with unwavering solidity. Its hair is Rocky’s refusal to be ignored or uninteresting. Rocky is funny and awkward and challenging; it represents a segment of black culture, but also the spirit of one specific but unnamed black individual, through the inclusion of that person’s hair.
Literature on black hair, which comprises some of the smartest and deepest writing on the subject of hair in general, seems to promote a binary distinction between black and white hair, generally disregarding other ethnicities. Other hair—Asian and Latino—has been the focus of profound works of art and holds powerful messages in the traditional art forms of the various cultures, but has been virtually ignored by modern English-language literature. Because Western black thoughts on hair directly respond to the presence of a white majority, my analysis also follows this black/white dichotomy. Hammons himself is not oblivious to the existence of other cultures, and has commented specifically on his fascination with Asian hair. “Japanese people, I can’t believe the way they’re designed. To me they seem unusual and different. I say, ‘Isn’t this amazing, the difference in their bone structure, their hair?’… [T]here is so much variety and it’s so remarkable. And as a visual artist all these things are extremely important to me.” More often though, on the subject of status and difference, the African American subject is likely to target the privileged white American as the standard of comparison.
It is also important to recognize that the English language is inherently biased by associating negative connotations to the precise words used to describe black hair. Western notions of beauty and aesthetics are white-oriented to such a degree that words like nappy, woolly, kinky, and frizzy imply faults that need correction and transformation into smooth, flowing, and wavy—words that better describe the texture of white hair. The black segment of the English-speaking population is unable to describe its own features in non-derogatory terms. Even the selling words on black hair care products like “sheen,” “glo,” and “soft,” tend to deny or downplay the natural frizzy quality of black hair.
In the modern Western world, black hair carries political and social connotations that speak to both the black community and white outsiders. African Americans in particular tend to be more aware of the statements and reactions generated by their hair and hairstyles than do their white counterparts. Processed or unprocessed, black hair is molded and coifed into statements of identity. Afros and dreadlocks, both inventions by black people in Western parts of the world, are symbols of black pride that clearly indicate a point of difference between liberated black people and white suppressers.
Kobena Mercer describes and deconstructs the invention and adoption of the afro and dreadlock hairstyles. The styles celebrate and exploit the natural kinky texture of black hair, and imply direct connection to Africa, but Mercer maintains that the afro and dreadlocks are modern Western inventions created to emphasize the difference between black and white. The afro especially, with its name clearly derived from the word “Africa,” and alternately called the “natural,” indicates a desire to associate Western blacks with a purer African ancestry, and to disassociate them with the industrialization and artificiality of Western society. The wearing of dreadlocks and the afro-kitsch accoutrements aligned with the Rastafarian style similarly constitute an image of a more natural state for Western blacks. Despite these intentions and connotations, Mercer reveals that modern native Africans do not wear these hairstyles. In fact, the afro and dreadlocks are specifically Western inventions, which would be visibly incongruous in African tribal communities.

[Afros and dreadlocks] invoked “nature” to inscribe Africa as the symbol of personal and political opposition to the hegemony of the West over “the rest.” Both championed an aesthetic of nature that opposed itself to any artifice as a sign of corrupting Eurocentric influence. But nature had nothing to do with it! Both these hairstyles were never just natural, waiting to be found: they were stylistically cultivated and politically constructed in a particular historical moment as part of a strategic contestation of white dominance and the cultural power of whiteness.
The afro and dreadlocks undermine white-biased notions of physical beauty. Emphasizing and built upon the natural frizziness of black hair, these styles reclaim the privilege of beauty that is linguistically denied through the derogatory terms of the English language. The 1960s popular slogan “Black is Beautiful,” demonstrates this proud reclaiming of aesthetic privilege and confidence. Furthermore, the proudly worn hairstyles shift the concept of what is “natural” from untamed and savage to pure and good. At the same time that they unite black people in pride in their natural features, this very celebration arguably creates a longing on the part of outsiders, white people, but excludes them by nature from experiencing or appropriating these aesthetic tools of self-imaging. White people who do appropriate the dreadlock style do so with great effort and cultivation. The result signifies a rebellious rejection of conservative, capitalistic Western values.
Afros were the style of choice adopted by the most visible black activist group of the 1960s, the Black Panthers. Never has any white hairdo so firmly symbolized any political agenda. Former Black Panther Angela Davis continues to be known today as “The Afro.” “[I]t is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo…But it is not merely the reduction of historical politics to contemporary fashion that infuriates me.” She laments the lack of memory and superficiality with which the public has glamorized her 1960s revolutionary look and forgotten the revolution for which she stood. Davis’s unprocessed afro was a sign of liberation and common struggle for equality. Its subsequent adoption as a fashion statement, she argues, misses the point and gravity of her cause. She calls a 1994 Vibe magazine fashion recreation of her 1970 FBI Wanted poster “the most blatant example of the way the particular history of my legal case is emptied of all content so that it can serve as a commodified backdrop for advertising (figures 10–11).” While Davis’s complaints are valid, they are naively simplistic. The docufashion examples she criticizes equally evince a sophisticated comprehension of the way politics and fashion walk hand-in-hand, and that one can use the other as a propagandistic tool. Her disillusionment with the popularized afro indicates a belief that fashion is less important or influential than politics. But she herself used fashion, her own hairstyle, as a political tool! When a fashion statement becomes popular rather than rebellious, it loses its radical potential for change. On the other hand, popular acceptance of a once-rebellious gesture could also mean that some degree of change has already taken place. In 1994, when the afro was no longer a fashionable hairstyle, its revival in popular culture could spark a renewed interest in activism.
Hammons translated the political implications of natural, unprocessed black hair into public art with his 1988 billboard, How Ya Like Me Now? (figure 12), depicting the politician Rev. Jesse Jackson with blond hair, blue eyes, and pale skin. Jackson’s African features are still easily discernible, despite his change in pigmentation to a white ideal. The billboard engendered controversy from all corners—white people were angered by what they deemed an offensive challenge to political impartiality, and black people considered the work a racist travesty of their leader. Soon after its installation, a group of black youths defaced the billboard with sledgehammers.
By altering Jackson’s hair color, changing him from black to white, and posing the snide question, “How ya like me now?” Hammons reconsiders the “natural” vs. “straightening” debate. Hair as a signifier of political ideology is an immediate association in the context of such a visibly active politician as Jesse Jackson. Hammons revisits the arguments for and against the “whitening” of black features, demanding a reaction from each race. Despite the growth in black pride since the 1960s, the United States has yet to see a black leader of the country. Hammons challenges idealistic visions of assimilation and equality. He posits that even if a black person appeared in a white guise, he or she would still be resented as a phony by both races. Furthermore, the billboard asserts that placing white features on a black man does not make him white, but in certain ways, emphasizes the ways in which he is unmistakably black.
The alternatives to natural black hair common among Western blacks involve chemical processing designed to relax tight curls. Straightening techniques provide both pride and pain—as a bonding ritual culturally specific to modern Western black people, as a physical accomplishment, as a personal victory over nature, and as a self-created image, hair straightening provides a positive experience for black people. However, considered as slavish imitation of white hair, a culturally enforced style code, or degrading self-mutilation, straightening processes inflict emotional and chemical harm on the black community. Yet Mercer suggests that hair straightening neither conveys a triumphant reversal of an unwanted feature nor a shameful cowing to convention, but rather, a cultural invention highlighting difference. Chemical straightening styles such as the conk, jheri curls, finger waves, or sculptural updos do not imitate, nor are they popular on, white or other ethnic hair. Neither do they attempt to re-adopt native African styles. Instead, they reinterpret a potentially demeaning ritual into newly invented, self-empowering, culturally-defined visual language. These styles employ techniques designed to straighten the hair, but result in looks that white hair could never achieve. They are styles unique to modern black communities in western cultures with primarily white leadership and social conventions.
Noliwe M. Rooks , bell hooks , and Lisa Jones fondly recall hair salons as safe havens for black women to congregate and gossip. The chemical burns, hot steel combs, and noxious smell of lye happily commingle with rites of passage into womanhood, and later, provide the jumping-off point for a critical discourse into the meanings of hair straightening. “I was an absolute adolescent. This was also the year I decided to straighten my hair. In the process of reaching my decision, I came to realize the extent to which my hair bridged the space between personal identity and a larger racial politic. Hair, I learned that year, is significant.”
At the very least, hair straightening implies a stylistic interaction between black and white, or “native” African and “modernized” Western. Taken a step further, the process indicates a black imitation of white hair, and a certain sense of shame for the texture that is natural to black hair. Malcolm X describes the ambiguity of his own experience of hair-straightening, recalling his first painfully acquired conks: “My first view in the mirror blotted out the hurting. I’d seen some pretty conks, but when it’s the first time, on your own head, the transformation, after a lifetime of kinks, is staggering….On top of my head was this thick, smooth sheen of red hair—real red—as straight as any white man’s….[This was] my first really big step towards self-degradation.” Hair processing is an equivocal practice; a sign of pride, but steeped in insecurity; a bonding activity among a distinct group of people, but staged in imitation of the dominating group; and yet not simply denoting mimicry as it invents a new form of identification. Hammons chooses to use only natural, unprocessed hair in his work, avoiding (while subtly suggesting) this controversial and complicated aspect of an already multivalent subject.
Whether natural or processed, characteristically black hairstyles—that is, those styles that allow the hair to be styled, that are not shorn short enough to deny or ignore their hairy qualities—are regal and crownlike in their volume and intricacy. Grandiose hairstyles or lofty headdresses command attention and connote a regal demeanor, functioning as a crownlike symbol of honor and privilege. The diverse intricacy of modern black hairstyles demonstrates that the black community has adopted their hair as a unique raw material to mold into encoded identificatory crowns. Self-stylized hair appropriately symbolizes black pride when reinterpreted as a genetic crown, echoing James Baldwin’s call for “African-Americans need to reclaim their (lost) crowns and wear them.” The personal choice whether to wear the hair natural or processed, as long as it is worn proudly, offers equally valid options that can both be argued to represent a liberated, positive image of black people.
Women especially undergo long and costly treatments, as well as sometimes unhealthy chemical processes in the effort to reform their hair into ornate statements of identity. Black women concern themselves with their hair more than do white women. A common enough phenomenon to have appeared on daytime talk shows such as Oprah Winfrey’s, black women hold far more value in the appearance of their hair than in their bodies or wardrobes, whereas the opposite is true with white women. A black woman wearing discount clothing commonly would wear hundreds of dollars of extensions in her hair. A white woman, on the other hand, would more often forego a timely haircut in order to afford a new expensive outfit. On the same note, black women tend to over-scrutinize the faults of their hair but have more positive notions of their bodies than do white women, who have widely publicized terrible body consciousness, but only moderate concern for their hair. For both races, the focus of hair attention weighs more heavily on women than on men.
According to this apparent gender imbalance of concern, then, “feminine” hairstyles are those that call attention to themselves, emphasize volume, and distinguish the wearer. “Masculine” hair, on the other hand, aims to disappear, be forgettable, allow the wearer to blend into the background. Gender-specific black hair treatments such as extensions and multi-style co-existence provide insight to both black culture and feminine tropes, but conversely, limit discussion to only the female half of the black community. Afros and dreadlocks, on the other hand, are worn by both women and men, and therefore speak to the entire community in a single political fashion gesture. Rather than propounding a binary distinction between masculine and feminine hair styles, Hammons’s hair pieces are often androgynous. If they seem more feminine than his other work, it is due to extrinsic associations of hair styling as a feminine pastime.
When questioned why his work tends to ignore women and speak from the male point of view, Hammons responded:

Hammons: I did deal with women in the hair pieces.
Neri: But the nappy hair that you used in the hair pieces is completely androgynous.
Hammons: Exactly. When I got to using the hair in my work in the early seventies, an artists told me that I had ‘emptied the cup.’ Maybe he was right, but I wasn’t going to let that hair retire me.
But in the end it did. I reached this bottom line with it. Zero-point. I got to a visual object and medium that was pure, nonsexual, which spoke everything I wanted to say.
Neri: Culturally specific Minimal Art.
Bag Lady in Flight (figure 13), 1982/1990, takes Hammons into this abstract territory that somehow speaks of femininity. It cleverly recalls Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending the Staircase (figure 14), 1912, and reinterprets the artistic trope to reflect Hammons’s own experiences in the urban black community. Like Duchamp, with whom he is often compared, Hammons rebels against the conventions of his artistic milieu, and abstracts the female form with the barest suggestions of her presence. She appears throughout every facet of the work, but nowhere is any recognizable human form depicted. The folded paper takes on an abstract design familiar from the 1970s large-scale abstract wall sculptures. But rather than utilizing hi-tech modern materials and techniques, Hammons incorporates his trademark found objects, already invested with the grime and wear-and-tear of its previous owners. “When you find a found object, the work is halfway complete because the object is talking to you. Whereas everything at Pearl Paint is devoid of spirit…” Greasy shopping bags scattered with triangular patches of nappy black hair clippings, recalling pubic hair, are the badge of the urban black homeless woman. Hammons dignifies his bedraggled materials and the individuals they represent by reforming them into an elegant sweeping curve.
The incongruity of this piece’s form with its subject matter pokes an ironic jab at the conventions of the art world. While the sweeping silhouette of this object merits inclusion in any minimalist collection, the incorporation of dirt, human materials, and narrative content ensure its separate consideration. Like the homeless woman to whom it refers, Bag Lady in Flight would probably be shunned by the average pristine gallery-goer. The inclusion of disembodied hair, complete with connotations of dirt and politics, disturbs the sterile environment and mind set of the white gallery.
As with Rocky, an uncomfortable tension rests between the human spirit invoked by the bodily materials and the calculated elegance expressed through the technique of this work. Hammons has once again chosen to perch some loaded hair on an otherwise cool, blank form. In both cases, the hair troubles the silence of what would otherwise be a sedate work of art. It invigorates these objects with traces of a specific, although anonymous, person’s life. They confront the viewer with their human essence. These works are not merely about the artist’s craft, about his skill, but forcibly bring forth the voice of an unspoken African American individual, someone who ordinarily does not converse with typical gallery-goers.
Hammons is aware of this discrepancy between the two worlds he straddles—the streets of urban black life, and the clean white walls of the art gallery. He understands that these spheres rarely interact, and appoints himself the interpreter between them, but clearly aligned with the black side, and only begrudgingly tolerant of the art world. “I’m speaking to both sides. I’m really right in the middle of the battle, and not, as most artists believe, on the outside looking in. I’m directing my work toward the galleries, toward the museums and toward the people who are coming into these places. As an artist I’m not aligned with the collectors or the dealers or the museums; I see them all as frauds.” In a later interview, Hammons clarifies, “…[T]here has to be something between low art and high art, a bridge to bring black people to high art. Someone has to bring them to that, and I took on the responsibility.”
Hammons defined his career by bringing high art to the black community, installing his monumental sculptures in Harlem and other primarily black neighborhoods. He entered the art scene in the 1970s with his wildly successful body prints in wheich he greased his body and literally pressed himself against the printing surface, to which he then applied pigment for a permanent print (figures 15–16). After his initial success, Hammons chose to reorient himself to the black community with his art pieces, and retreated from active engagement in gallery and museum showings. By the time he re-emerged to the esoteric art audience in the early 1990s, it was as if he appeared from nowhere with a full career of artmaking under his belt. Hammons had made the streets his gallery space, showing his work to his neighbors rather than wealthy art patrons. One of his most widely publicized public sculptures, Higher Goals (figure 17), 1986, comprised unattainably high basketball hoops atop poles covered with found bottle caps. The piece was a political and savvy reminder to African Americans that sports do not provide the only way to raise their status and situations, and that the chances of success are minimal. Another highly visible public work was House of the Future (figure 18), 1991, in Charleston, South Carolina. With this project, Hammons was able to directly rechannel money into the black community—with his commission from the Spoletto Festival, he hired a local contractor who in turn employed neighborhood workers to build a house. The structure is impossibly narrow for comfortable living quarters, and attracts attention through its exaggeratedly attenuated proportions, but its workers learned marketable skills through constructing it, and the building still serves as a shelter in its community. These pieces, like his Jesse Jackson billboard and other public works, received remarkable critical attention and success. The art community noticed them, but more so, popular media focused on these works. Outdoors and confrontational in charged urban environments, these works engage human interest for their political and social merit, independently of their artistic value.
In contrast, sculptures made of actual human hair could not weather outdoor exposure as do basketball hoops, houses, and billboards. The very material of Hammons’s hair sculptures requires it to be rooted in the gallery setting. Meanings and audiences change when venues do, and the gallery offers quite a different ambiance than the streets of Harlem in which to digest the sculpture of David Hammons. Usually so steadfast in his affirmations that his art is for the black community, Hammons made these hair sculptures fully aware that they could only be displayed in a protected environment, an art space. Even the galleries and museums whose demographics reveal a large percentage of African American traffic still primarily appeal to an elite economic and educational portion of society. Unlike his public work, Hammons’ hair art is relegated to the confines and comprehension of the art community. Furthermore, Hammons’ public art such as Higher Goals, House of the Future, and How Ya Like Me Now? carry overt political messages, whereas his hair pieces more subtly approach issues of black culture. Clearly aimed at raising consciousness in the black community, his outdoor work is more readily approachable for media comment than his smaller indoor ambiguous hair sculptures.
In the gallery space mostly attended by a white audience, Hammons’ black hair art is subjected first and foremost to outsider scrutiny. The texture of black hair is unfamiliar to the average white viewer. Taken off the body, the kinky curls become even more foreign. The white viewer, used to smooth hair in paler shades, is addressed or even challenged by these pieces that demand recognition as human and natural, but meanwhile provoke discomfort with displacement and incongruity. Also, placing the hair on an inanimate object allows the white viewer to get closer and stare longer than if it was still on the black person’s head. This displacement creates a disturbing intimacy not possible with a real person. After years of political action, “natural” black hairstyles have come to signify black pride, black power, black beauty. But these signs are only apparent when on a black person’s head. Removed from the body, all hair is rendered dirty; hair that is unfamiliar in texture to a viewer becomes even more problematic—it becomes unrecognizable.
That many early critics of Hammons’ hair work mistook the substance for steel wool reveals some of the biases and racial ignorance of the art world. The 1960s and 1970s were a time for activity and liberation in the feminist art movement. For example, Mimi Smith’s Steel Wool Peignoir (figure 19), 1966, was lauded by critics as a comment on women’s work and priorities. They had no problem understanding the juxtaposition of steel wool and a delicate negligee in the context of women’s issues. The art community was ready to accept feminist works, and interpreted new art with such notions in mind. So when a new wiry substance appeared, its viewers reverted to terms and forms already understood. Art engaging racial consideration was not as widely disseminated in the art press. Race was still just a political issue, not an artistic one. The previous championed artistic avant garde, feminism, spoke with different symbols than Hammons’s new work, even though they used the same strategies. Critics needed to learn a new vocabulary, where kinky could imply black hair instead of steel wool; but feminism had already taught them the grammar of communicating in a visually political and subversive manner. Race issues have been discussed and addressed as long as gender issues, but feminism was disseminated in artistic projects before black issues were accepted in the avant garde. Although examples of black activism predate feminism, feminist art retains chronological precedence over black art. Hammons was a pioneer in creating art about black issues that utilized some of the same tactics as feminist art.
The comprehension of Hammons’s hair art by a white viewer is a multi-step process. First, the viewer sees a piece, and then eventually recognizes (or reads label information to determine) the substance from which it is made, and finally must reinterpret the work with extrinsic connotations regarding black hair, the black community, and the elements comprising the piece. Obviously, a typical black viewer might more immediately recognize the hair in these works. In general, a white gallery audience comprehends Hammons’s hair art with greater delay than a black one. Hammons surely created these objects with his audience in mind, aware of the demographics of museum and gallery traffic. His intention, then, was to slow the pace of the white viewer to closely study and digest differences between black and white. It brings the “other” to an accessible distance.
At the same time, Hammons toys and teases with his human substance and subject. He purposefully denies their human origins, placing the hair in situations that speak of other sources. In Rocky, hair sprouts from a stone; Bag Lady in Flight offers hair on paper bags. In another series of work, Hammons creates plant-like forms with puffs of hair in place of cotton awaiting harvest, not only troubling the natural origin of black hair, but recalling the cotton industry as the primary financial justification for American slavery. Hammons refuses a simple understanding of black hair in his art. Hair is never a straightforward object of fashion, but a political tool, object of oppression, and signifier of difference.
Hammons’s hair art entirely departs from referencing the human figure with Untitled (figure 20), 1992. This large sculptural installation, frequently recognized as a highlight of the Documenta IX exhibition, has received more critical attention in the art press than any of his other hair pieces because of its inclusion in that prestigious show. With its prominent position in the Documenta exhibition, it was finally a hair piece as visible to the art community as his public political creations or early body prints. The monumental sculpture consists of barbershop clippings wrapped around a spiky armature resembling a sea urchin or multi-legged spider. Under the hirsute creature rest rocks and bits of urban debris—cigarette butts, gum wrappers, and other city refuse. The piece is a “mesmerizing monument to dreadlocks,” that outshined much of the other work at Documenta IX in critics’ reviews.
Untitled is massive but organic, funny but threatening. With a twist on the Claes Oldenberg sense for outrageously exaggerated scale, Hammons magnifies a mass of dreadlocks to a heroic and ridiculous stature, so that it only vaguely references a human feature, and instead takes on characteristics of a simpler, decidedly creepy life form. This gigantic hairy spider threatens the viewer with its monumentality, and to comprehend that the sprawling piece is composed of black dreadlocks signals a grasp of the power in what is traditionally held in low esteem. This phenomenon forms the bulk of Georges Bataille’s discussion of l’informe, wherein he describes the disconcerting implications of bringing noble and lofty forms down in value, of rendering them formless. “…[A]ffirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.” It is equally possible to argue the opposite: that to take something seemingly worthless, like a spider or spit, and raise it in status, would be to give it form. This is precisely Hammons’s ongoing goal—to render the discarded, overlooked, and undervalued worthy of consideration.
Untitled is undeniably humorous and positive. It celebrates the qualities of black hair, as well as black life, that enable it to come together in so massive a structure. It plays on the fears of dreadlocks as dirty, unwashed, and unkempt, emphasized by their detachment from the human head. The connotations of dreadlocks as a hairstyle, already intended to threaten the white viewer with a denial of Western aesthetics and politics, here becomes all the more imposing. Among other things, dreadlocks symbolize rejection of white oppression; disembodied and joined together, they create a new life form with an inner strength and solidarity that speaks of an irrepressible power. The brilliance of this piece rests in the fact that it is simultaneously imposing and ludicrous. Hammons is able to join several of hair’s associations in this one remarkable sculpture.
Hair can represent the human body and provide a fetish on which to relocate physical and social concerns. By fetish I mean both objects that contain protective power for those close to it, and a displaced focus for physical attention. Hammons constructs these powerful fetish pieces that contain power and fear, pride and oppression. These hair pieces are talismans for black recognition in a primarily white discipline. They evoke the body, specifically the black body, without actually representing it. The sexual nature of the fetish, most clearly suggested in the pubic triangles of Bag Lady in Flight, lives in each of Hammons hair pieces sublimated as an uneasy potency, both joyful and dirty in its associations. Hair invests these pieces with the energy and spirit of the individuals who inadvertently supplied the raw materials, the essence of the black community who inspired them, and the sensibility of David Hammons, who understands the scope of voices with which hair speaks.
Hammons removes hair, the symbol of both black pride and shame, from the head, its seat of distinction, whereby it takes on new associations as discard and filth. Then, recombining this disembodied, discarded hair into new formations, Hammons invests the substance with poignant commentary regarding the people from and about whom it was made. Hammons reinterprets major social and political issues with a nod toward personal interests and concerns. Hair is at once a symbol of a people and an individual feature that each person shares. It is important and symbolic, but it is also frivolous and superficial. Hammons’s hair pieces reveal this dichotomy, addressing relevant and weighty issues such as pride, power, and poverty, but always with a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor.

3
Hair, Fetishism, and Feminism:
Janine Antoni’s Loving Care

A recent advertisement shows the back of a woman, her long, lush hair spilling across the picture plane, her face entirely hidden. The text reads, “How much do you need to see to know that I am beautiful?” This kind of propaganda pervades the modern Western world. There is a certain kind of hair that immediately signifies feminine beauty—long, smooth, and flowing. We are accustomed to seeing beautiful hair in popular media, and know how to react to it—we should desire what is shown and respond with our wallets. In contemporary art, which typically ironizes popular media, how should hair as a signifier of feminine beauty be portrayed? What kind of new meanings does this kind of hair take on when it is reinstalled in the art context? How should the audience to react to hair art?
Janine Antoni has performed Loving Care several times internationally since 1992 (figures 21–24). It has become one of her most recognizable works and has been widely reproduced photographically both in art press and popular media. Excepting minor variations depending on venue, Antoni’s performance follows the simple ritualistic structure described by the work’s subtitle, “I dipped my hair in dye and mopped the floor with it.” Dressed in an unadorned black bodysuit, Antoni begins the performance by opening dozens of packages of Clairol’s Loving Care® temporary hair dye in Natural Black (the color Antoni’s mother uses) and emptying the bottles into a plastic bucket. She dips her long dark hair in the dye and then, on her hands and knees, drags her head along the floor in swaying, rhythmic motions, painting the floor in dye. Trained as a dancer, Antoni’s body movements are fluid, graceful, and trancelike. As the dye covers the floor it encroaches on standing room, forcing the viewers out of the gallery space and into another room where windows and video monitors reveal the artist’s activity. The stained floor, empty containers of dye, the bucket, and Antoni’s plastic gloves remain for the duration of the exhibition along with documentary video and photographs of the performance.
Although this piece has helped secure Antoni’s status as a bright young star of the art world, it has also met with critical controversy among the conservative old guard in the art community. Loving Care is championed as the quintessential example of the modern feminist avant garde in broad surveys such as The Power of Feminist Art. Meanwhile, it serves as the standard for comparison of contemporary work where it sometimes fares negatively, as with its reception in October, as I will elaborate, and in Catherine de Zegher’s comparison with Mona Hatoum’s Recollection, which I fully discuss in Chapter 3. The sometimes vehement and widely varied reception of Loving Care brings to the fore otherwise unspoken associations with hair as a sign of beauty. Antoni’s specific hair defines the work’s reception. Long, lush hair like hers is the kind popularly pictured on glamorous actresses and models, but when placed in the art environment, it troubles Western constructions of beauty. I propose that if Antoni’s hair did not meet the ideal standards for modern Western feminine beauty—if it was short or gray or if she wore a wig or used hair clippings removed from her head or any other such variations—the performance would have sparked less backlash; but by the same token it would have lost its potent effect and relevance.
As it was originally conceived in 1992 for “The Autoerotic Object” exhibition at Hunter College in New York, only the physical remnants of Loving Care were to be viewed as evidence of an ephemeral private ritual. Loving Care was to be an exercise in deriving pleasure from, in fetishizing, compulsive behavior. According to Juli Carson, curator of “The Autoerotic Object,” when activity rather than an object provides gratification, the fetish is dephallicized. “It is not the thing in itself, the mopped floor, that provides pleasure; rather pleasure is derived from the activity of mopping enacted as a fetishistic search for an undifferentiated subjectivity.” In this original conception of the piece, Antoni intentionally removed her body from the installation in an effort to discourage any attempts to locate a standard fetish object in her work. She discovered, though, that “[i]n doing so, Antoni refetishized a quintessential fetish of the female body (hair), isolating it as a paint brush and then removing its physical presence….Furthermore, in her effort to despectacularize her body, she found that absence instead more markedly pictorialized in image in the art press (people demanded to see the body that had made these marks.)” In her subsequent performances, Antoni reintroduces her body; she creates a visual continuum from process to remains. This way, she attempts to shift focus from the object, the remains, to the activity of her fetishized creation. But the critical reception has too often revealed a neglect of the final object and only minor interest in Antoni’s personal pleasure derived from the piece. Primary attention goes to the objectified sight of Antoni’s body fully absorbed in her ritual. Although Antoni fetishizes her activity, she risks becoming the object of fetish for her audience by allowing them to view her in the process of making the piece. What was originally intended to be the final work of art, the painted room, etc., only secondarily interests either the artist or the viewer—both have already found their fetish earlier—the remains are superfluous.
The issue of the fetish is essential here, but what is being fetishized and who is the fetishist are variables. The reception of this performance must be understood independently from its intention. Antoni herself fetishizes the physical process of her actions. A Freudian reading would see Antoni narcissistically deriving pleasure from her own body as she renders it attractive to the (male) gaze. Recognizing and compensating for her feminine inferiority, her lack of a penis, she phallicizes herself through compulsive attention to her own hair, body, and activities. Antoni is her own fetish. This Freudian interpretation is dependant on the gaze and visual pleasure of the audience, however, which was absent in her first performance of Loving Care. In that private ritual, which Antoni performed solely for herself, her pleasure did not rely on the presence of an active (male) gaze. Assuming she derives the same pleasure from her actions with or without an audience, Antoni exhibits self-fulfilled sensuality. Her audience, on the other hand, enjoys voyeuristic pleasure from viewing Antoni’s actions.
Fixated on Antoni’s lithe body, her soaking tendrils of hair, and her rhythmic horizontal movements, the attentive viewer achieves pleasure in the act of looking. According to Freud, in such a scenario, the woman represents the fear of castration and the fetishist is caught between the desire to dispel this anxiety but to believe in it simultaneously. “In the world of psychical reality the woman still has a penis in spite of all, but this penis is no longer the same as it once was. Something else has taken its place, has been appointed its successor, so to speak, and now absorbs all the interest which formerly belonged to the penis.” The fetishist refuses to look at the castrated phallus, but in doing so fixates on another object, in this case, the activated tool of female hair. He stares at this substitute phallus, gaining scopophilic satisfaction from visual possession. Here too, Antoni is the fetish, but she is rephallicized, making her the object of fetish, and no longer the active fetishist. Fetishizing her own activities is only marginally relevant to the fetishist who objectifies her femininity.
Feminists have reconsidered fetish theory, reinterpreting the Freudian preference for limited phallocentric explanations. Naomi Schor offers a reading of fetishism as a polycentered/polymorphous perversity. In Lacan’s broadened definition of the phallus, the fetish does not necessarily substitute for the mother’s missing phallus, but could be any phallus, and a phallus need not be a penis. A fetish supplies fulfillment where there is a lack; it reassures where there is fear. This suggests the need to determine what is Antoni’s lack, the lack she both hides and highlights through attention to her own fetishistic actions. Likewise, what is the lack or fear for the audience, who fixates so intently on Antoni’s body?
Cases of female fetishism are extremely rare in psychoanalytic documents, initially suggesting that female fetishism might be an oxymoron. Upon closer examination though, female fetishism does exist, only in different forms than the more prevalent male fetishism. Woman tends to fetishize her own body, or what her body produces. Occasionally, she fetishizes an object extrinsic to herself such as a man’s mustache or an article of clothing, a condition Elizabeth Grosz studies in terms of Freud’s “masculinity complex.” The problem in searching for examples of female fetishism is the prevalent but narrow approach of equating a fetish with a substitute for the mother’s phallus. Freud could not find female fetishism because he was looking in the wrong place. Women do not need to replace their nonexistent penis, but they do desire compensation for their lack of power.
Antoni has spoken of the disenfranchised status of women in the art world. “I feel attached to my artistic heritage and I want to destroy it: it defines me as an artist and it excludes me as a woman, all at the same time.” It is the continued disempowerment of women in the art world that inspires Antoni’s fetishistic actions. Her lack that requires compensation, then, is the ability to achieve security and recognition in the art world as a woman. She simultaneously recognizes and rebels against acknowledging her lack of power in the art world, her artistic castration anxiety, if you will. This uncomfortable recognition of enforced female inferiority leads Antoni to fetishize the practice of artmaking, in a stubbornly and fiercely feminine manner. She exploits the most recognizable traits of feminine supression, objectification, and fetishization, such as long, pampered hair, to a virile artistic end. Antoni’s actions give her pleasure because she performs both macho and dainty rituals simultaneously, thereby destabilizing each.
Images of Loving Care readily recall Hans Namuth’s photographs of Jackson Pollock at work (figure 25), the virile genius in a passionate yet methodical trance, creating a seminal masterpiece. Both black-and-white studies feature an artist deeply engaged in action, the painting removed from the easel and repositioned horizontally on the floor. Brushes are dispensed with as the artist’s body disperses the pigment. But whereas popular media celebrates Pollock’s status at the forefront of artmaking—in 1958 Life Magazine posed the hypothetical question, “Is He the Greatest Living U.S. Artist?”—critics vilify Antoni for essentializing the female body. This disparity partially results from the conditions of the final works of art—Pollock produces a painting which eventually hangs in a museum; Antoni creates an ephemeral performance, the remainders of which go ignored in critical work, but even if they were noticed they would be dismantled at the end of the finite exhibition timeframe. Antoni’s piece remains only in these photos, whereas the similar photos of Pollock are merely meant to document the making of a tangible permanent object.
Moreover, Pollock’s stance is one of white masculine power, and although Antoni mimics his motions, she employs tools and habits that are generally aligned with feminine oppression. Mopping and hair dying are submissive activities, women’s work that indicates servitude to and suppression by men. Unlike with Antoni, the audience never fetishizes Pollock—it always sees him as the active creator. When a man sensualizes his body, he is a virile genius; when a woman does the same, she is a seductress. It is the same hair on her head that marks Antoni as an object that she also transforms into her tool of creation. Hair plays dual roles that seem to conflict according to common notions of propriety. This incongruity disturbs critics who would prefer to classify Antoni as a feminist, but cannot reconcile her promulgation of (or rather, their insistence on seeing her as) the image of woman as object. Antoni’s reception as a fetish object speaks more to the desires of the audience (and Antoni’s manipulation of that) than it does of Antoni as a subject.
Brief comments regarding Antoni’s performances published in a roundtable discussion, “The Reception of the Sixties,” in October 69, 1994, focused attention on contemporary feminist artists who revisit tropes and techniques of body artists of the 1960s and 70s, rendering Antoni the “poster child” for such discussion. In the conversation, Silvia Kolbowski mourns what she sees as a regressive trend among 1990s artists. “…[T]here is the recent work of someone like Janine Antoni, which I find really problematic in terms of the way it figures a relation to an earlier paradigm: you take something for its pictorial value, with no relation to what it meant historically, and you produce work that critiques it purely on a pictorial level.” Benjamin Buchloh shares in this distress, “I would go one step further. It’s not only in pictorial terms but, precisely, cashing in at this moment in time on the radicality of the art of the 1960s…but not in order to invest the work now with a specific emotionality but to offer a product that seems to satisfy both demands for radical feminist theorization and for a new quality of dramatized objects. What’s happening in Antoni’s work is precisely the spectacularization of feminist theory. And the spectacularization of Fluxus practices.” The discussants continue to lament the waning interest in Lacanian theory, and increased evidence of literalism in contemporary art. Between the lines, they display their collective distaste for early feminist performance artists who expose their attractive bodies, like Carolee Schneeman and Hannah Wilke, and their preference for 1980s feminist artists like Sherrie Levine and Jenny Holzer who attack the male paradigm not with their bodies, but with linguistics—what is deemed masculine terms and forms.
Two issues later, October made this digression its central theme. Questions were posed to 25 artists, writers, and theorists, regarding the apparent feminist artistic trend of bypassing 80s theorizations for a return to 60s and 70s essentialism, and accessibility vs. elitism. The questions were obviously interconnected, as many of the respondents commented, and seemed to promote a dichotomy of art that is either theoretical-elitist-mediated or essentialist-accessible-unmediated. They revealed a snobbish and defensive fear on the part of the October editors, that if theory were preempted, their positions would be obsolete. In light of the previous roundtable comments, the work of Janine Antoni specifically seemed to be the implicit target for these questions, which provoked a number of responses that cited Loving Care or Antoni’s work in general to illustrate their stances on the debate.
Antoni herself admits her debt to art of the 1960s and 70s, while she clearly displays a knowledgeable digestion of the art of the 1980s. She did not bypass or ignore theory-based work from the 1980s, but she chose to respond more thoroughly to other influences in her own work:

The 80s artists, Kruger, Levine, Holzer, Sherman, are historically important and really influenced me. They made it possible for me to do the work I’m doing now. But the irony of 80s is not something I’m interested in. My strategy has more to do with the feminist artists of the 70s—the humor, the process, the emphasis on performance, the intensely visceral quality of their work. It was necessary for the 80s feminists to exist for me to ‘return’ as the 70s. The 80s feminists used a language that was already respected, and they put their content in it, whereas the 70s feminists were much more extreme, and they paid for it by being dismissed.
In general, the 25 respondents defended feminist art of the 1990s, stating that contemporary artists have digested the theoretical textual work prevalent in the 1980s, and have refused to overwork theory lest it become meaningless word play. Instead they have returned to specific issues of gender formation and body consciousness that were raised by the groundbreaking feminist artists in the 1970s. If anything, the respondents seemed to applaud a dismissal of abstract theoretical verbiage and a renewed interest in a politicized attention to gender issues that had effectively raised consciousness in art before. The new generation of artists does not ignore theory, but rather, goes beyond it. They cite Loving Care specifically as an expansion of 80s theory, going beyond the binary understanding of the body as cultural construct or as the “real” feminine essence. Antoni controls her own body, acknowledges its commodification, and revels in its sensuality. Even those who criticize Loving Care do so for pointed rather than generalized representative reasons of larger issues, and disagree with the general premise of the whole essentialism/theory debate.
The premise of this debate attempts to position art and artists into rigid categories. Loving Care provokes controversy because it refuses to neatly adhere to any predigested philosophy. Even while the performance criticizes patriarchal structures, it embraces elements of female objectification. How can this work have it both ways? Is it feminist? Is it regressive? Does it merely envision a simplistic, stereotypical concept of feminine existence? Rather, it acknowledges the contradictions and often opposing forces that sway and mold contemporary sensibilities of and by women. Antoni looks the part of ideal feminine beauty, and proudly flaunts her physical qualities. She wears her hair long and makes art that directly exploits the power of that hair to serve as a sign of beauty. Rather than removing hair to create discrete art objects, Antoni insists on subjectifying hair in the form where it is often objectified. This is a new, usually unseen form of feminism that accepts the complexities of femininity as a social construct and does not necessarily demand a reconceptualization of life free from the bonds of patriarchy. It suggests that as a group of savvy, literary, visually aware intellectuals, the 1990s audience no longer requires a deconstruction of femininity. After all, almost everyone who takes part in Western culture is aware of media manipulation and histories of patriarchy. Artists no longer need to recapitulate those same underlying facts with endless theoretical discourse, but to work within the given circumstances toward new discoveries. Antoni refuses to cut her hair short or otherwise relinquish her right to adopt Western constructed signs of femininity, even while she clearly recognizes the ways in which her hair marks her as a product of and object in attitudes toward women.
Hair specifically provokes confusing and mixed messages about femininity, not only to the audience, but to the artist herself. Hair is part of the package that constitutes an attractive woman. It is one of the quintessential Western male fetishes. A removable and desirable body part, hair offers itself for visual fragmentation and fixation. Using the actual hair on her head—Antoni did not form a paintbrush or mop made of human hair—Antoni troubled the fetishist’s aim. In the fetishist’s ideal scenario, hair alone—passive, objectified, and separated from a willful individual—provides sexual satisfaction. Female essence is necessary, but a woman’s personality is superfluous, unwanted by the male fetishist. When the woman is not conveniently passive she is a nuisance, an obstactle in the fetishist’s path toward his desired object. So when a woman actively re-appropriates this object of fetish, she wields power over men. Man wants to possess the phallus/power; woman owns the phallus/power. And what is a fetish but the embodiment of power? Man attempts to employ the fetish as a safety mechanism, to keep him from recognizing too painful a truth, but he is thwarted by the woman who brandishes the very same weapon for an ulterior motive, to empower herself and reaffirm her subjecthood. When Antoni uses the hair on her head to create art, she reclaims the fetish object and the power to create art. Clearly, very different associations arise when an easily fragmented body part is activated within the complex of the whole body than when it is separated from the body and employed as an object.
Hair, of course, has been invested with the very essence of power throughout history and culture. African fetishes that incorporate hair hold the ability to ward off evil or direct it toward an enemy. It is hair that invests these objects with the capacity to alter fate and give their possessor its magical powers. The story of Samson and Delilah literally equates hair with strength and power. When Delilah betrays Samson and enables his enemies to cut off his hair, his treasured source of virility, he is rendered weak and helpless. Similarly, Medusa’s snaky locks were her source of power. But Perseus did not stop with a simple trim for his enemy; he cut off Medusa’s whole head to disempower her. Each of these stories have been equated with castration anxiety, where the phallus means power, and it can be lost. The removability of hair translates as a perfectly analogous symbol for this fear. Post-Freudian readings of the Medusa myth see straight through the castration anxiety to an underlying fear of women. “But isn’t this fear convenient for them? Wouldn’t the worst be, isn’t the worst, in truth, that women aren’t castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning? You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.” It is less frightening to focus on hair as the powerful force than to recognize women as the other, a willful and strong being.
The one who owns the hair is the one in control. This is why fragmentation and fetishization are a safety valve for insecure men. As a fetish, hair no longer gives power to the one who grows it, but to the one who possesses it, either physically, visually, or even just mentally. Whereas man wants to have the phallus, woman is the phallus, because she is the one who traditionally keeps her hair long and noticeable. In this system, women may safely maintain their hair, as long as they do so for the benefit of men. But this logic inevitably leads to power struggles and manipulation. On a more or less conscious level, women recognize that they can control people around them according to how they treat their own hair and bodies. Illustrating this point, Antoni relates a story told to her in her childhood by her grandmother. “Barto [Antoni’s grandfather] told my grandmother that he loved her for her long, beautiful hair. He warned her, however, that if she ever cut her braids, he would no longer love her. This enraged my grandmother. After he had left the house that day, she grabbed her two braids—which reached down to her hips—and snipped them off at the ears. She then tacked them in a crucifix form above their bed.” Antoni’s grandmother was able to assert herself and manipulate her husband without ever touching him, only herself. Was cutting off her hair to spite her husband like cutting one’s nose to spite one’s face? Perhaps. But it was an effective and industrious solution for someone in a position with limited options. And so, the translation of these thoughts into an artistic vision, Loving Care, is indeed complicated and problematic. It is not based in a utopian or revisionist ideal of feminism, matriarchy, or essentialism; nor does it passively submit to patriarchal objectification of women. Antoni is both the subject and the object, the fetishist and and fetish, the master and the muse.
Returning to the audience, whether or not they comprehend the self-reflexive complexities in Antoni’s performance, they nevertheless achieve a certain pleasure watching Antoni perform. “A beautiful piece, I thought: especially the movement of her body, which had an exceptional fragility about it.” The simple pleasure of enjoying the sight of something beautiful is not simple at all, but manipulative and multilayered. Antoni has transformed herself into the multifaceted embodiment of the phallus, the seat of power. The aggressive human desire to possess the phallus explains the media fetishization of Antoni. The comforting ownership of photographing, cropping, and editing views of Antoni’s performance is distressed by the unrelenting reality that it is she who has manipulated these very views. Antoni controls her own actions, including those that make her attractive to the fetishizing eye.
This scheme disconcerts the practiced art critic, who is too well-read and liberated to fall into the trap of objectifying the female form, but finds him or herself doing so when confronted with Antoni in Loving Care. Such art critics would surely resent the artist who manipulates them into such an embarrassing predicament. But nevertheless, even in the previously discussed October 69, this phenomenon reveals itself. In the 18-page article focused on art of the 1960s, aside from two works by Robert Morris (whose exhibition allegedly inspired the conversation), the only artworks illustrated are Loving Care and Chocolate Gnaw (figure 26), 1992, by Janine Antoni. Her work only warranted a short verbal digression, and a negative one at that, but its compelling image took precedence over every other artist and artwork discussed. The choice by October to publish a photograph of Loving Care belies the discussants’ protestations about the work’s value. In classical fetishistic manner, they deny the importance of what upsets them, but cannot resist looking at it all the same. They simultaneously acknowledge and refuse to admit their fear. But what is the psychoanalytic root of the October fetish? I propose that their collective fear stems from a hypertheorized guilt in enjoying the seductive force of beauty, of partaking in the constructed ideal of beauty as a reflection of a given society’s values. They want to transcend their culture’s unquestioning acceptance of visual pleasure and instead enjoy art for intellectual satisfaction, but Loving Care demands to be seen from both an intellectual viewpoint and from culturally constructed notions of feminine beauty, and neither is able to rest comfortably with the work.
Critics exhibited the same difficulty in reconciling Hannah Wilke’s use of her own body as the site of both feminine suppression and sensual pleasure. Wilke, like Antoni, overtly enjoyed exposing her beauty, and made it integral to her work (figure 27). Critics could not accept an attractive woman as a subject, only as object; and for one to use herself as her own object was either narcissistic or self-abusive, or both, but never healthy and rarely a valid justification for serious art. Had she been an unattractive woman, Wilke’s work would have surely been universally celebrated, but then it would have made entirely different points about female identity. Feminists themselves were divided in their reactions to Wilke’s performances—either embarrassed by her exploitation of feminine beauty or supportive of her critical reappropriation of her own qualities. In the following quote, ardent feminist Lucy Lippard reveals her disdain for Wilke’s work as it validates artist as beauty:

I must admit to a personal lack of sympathy with women who have themselves photographed in black stockings, garter belts, boots, with bare breasts, bananas, and coy, come-hither glances….I must say I admire the courage of the women with less than beautiful bodies who defy convention and become particularly vulnerable to cruel criticism, although those women who do happen to be physically well-endowed probably come in for more punishment in the long run…. [Hannah Wilke] has been making erotic art with vaginal imagery for over a decade, and since the women’s movement, has begun to do performances in conjunction with her sculpture, but her own confusion of her roles as beautiful woman and artist, as flirt and feminist, has resulted at times in politically ambiguous manifestations that have exposed her to criticism on a personal as well as on an artistic level.
What Lippard objects to, along with the October editors, is complexity. Lippard also collapses the artist and her reputation with her art and representation. Art that equally subscribes to more than one, often opposing ideal, is incomprehensible to a simplistic reading, and therefore bad art.
Both the work of Antoni and Wilke stand in opposition to the work of an artist like Yves Klein, who used women’s bodies as art and to make art (figure 28). His pieces in which he painted a woman with his signature International Klein Blue color and then dragged her across a canvas, declaring the blue smears his final work, are similar to Loving Care, which also applies pigment to a woman and then uses her body as the brush to transfer the pigment to another surface. The obvious and crucial difference is that Klein is the artist who objectifies another human being whereas Antoni is the artist who remains the subject throughout her work. Rachel Lachowicz, who is often paired with Antoni for their contemporary rethinkings of feminism, differently reinterprets artistic/phallic privilege in her re-enactments of Klein’s work. In Red Not Blue, 1992, Lachowicz reverses Klein’s prescribed gender roles. Lachowicz, in a cocktail dress instead of Klein’s tuxedo, creates seminal markings from her male, rather than female models/brushes, using red lipstick in place of blue paint for pigment. Lachowicz’s straightforward and humorous anti-enactment of Klein’s work is simpler than Antoni’s conflation of roles in her own performance. Lachowicz appropriates the active male genius role and renders the object masculine. Antoni likewise assumes the position of artist/creator/genius, but also poses as model and object, working within and against the paternalistic art world in a complex system of relations and self-reflection. Antoni consciously chose both Klein and Pollock as abstract expressionist precedents on which to comment in her performance. Each of these white male artists represent the macho mystique prevalent in the art world, the same artistic bias that sees artmaking as an aggressive masculine activity, and excludes women from its historical trajectory. Antoni did not obscure her referents, but complicated the similarities and differences between their and her work to enable multiple interpretations. I disagree with those critics who would argue that Loving Care is confused—complicated, yes, as it understands the loaded and conflicting associations with hair and femininity.
Also pertinent to this entire inquiry of hair as a subject in art are the similarities between Loving Care and David Hammons’s early body prints from the 1970s (figures 15–16). Both Hammons and Antoni use their own bodies to apply pigment to a surface. Whereas each of them use hair in their art, Hammons separates the two elements—his body and hair do not appear in the same works. Both are American artists, but Hammons is a black man in Harlem, whereas Antoni is a white woman from the Bahamas who lives in New York. Hammons’s body prints date from the 1970s, although his hair art spans approximately the past 25 years, whereas Antoni’s work has a distinct 1990s feel that is retrospective to the 1970s.
The main difference between Antoni’s and Hammons’s work lies in their reception. Unlike the controversy surrounding Loving Care, Hammons suffered no criticism of his manipulation of his own body to create images. The issue-oriented subject matter of these body prints, such as Injustice Case, 1970, were pointedly confrontational and controversial, but Hammons’s method of forming these images only generated admiration and praise. To create the work, Hammons pressed his greased body against paper and then applied pigment to his markings. As with Pollock, photographs of Hammons at work supposedly only serve to document his technique, not to constitute the final work of art. Hammons’s bodily manipulations result in a permanent work of art that is a saleable commodity, while Antoni’s performance is her work, and does not produse any saleable product.
Until the art world’s recent “rediscovery” of Hammons, his body prints were his most commercially successful venture. Still now, when art surveys include any one piece by Hammons, they tend to choose one of his body prints, even though he abandoned that technique long ago. Since the early 1970s, his work has turned away from art as a commodity, and instead values cheap, ubiquitous substances that are generally ephemeral and uncollectable. In contrast to his profitable body prints, Hammons’s work with hair has been less critically acknowledged and consumed by dealers. The advent of his hair art marked Hammons’s simultaneous disappearance from the art world. Despite his proven saleability with the early body prints, Hammons was no longer a hot commodity when he marketed art made from black hair.
Why would Antoni’s hair/body piece generate such criticism and attention, whereas Hammons’s hair goes virtually ignored and his body work incites universal praise? As I have discussed, Antoni attracts attention with her feminine physical beauty, and engenders confusion through her focus on hair, a generally fetishized object of female narcissism and oppression. Hammons, on the other hand, an African American man, does not embody seductive beauty for the primarily white privileged audience, but rather, inspires fear and distrust, guilt and anxiety. Making political images from his body on a piece of paper fits Hammons safely into the art audience’s controllable environment. But creating ambiguous objects constructed of an actual black person’s hair confronts the audience with more reality than is comfortable. Antoni’s hair is desired; Hammons’s hair disgusts and confounds. The usually affluent, white viewer sees white feminine hair as passive—it is desired by others; while black masculine hair is active—it threatens with its difference. For the white audience, it is frightening and disconcerting to confront active black art, which explains the general dismissal of Hammons’s hair pieces. Much more comfortable is his passively controllable, frameable, and hangable body print.
Saying that the audience sees Antoni’s work as passive and feminine does not imply that it is weak or ineffective. Like Antoni’s anecdote about her grandmother, Loving Care manipulates an unfavorable set of circumstances to an unexpected advantage. The piece appropriates the fetish, destabilizes the gaze, and empowers and subjectifies feminine beauty. By exploiting the fetish and convoluting it to ulterior purposes, Loving Care tackles the dominant systems of gender relations and artmaking from the inside out. Naomi Schor recounts the arguments advocating female fetishism: “In Kofman’s Derridean reading of Freud, female fetishism is not so much, if at all, a perversion, rather a strategy designed to turn the so-called ‘riddle of femininity’ to women’s account.” But she ends her investigation with the nagging fear that female fetishism may really be an old misogynistic concept with new feminist packaging. “What if the appropriation of fetishism—a sort of ‘perversion-theft,’ if you will—were in fact only the latest and most subtle form of ‘penis-envy’? At the very least a certain unease resulting from the continued use of the term fetishism, with its constellation of misogynistic connotations, must be acknowledged.”
In a separate essay, Schor addresses controversial issues surrounding Loving Care head on. She aligns the elite postmodern theoretical intellectualism favored by October with irony and fetishism, and poses it against pathos, literalism, immediacy, and pastiche. Both irony and fetishism negate and preserve a troubling reality, and therefore tend to walk hand in hand, speaking in each other’s languages. The confusion with Loving Care, then, is that while it addresses fetishism, it allegedly stands on the literalism-immediacy side of the equation. It separates fetishism from irony, and disconcerts the comfort of sublation implicit in the ironist/fetishist’s tactics. Schor calls for a feminist division between the two concepts, but expects and prefers an adoption of irony, not fetishism. “I fear that until irony is divorced from fetishism, the risk of irony must be taken with extreme care lest the feminist ironist find herself playing straight into the hands of the male fetishist from whose perverse images of women she sets out to distance herself.”
By exploring fetishism and holding irony as a secondary priority (I would not say that Antoni abandons irony, nor that her work is literal, despite the accusations by October), Antoni does risk her own objectification and fetishization. It is the tension between the permission and refusal to play into the fetishizing eye that continually piques interest in her work. Antoni needles at an insecure and changing identity of femininity, and pushes it in several directions at once. Her perceptive focus on hair as a symbol of constructed femininity offers a common feature already laden with multivalent connotations to work with. Antoni’s hair provokes attraction, admiration, and anxiety. The overt implications of Loving Care belie the complex and subtle ways in which hair is woven through our culture as a defining element of femininity.
Antoni’s first United States public performance of Loving Care occured in 1996 at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, 23 years after Mierle Ukeles presented Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance (figure 29), 1973, at the same venue. This comparison is critical, as each offers alternative views of women compulsively mopping. Whereas Ukeles cleans, Antoni dirties. Ukeles’s actions—compulsively mopping, dusting, sweeping the galleries—were intended to reveal the kind of daily necessary chores generally performed by women that make public and private spaces run smoothly, but are themselves usually kept hidden. Like Loving Care, which also publicly displays an otherwise private female ritual, Hartford Wash provokes in the viewer a disturbing sense of intrusion. But viewers of Loving Care commonly experience voyeuristic shame whereas Ukeles’s performance evokes sympathetic guilt. Ukeles performs as the mother—quietly and modestly cleaning up after others. In fact, her focus on acts of cleaning and maintenance were initially inspired by her own motherhood. Antoni, on the other hand, is sensual, erotic, untamed, and like the floor she paints, dirty.
The two artists perform similar actions, but reactions to them vary with the focus on hair. Hair identifies Antoni as a sexual feminine object of desire. Her attention to feminine pastimes—preening and cleaning—complicates her role as woman and artist. No one has ever argued whether Ukeles is a feminist—her work has commonly been accepted as an honoring ritual for too-often unthanked workers. But Antoni, because she exploits feminine beauty in her work, which perhaps historically has been too revered to warrant an respectful unveiling, triggers confusion. She consciously chooses hair as a signifier for feminine beauty for the focus of her performance. The diverse and complicated reactions surrounding Loving Care exemplify the multivalent associations derived from a beautiful head of hair in the context of the art world.

4
The Physicality of Disembodied Hair:
Mona Hatoum’s Recollection

Hair that grows on the human head or body becomes a foreign substance when removed from the person. While on the head, hair indicates health, virility, and attractiveness; but after it is shed, a stray hair instantly transforms into filth, a sign of decay. On its own, a singular hair is like a bug—small and harmless, but dirty and disgusting and indicative of an army more just like it. Bugs and hair both seem so fragile and delicate, but are in fact quite hearty and resilient. Insects are among the oldest and most adaptable life forms; hair is as indestructible as bone or wood. Both seem to have an insidious quality, and produce similar reactions of disgust when found in food or piled in the corners of rooms. But whereas bugs generate almost universal annoyance or repulsion, hair can be the source of either pleasure or disgust depending on circumstances.
Nevertheless, the world abounds with insect collectors. Somehow, those repulsive little creatures gain respectability when neatly displayed in an orderly, scientific vitrine. Why are there not as many hair collectors, then? Mona Hatoum is a hair collector who displays her own home-grown specimens in her installation Recollection (figures 30–33), 1995.
Recollection sparsely fills a room with hundreds of delicate, airy balls of hair. Any breeze generated by viewers’ movements scatters the hair balls into new currents. They gather in corners, they stray beyond the boundaries of the designated installation space, they collect at the viewer’s feet. As a group they violate the order of the exhibition space, and yet individually they are minimal, compact, and regular in form.
From the ceiling hangs an almost imperceptible curtain of single strands of hair. At regular five-inch intervals, individual hairs tied together reach a length that stretches from the rafters almost to the floor. Their lightness renders them ethereal, and they surprise unsuspecting viewers by brushing against their faces or catching in their mouths. As with the hair balls, their fragile delicacy disrupts the perception of their symmetrical regularity. The strands seem randomly distributed, although insistently unavoidable to the viewer’s touch.
The hair balls and strands exist in a seemingly organic formation that might suggest growth or decay, and belies their placement by human hands. They seem to have materialized on their own like cobwebs infesting an abandoned building. This too would suggest human absence, but the very materiality of hair insists on human presence. Simultaneously, Hatoum’s piece denies and recalls human existence. What categorically asserts human creation are the two more industrial, less “natural,” elements of the installation.
On a table in a corner of the room sits a weaving loom prepared with strands of human hair as its fabric. The warp and weft pulled tight and smooth, the hair submits to a grid of human-imposed geometry. But at the ends, unwoven, the hair curls according to its natural texture. Nearby, a used bar of soap is infested with stray pubic hair; not randomly caked in as we all hate to find it, but deliberately plugged at the roots in a neat straight line as in a transplant. These objects are no more carefully organized or constructed than the hair balls and hanging strands, but more readily indicate the intention with which they were created. This evidence of intention reflects back on the balls and strands, reminding the viewer that they too were designed and placed by a person.
In modern Western culture, it would seem that only someone with an obsessive nature would have the patience and endurance to painstakingly collect and organize hair into such precise arrangements. Hair is not a socially acceptable artistic medium like paint or wood which warrants such attention. Rather, disembodied hair is usually considered waste and Hatoum’s work might suggest an unhealthy compulsion to some. According to hair propaganda and common practice, hair is only deserving of attention while part of the human body—once removed, it immediately loses its value and should be discarded. (Then again, some people collect insects.) Mona Hatoum’s collection and installation of her own hair disrupts notions of the boundaries of the self, and broadens the definition of artistic medium.
Hatoum began collecting her own hair as if by chance; she describes being so taken with the tactile sensation of her hair left in a bathtub drain that she could not part with it.

The hair balls that ended up in Recollection were collected over a period of six years. I made one accidentally when I was staying at a friend’s place in Cardiff in 1989…It was the hair that came off my head in the bath. I didn’t want to leave it behind, so I picked it up and was playing with it absentmindedly, rolling it in my hands. It was a perfect ball, very cocoon-like. It was beautiful. I decided to collect them without any specific idea of what I would do with them.
Thus, it was the haptic experience of her disembodied hair and not the numerous intangible associations that it inspires that initially attracted Hatoum to it as an artistic medium. Her eventual employment of the medium reveals Hatoum’s deep connection and understanding of hair’s physical qualities. The hair in Recollection is not restricted, but rather, re-formed in ways to best exploit its natural tendencies. Hair shapes the installation, always testing the artist’s imposition of order.
Recollection provides an opportunity to discuss a number of the pertinent issues raised by hair. As it does not overtly engage any specific issue, but rather speaks foremost to the actual physical properties of hair, Recollection may be addressed from any number of theoretical stances. I wish to deeply analyze the ways in which it exploits the physical nature of hair, and follow those strands along with discussions of recurrent issues raised in Hatoum’s oeuvre to suggest alternate modes of interpreting the work as a whole, thereby better understanding the potentialities of hair in an art context.
A Palestinian born in Beirut, Hatoum was in London when war broke out in Lebanon in 1975. Forced to stay in England, Hatoum enrolled in art school and began creating works addressing themes of isolation, imprisonment, loneliness, and war. As an outsider in a Western society, Hatoum has equated her situation with that of other marginalized groups such as the British black community, who shares with her a pervasive awareness of being considered the Other by the majority of their society. Hatoum admires and identifies with the black struggle to maintain solidarity in an intolerant community.

The black struggle became more diversified once the basic issues were established. And blackness here is not to do with the colour of your skin but a political stance. In the early 1980s I don’t think I saw my practice as part of the black struggle, I was doing my own thing…I was basically trying to deal with an environment that I had experienced as hostile and intolerant and eventually those feelings began to pervade the work—and still do.
Although African American, not British, David Hammons provides such an example of finding strength in his own minority community while interacting with an often hostile majority. His hair art aggravates boundaries of difference and exclusion with wry wit and serious messages. When clearly addressing a white audience, Hammons obstinately and perversely reveals the outsider status of his own black community. Doing so, his work takes on political import that teases out social inequities normally combed over by the white majority. Hatoum likewise approaches artmaking from the perspective of an outsider even in her own home. In Recollection, Hatoum’s hair might represent the isolation of one person. Her hair infests the room as if searching for others like itself, but only meets more of its own kind. Its interactions with viewers provoke disgusted fascination, but an irritation, never inclusion. Both Hatoum and Hammons employ hair as a mark of difference, a physical boundary that separates them from the majority of their environments.
The fragmentation and estrangement one’s own body reappears throughout Hatoum’s installations and performances. Hair provides an ideal means to explore this theme, as it is painlessly removed, constantly renewing itself, and comes pre-invested with issues of fetishism, filth, and femininity. In one of her most renowned works, Corps Etranger/Foreign Body (figures 34–35), 1994, Hatoum seeks to demystify the body while blurring the boundaries between the body and its surroundings. The piece involves an endoscopic video of Hatoum from the inside and out, entering each of her orifices and exploring the visceral pathways of her body. Viewers enter the round video enclosure through two narrow entrances to see or walk across the circular projection of Hatoum’s body on the floor. As the camera enters and emerges from each of her orifices, differently textured and immediately recognizable types of hair mark the boundaries between inside and outside. The sounds of the human heartbeat and breathing pervades the installation. Advanced medical technology provides a super-human eye with which to view the body, separating what seems “natural” in daily life from what seems garish and artificial in its microscopic emphasis on “nature.” The body, which should be familiar to all, seems grossly alien under such a minute examination. Hatoum’s own body becomes the foreign body through dissociation, like a stray hair.
Hatoum effects the same jarring dissociation from the human body with Recollection as she does with Foreign Body. In both installations, aspects of our own corporeality are examined so closely that they become unfamiliar and disturbing. Individual parts, investigated separately and not comprising the whole body, seem to live with their own self-generated energy. Hatoum’s innards seen through endoscopics and pulsating on the floor are like alien creatures; her hair given free reign of a room unto itself becomes an infestation of small pests. The knowledge that these are both really human makes such associations all the more disturbing.
The foreign body references not only Hatoum to herself, but also the sensation of being a stranger in a foreign land. The notion of self-alienation resonates with Hatoum’s Palestinian heritage and separation from her family. For Hatoum, the concept of dislocation encompasses the Other both intimately on a personal physical level, and broadly as an exotic individual interacting in a foreign community.
At the same time, it must be mentioned that although she exhibits an awareness of outsider status and alienation, Hatoum’s disembodied hair paradoxically demonstrates a sense of holistic completeness on a personal level. Although in both Recollection and Foreign Body Hatoum aggravates the tension between corporeal familiarity and dissociation, she comfortably explores her own body’s boundaries and reveals a healthy curiosity about its workings. Hatoum brings from her native home a sense of connection between the physical and spiritual worlds, between body and mind. She states that in Western society, people are often unfamiliar with their own bodies, and she seeks to return the physical self to art.

The first thing I noticed when I came [to London] was how divorced people were from their bodies…I have always been dissatisfied with work that just appeals to your intellect and does not actually involve you in a physical way. For me, the embodiment of an artwork is within the physical realm; the body is the axis of our perceptions, so how can art afford not take that as a starting point? We relate to the world through our senses. You first experience an artwork physically. I like the work to operate on both sensual and intellectual levels. Meanings, connotations, and associations come after the initial physical experience as your imagination, intellect, psyche are fired off by what you’ve seen.
In pieces like Recollection and Foreign Body, Hatoum challenges her viewers’ familiarity and comfort with their own human body. The insistence on visualizing the body’s most mysterious realities may repulse or disturb the viewer, but it is not intended to inure the viewer to such sights. The body, its products, and its inner workings continue to fascinate both the artist and the viewer, and Hatoum explores this curiosity with sensitivity to the nuances of human material, and may in fact ultimately produce a positive response in the viewer.
It is because of this positive and healthy curiosity about the workings of the human body that popular theories of abjection or l’informe will never completely describe Hatoum’s hair art. Since the late 1980s–early 1990s, writers who discuss art made from human detritus generally speak of it in terms of abjection. Indeed, as per Julia Kristeva’s definition of abjection, Recollection does fall into the category of “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.” But more often, the abject implies sorrow for human frailty and weakness; abjection is a wretched condition. In Rosalind Krauss’s reading of Georges Bataille, abjection is the miserable and the disgusting, “a force that strips the laboring masses of their human dignity and reproduces them as dehumanized social waste…” Recollection is more complex than that definition allows. In so many recent articles, books, and reviews, the term “abjection” is thrown around without a clear explanation of what the writer intends to communicate. Often I wonder whether most writers themselves fully understand the nuances of abjection. The abject is a catch phrase that identifies the contemporary avant-garde without describing it. Regardless, any worthwhile work of art deserves to be analyzed more fully than as an example of either ambiguity or disgust.
Georges Bataille’s theory of l’informe, as elaborated by Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois in their 1996 exhibition of the same name, better addresses the multivalent elements that comprise Recollection, but perhaps only because l’informe is a less commonly used term than abjection, with a broader, more ambivalent and inclusive definition. The theory encompasses base materialism, horizontality, and rhythm, all of which are manifested in Hatoum’s installation. Hair is a base material that is related to scatological art by its removal from the body as waste. It succumbs to gravity, stray balls of it moving along the floor and hanging strands softly dissecting the vertical space, in opposition to traditional vertical art: paintings or upright sculptures. The size and spacing of the hairy elements in Recollection throb with a rhythmic sexual energy, or pulse, as it is called according to the language of l’informe.
In her essay on Recollection, Catherine de Zegher uses the terminology common to discussions of abject art and l’informe. Unfortunately, she fails to substantiate her wide vocabulary with reasoned explanations that carry her readers from description to conclusion. After speaking about the employment of bassesse and bas matérilisme (lowness and base materialism, but the French terms imply a greater intellectualism) in Recollection, de Zegher states that “the hair gets to you….At that moment all progress in space is coupled with regression; hair invokes contradictory reactions from fascination to abjection…” Firstly, abjection is less a reaction than a state of being. Secondly, it generally involves lurid fascination rather than moral opposition. Nevertheless, I am impressed with her clever inclusion of the psychoanalytic concept of regression. All in one sentence! I include this quote because it is representative of the kind of writing found on trendy concepts like l’informe and the abject—vague, underdeveloped, and confused. Moreover, de Zegher curated the show that originally commissioned Recollection, so it should follow that she would deeply understand the work and her thoughts on the subject would be worthwhile for elucidation.
As a proponent of abjection and l’informe, de Zegher indicates that Hatoum’s installation derives its strenght from its ability to surpass minimalistic boundaries. Here, she does demonstrate an understanding of a prevalent theme in both theoretical discourses, illustrating how these types of art differ from and disrupt traditionally accepted monumental art forms, particularly minimalism. The abject and l’informe are defined in contrast to such work, by their refusal to obey the clean, straight, orderly geometry of minimalism. “Because order always indicates limitation, disorder has by implication limitless potential for patterning.” The untamed ends of the otherwise geometric weaving loom or the tangled appearance of the systematically hung hair strands clearly demonstrate how pattern and discord co-exist in Recollection.
Yet, much of Hatoum’s oeuvre shares common features with minimalism. Her sculptural installations usually reveal a preference for hard-edged materials, rigid angles, and austere simplicity in form. The softness and delicacy found in Recollection is really a departure from the shapes and textures found in her other works, although her performances have often employed base materials. But although much of her work appears in minimalistic forms, it always relates to the human body through its proportions and suggestions of loneliness, exile, brutality, or other related subjects. Describing her work, Hatoum states that, “[u]nlike minimal objects, they are not self-referential.” Her work is never abstract; it is never only about its form—which, despite her comment, is not unlike certain minimalist works. Richard Artschwager created a box formed of hair in 1969 (figure 36) that easily could be described in the terminology of abject art or l’informe rather than alongside the clean lines and boxes of artists like Donald Judd or Carl Andre, where formalist theory traditionally situates it. The problem with these theories, and what makes them imperfect in applying to works like Recollection, is that their means for discussing recurring themes in art reveals more about art historical methodology than about the works themselves. Art theory, like all theories, conforms to the expectations of its culture. Today it is fashionable to understand hair art in terms of ambiguity or disgust, while thirty years ago hair art could acceptably fit in with the ideals of minimalism.
Another popular discourse, fetishism is inevitable in any current discussion of hair. As a removable, gendered part of the body, hair is a convenient object of displaced sexual attention, and has been recognized as such since the publication of Freud’s essay on fetishism in 1927. De Zegher, as smitten with postmodern interpretations of fetishism as she is with abjection and l’informe, rhapsodizes over Hatoum’s use of the fetishized object. “At once fetishized (her own splitting hairs stand in for the lost/transitional object—what Freud called the ‘longed-for sight of the female member’) and fetishist (as contemplating subject no longer ‘split’ by the gaze of a male Other), the artist examines in an ambivalent way the notion of disavowal, or the urge to distance oneself from the sight and knowledge of difference.” De Zegher aligns herself with a Lacanian de-phallocentric notion of the fetish—that the fetish is not a stand-in for the phallus, but rather for any desired object. However, she never suggests what the hair in this case replaces. She is so enamored of fetish theory , and has so internalized that hair must always be a fetish object, that she neglects to defend whether hair is a fetish, or replacement object, in the specific case of Recollection.
De Zegher contrasts Hatoum’s Recollection with Janine Antoni’s Loving Care (figures 21–24) on the basis of the phallocentric fetish object. She states that Antoni’s performance “can only be read as a disguised transgressive act, or a reductive, iconographic transposition of the legacy of art from the 1960s to the 1990s. Ironizing the machismo of action painting, Antoni’s hair-dye performance nevertheless re-phallicizes the fetish (female hair) and alludes, unlike Recollection, to the notion of victimhood.” This simplistic reading ignores the subtleties and associations raised in Loving Care, which I already discussed in Chapter 3, “Hair, Fetishism, and Feminism: Janine Antoni’s Loving Care.”
A simplistic, trendy understanding of the fetish is insufficient to unravel the complexities of Recollection. Hair does not always necessarily equal fetish, and when or if it does, the type of fetish indicated is not necessarily the Freudian or Lacanian version as a misplaced object of sexuality. Another, pre-psychoanalytic, concept of the fetish better applies to Hatoum’s installation. Recollection has fetishistic qualities, not in the Freudian or Lacanian displacement sense, but in powerful, mystical, or ritualistic way. Generally applied to non-Western art, the fetish can also mean a talisman of power that protects its owner. Rather than replacing a missing object, the primitive fetish provides in its original form—not as a replacement—magical power. That is, it creates a new intangible force; it does not imitate an absent object. It does, however, incorporate ingredients from absent sources of strength and fear, such as human or animal hair and teeth. Hair is symbolic and suggestive of the human body, feminized in this context, but not necessarily standing in for what is lacking; more of a ghost of what has been, and whose essence still remains. The hair in Recollection is not a replacement, but an emblem of power and protection. It depicts a feminine self-celebration, as its intended context illustrates.
Recollection was originally commissioned for the exhibition series “Inside the Visible. Begin the Beguine in Flanders,” organized by Catherine de Zegher for the Kanaal Art Foundation in Kortrijk, Belgium. It was installed in an old Belgian béguinage, which is similar in practice to a convent, where women spent their days praying, writing, and making lacework. Later it was reinstalled as part of the exhibition “Inside the Visible: an elliptical traverse of twentieth-century art in, of, and from the feminine,” organized by Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Both feminist contexts instill focused meaning into the work.
Obviously, site-specific installations and performances are complicated to move because any new combination of surroundings alter the essence of the work. Recollection was in part inspired by the Béguinage Saint-Elizabeth for both its architectural qualities and its history as a house for devoted women. A sense of femininity and feminism infiltrates the creation and reception of the installation. In these surroundings, hair is understood specifically as women’s hair. Even after its initial installation, as part of the feminist “Inside the Visible” group, Recollection still partakes of a sisterhood that breathes strong associations into the piece. It is empowered by its feminine environment, and unabashedly proclaims its soft strength as a statement on feminine power.
At the same time, Recollection recalls the history of female oppression. The weaving loom especially, but all of the methodical placement and obvious care and attention to detail, signify women’s work. They echo the years of lacemaking by the béguines who inhabited the space for so long. In that echo is the reminder that the béguines were one group of many women throughout history who were marginalized by society by their lack of value—they often came from poor families, the unmarriageable younger daughters with no prospects other than to exist for the sake of others. Not even sanctified with the identifiable badge of Christianity, the béguines were not nuns but chaste women joined together to form a safe haven from external forces. Their quiet sisterhood was a creative option, invented in the 13th century to offer respectable lives despite unfavorable conditions.
The calm of the soft textures, coupled with the maddening insistence of the hair to infiltrate every space, mirrors the monotonously peaceful existence of the stifled béguines, or any unliberated women, such as the quintessential housewife. The hair is like dust that settles every day, soft and barely noticeable, but as it inevitably accumulates it becomes more insidious and aggravating. Cleaning is traditionally women’s work, so it is all the more enraging that this hair is feminine waste resulting from female activity. The woman is a self-contained cycle of female chores—she preens and cleans, preens and cleans. With equal emphasis on the meticulous order of grooming and the chaotic disarray of entropic growth, Recollection halts the process midway and offers a glimpse of surrender to this feminine existence, and the result is a beautiful stasis. From associations of female servitude and oppression comes a celebration of femininity.
These ambivalent connotations of hair makes Recollection a powerful fetish piece in the primitive sense. It employs a mysteriously ambiguous substance to great effect, both highlighting a source of stress—the need raised by hair maintenance for perpetual care both to the self and the domestic space—and simultaneously recognizing its restorative powers—the pride and pleasure derived from one’s own hair. Hair symbolizes both the endurance and the pleasure capable in women, in a compact, removable form. The hair represents Hatoum specifically, but women in general, and its strength and resiliency reflect back on its owners. The delicacy and scariness coexistent in the hair in Recollection imbue women with the same powers. In that way, hair is a talisman, a fetish of feminism. Women can find frightening force in their fragile demeanors.
Beyond these feminist contexts, Recollection undeniably inquires to all humanity the conditions of mortality. Hair is an enduring substance that lasts beyond death, as permanent as bone. Its existence without the support of the body exposes the expendability of life while providing a means for immortality. Certainly some of the discomfort engendered by this installation is derived from the loss of familiarity with hair upon its removal, coupled with the knowledge that hair is more durable than life itself. No longer part of the human, hair is super-human. A person’s disassociation from hair, both literally and figuratively, implies a relinquishing of life. Recollection nags at this mortal fear.
Such associations make hair fecund with meaning when formed into memento mori (figure 4). Many Victorian trinkets and jewelry were woven by women from the hair of their departed and served as permanent reminders of their lost loves or family. Hair, such a lavished sign of health and virility in life, also serves as a symbol of mortality. Memento mori are tokens of a specific person’s death, reminders of the permanence and inevitability of death. “Hair jewelry was made and worn as a way to express pain, not to assist in the transformation of grief.” While they incorporate bits of the deceased, memento mori could not replace any person. Rather, they recall an absence and a longing, and acknowledge, if not assuage, fear.
As a specifically feminine fetish object, the memento mori provides a focus to accept what is frightening and incomprehensible. In her essay “Splitting Hairs: Female Fetishism and Postpartum Sentimentality in Maupassant’s Fiction,” Emily Apter relates Maupassant’s story, “Une Veuve,” in which an old woman wears a memento mori as her eroticized mourning ritual. She describes the fin de siècle female fanaticism for collecting hair as indications of both maternal obsession and death obsession. Through attention to children’s hair relics, the Victorian woman keeps herself perpetually the indulgent mother and martyr. She always memorializes her deceased child, thereby ever remaining the mother and keeper of immortality. In this way, the memento mori is a female fetish memorializing loss, but not castration.
As Freud would have it, the child is a woman’s means of creating her own phallus. Likewise, feces as a product generated from but separated from the body—much in the same way that hair exists—also provides an alternate phallus for the deficient woman. Bodily products—be they child, feces, or hair—offer compensatory objects of fixation for the bereft woman. By wearing her child, her child’s hair, the Victorian woman resists acknowledging the loss of her child, that is, her phallus. Considering this Freudian interpretation, the memento mori is precisely a female fetish that simultaneously affirms and denies castration anxiety.
The memento mori allows several powerful associations at once—motherhood, creator of an alternate phallus, and immortality. Recollection, even in its title, acknowledges the remembrance associated with hair. The factors of discomfort and disassociation from the hair, that it is simultaneously human and alien, and its power as a fetish object, contribute to its use as a token of mortality. It reminds us of human commonalties, but implicit in hair loss is age, weakness, and decay. A memento mori is both a concession to mortality and an attempt to achieve immortality by commemorating the departed with an abiding monument.
But in the case of Recollection, there is no loss of a child. Recollection is unusual in that it commemorates a living person, the same one who grew, collected, and crafted the hair piece. This memento mori remembers its own creator, still alive and able to interact with her own self-made fetish. It is instead a proscriptive fetish to ward off future loss. It is an insurance policy banking on personal immortality through memory.
Having made her own memento mori, Hatoum places herself in the awkward position of seeing her own death. Her hair stands in for herself, rendering Hatoum the person and artist superfluous. Recollection takes its life from Hatoum’s growth of hair, but no longer requires Hatoum to sustain it. The artist is at once present and unnecessary in her creation. In interview, Janine Antoni questioned Hatoum about Foreign Body, but they could just as well have been discussing Recollection, “In the end, was it important that it was your body?” Hatoum responded, “It had to be my body.” Both pieces are the artist’s searches for immortality, self-investigatory offerings of love and invasion.
Hatoum’s investigation of the physicality of hair begs the discussion of many issues, perhaps because it speaks so eloquently of mortality, the inevitable condition of human existence. The piece is at once commemorative, protective, and frightening. Its fragmentation renders the hair eerily un-human, and yet it unmistakably represents the entire human essence. Recollection thoroughly exploits the fear that disembodied hair instills. Hair will outlive you, hair is indestructible, hair is annoying—hair is like bugs. Hair is your personal souvenir that you scatter everywhere you go to mark your territory, but as you lose it, you lose the life it represents. Hair loss is a sign of decay, and Recollection is its monument.

5
Conclusion

Hair is difficult to control. It’s always frizzing or curling in the wrong direction or hanging unevenly. You have to use lots of hairspray if you want it to conform to your vision, but then it becomes stiff and brittle—you can’t comb through it or even run your fingers through it. A little product is helpful—I myself am quite fond of pomade and some gel or mousse, perhaps. Just enough to tame my mass of curls into some semblance of order rather than the huge, wild mane it would become if I left it alone.
I’ve discovered quite the same phenomenon with this academic investigation of hair. It’s still hard to control, even when it’s only on paper. If too much hairspray is applied, under the name of abjection or psychoanalysis or some other notion, hair loses its flexibility and natural beauty. It can only lay stiffly in one direction, when its inclination is to fly away, get caught in the wind, and form knots and tangles. But if no product is used at all, the hair is completely unmanageable and the only possible result is a bad hair day. As with the hair on my own head, I’ve chosen to use a variety of hair products in this thesis, sparingly, and according to the styles they best enable.
After shampooing and rinsing well, I massaged in a creamy leave-in conditioner throughout the hair under the general product name of visual and cultural discourse. I applied special grooming products as required. African American hair naturally tends to be relatively dry and coarse, so I added a thick pomade of post-colonial theory and racial studies to David Hammons’s hair pieces—not so much to make the hair greasy, but enough to keep the curls crisp even in humid weather. Janine Antoni’s hair is long and dyed, so the ends need extra conditioning while the roots require added volume. I kept her hair soft, strong, and bouncy with a generous mixture of fetish theory and feminism and an all-over final spritz aimed at her hair’s critical reception. Arab hair like Mona Hatoum’s is usually thick and strong, so I only added precise swipes of maximum hold gel in the form of fetish theory for style and definition. Her hair needed an extra rinsing to remove residue and buildup from previous overuse of abjection and l’informe. I deliberately avoided hairspray for my three clients—I wanted to leave their hair free to push and transcend boundaries.
David Hammons’s hair pieces are ironic reminders of black pride in white-ruled America. They offer comforts to a marginalized community while questioning its limitations. His kinky hair curls back and forth among black and white, tickling and irritating each in the process. Janine Antoni’s Loving Care plays with different facets of the fetish, but finally serves as a talisman of feminist power by reclaiming and reactivating a typical site for male fetish. Her hair grows against the boundaries between feminism and femininity, creating a tension between the desires to play both subject and object at once. Mona Hatoum’s Recollection troubles the liminal stages between the body, what it produces, and its surroundings; creating a disturbing dissociation from the self. Meanwhile, the hair is also its fetish that protects against the fears of mortality and oppression. Each of these cases investigates the intertwined boundary and fetish issues of power and fear, pride and oppression.
Hair infiltrates our lives beyond personal grooming. As I argued in this thesis, it influences our identities and relations in terms of race, gender, and body consciousness. Although I separated these issues and the artists who work with them into chapters, I intended to demonstrate that hair braids these themes together with recurring motifs and strategies. Namely, artists use hair as a protective fetish in their work that tests boundaries.
When I speak of the fetish, I hope that I have made clear that I do not necessarily wish to indicate a sexual or Freudian fetish, although that is the kind most commonly connoted. The hair pieces I discussed do not require sexual interpretations except where it is appropriate. However, the concept of fetish is central to this entire thesis, as it describes a discrete object that is empowered to identify and protect states of transition.
Neither does hair fit simply into preconceived notions of l’informe or abjection, despite being a sometimes alienated bodily substance. Nor is hair like scatological art because it is not simply waste—it is a once-prized piece of the self gone obsolete. Hair differs from other body art in that it is a removable body part that is almost not human. Hair does not automatically signify any one thing. It can be friendly or frightening, sexual or clinical, desirable or repellant. Sometimes it is all of those at once, and more.
Each of the artists I investigated has created other hairy works that I did not discuss in the body of this thesis. David Hammons’s hair objects are countless, and I only examined a select few of them. Generally his hair pieces employ black hair as a raw material with unique physical properties, avoiding a direct association of hair as a part of the human body (figures 37–39). I chose the pieces that best highlight his ironic sense of humor and race consciousness. From around the same period as her first performance of Loving Care, Janine Antoni’s Deficit (figure 40), 1991, and Butterfly Kisses (figure 41), 1992, likewise penetrate themes of feminism, fetishism, and interactions between the visual worlds of artmaking and popular culture. In Deficit, Antoni laid a disembodied long hair braid across an office cubicle covered in blue striped oxford cloth—the fetishized feminine feature pervades in a masculine environment. For Butterfly Kisses, Antoni covered her lashes with CoverGirl Thicklash® mascara and winked 1254 times on a piece of paper for each eye. Mona Hatoum has made several pieces that incorporate real hair or focus on it for its connotative purposes (figures 42–45). In each of them, she again questions the boundaries of the human body, envisioning its daily interaction with objects made from itself—the disembodied “unreal” body envelopes the living “real” body.
I chose not to discuss these other pieces because I did not wish to write monographs on these artists. Rather, my intention was to investigate different connotations that hair raises, using select works by these artists as case studies into hair dynamics. I trust that my study not only offered a glimpse into the oeuvre of three very talented and engaging artists, but moreover demonstrated the way hair deeply pervades social, cultural, and artistic issues by diverse means.
The hair used by each artist serves as an anchor of stability even as it flows back and forth between opposing goals or fears. Power sought in terms of race, gender, or mortality is both achieved and held at bay through hair. In that way, hair is a fetish that simultaneously protects and endangers, hides and reveals forces beyond the artist’s control. The artists focus on issues that limit, define, frighten, or enrage them, and use hair as their tool to engage and contend with those issues. Hair defines their status, reveals alternate possibilities, and both cushions and itches the distance between the two.
And now, having washed my hair of this final requirement for the master’s degree, I am ready for a new look. Chop, chop.

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Vita

Melinda Hillary Klayman, who usually goes by the surname “Klayperson,” was born in New York on February 18, 1971, the daughter of Karen and Melvyn Klayman. In 1979, she moved to California, where she lost her thick Long Island accent and perfected her beach bunny imitation. After graduating from Agoura High School in 1988, she attended the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she became a vegetarian and double majored in studio art and art history. During the summer of 1990, she was an intern at the Franklin Furnace in New York City, which infected her perception of art and culture with a pervasive sense of the absurd. She received her Bachelor of Arts with highest honors in 1992. In the following years, she lived in New York, where she worked at the College Art Association and got very fashionable, very expensive haircuts. During the spring and summer of 1995, she lived in Paris, France, with the intention of learning to speak French fluently, but instead learned how to speak English with a French accent. In August, 1995, she entered The Graduate School at The University of Texas at Austin. From August 1996–August 1997, she was the Edward and Betty Marcus Foundation Curatorial Intern at the Dallas Museum of Art. During her years in Texas, she has determined that hot, humid weather makes her hair frizzy.

This thesis was typed by the author.

The Anglo-Scandinavian Hogback: A Tool for Assimilation

The Vikings swept through Britain with series of invasions throughout the 10th century, and for a time controlled the area of northern England known then as Danelaw. Names of towns, roads, and families still in existence today attest to the Scandinavian stronghold of England a millenium ago. However, scholars have discovered only traces of their pagan Scandinavian roots from the artifacts left behind by these Viking settlers. It seems as though the conquerers were quickly conquered by the customs and beliefs prevalent in their new land.
The Vikings rapidly assimilated—they converted to Christianity, adopted Christian burial practices and built churches, and began to carve in stone. Wood and metal had been the preferred mediums for artmaking back in Scandinavia (note the continued evidence of this in Scandinavian furniture you probably own, e.g. Ikea), but stone sculpture had long been practiced throughout Britain. The Vikings adopted this form of carving with relish, the stone sculpture dating from the Scandinavian period vastly outnumbers that which had been made in England in previous eras. On the other hand, the Vikings did not import new sculptural forms that the English had not already made—standing crosses and recumbent grave slabs were already common Anglian forms of sculpture. (This is notwithstanding surface decorative elements; what I am concerned with here is structure.) The joining of the Anglian and Scandinavian cultures did produce one remarkable new form of stone sculpture, unprecedented either in Britain or Scandinavia—the hogback.
Found mainly throughout northern England up into Scotland, the hogback is a unique form of sculpture whose period of production was limited to probably a 50-year span in the mid-10th century. About four to five feet long and shaped generally like a bowed house, the hogback derives its name from the convex curve of its roof. It often incorporates architectural elements, such as shingling, archways, and pilasters, and in fact, the hogback has been employed as a model for recreating Viking-age house structures.
Its purpose remains a great mystery to scholars, as does its short span of existence. Most scholars agree that the hogback is a grave marker, despite the fact that not one has ever been found in clear association with a grave. Those who doubt the hogback’s use in relation to graves have not offered a suitable alternate explanation to justify its purpose.
A number of hogbacks include endbeasts, creatures hugging or attacking the gable ends of the structure. Most easily identifiable are those endbeasts which take the form of bears, but they also appear in various stages of abstraction—without limbs, or more dragonlike than bearlike in appearance. The endbeasts are usually muzzled, even when they have devolved from a distinct bear form.
Certain hogbacks exhibit narrative scenes on their sides depicting scenes from Norse mythology or Christian iconography. Surface carving, both narrative and abstract, is generally shallow and of lesser quality than on contemporary objects such as standing crosses, grave slabs, or luxury items.
Scholarship on the hogback has been largely descriptive, and tends to shy away from speculative, except as a tool to determine architectural form. The definitive work on the subject, a catalogue by James Lang, meticulously describes and categorizes every known hogback, but fails to answer some of the most enigmatic problems of these sculptures—what were they for? who commissioned them? how do they reveal the melding of the two distinct cultures that fostered their creation? If anything, Lang’s study serves to disprove theories that previous scholars had asserted, without proposing suitable alternatives. I hope that my fresh perspective on this issue will offer insight to the matters that need to be addressed, and point to avenues for future investigation.
Using hogbacks to aid their understanding of Viking architecture, scholars have assumed that hogbacks offer a representation of housing. Indeed, hogback decoration appears to mimic architectural features, and the ovalesque curve of most hogback sides match the general pattern of post-holes in contemporary Scandinavian housing. Hogbacks have served as some of the primary sources in the reconstruction of the early medieval Trelleborg house in Denmark. But it would be foolish to assume that these stone carvings accurately depict architectural realities. One must always remember that medieval artisans were not interested in naturalistic analogue, but rather, in presenting readable iconographies. With this danger of literalism in mind, it is useful to extract the consistencies in housing depictions as fair insight to the 10th century idea of structure.
I have already mentioned that both post-holes and many hogback sides bow in a convex curve. The fact that these features are not always identical may indicate several possibilities. Architecture existed in the 10th century with straight walls as well as bowed. There is no evidence to assume that if hogbacks do represent architecture, that they would only mimic those buildings with bowed walls. Alternatively, the artists who carved the hogbacks could have chosen to translate the bowed buildings that existed architecturally into straight-walled stone carvings, either for ease of comprehension or ease of craftsmanship.
In his 1973 article, Holger Schmidt argues persuasively for a clear correlation between Viking architecture and extant representations of housing. He points to several images of Viking houses, in addition to his analysis of hogbacks. Each of the depictions he chooses share features of a roofline that is more or less curved, and most include shingling and/or a central archway or high door. The most convincing two-dimensional parallel appears on the Birka coin, c. 800, which displays each of these attributes, and also includes two beasts perched on the gables looking inward, recalling the hogback’s endbeasts. His most house-like three-dimensional representation is a bronze model of a house on top of an iron rod found in a 10th century grave in Klinda, Öland. The house is rectangular, not ovalesque in plan, but it has a curved roofline. On the buttresses at the corners of the house are beast-shaped finials.
Schmidt also sees the Cammin casket as a representation of a house. It too has a curved roof, projecting beast shapes, and is ovalesque in form. But unlike other house images, the Cammin casket has no other architectural references, such as shingling or an arched door, making it difficult to see as a house form, but clearly analogous in shape to the hogback. To me, this comparison troubles the reading of the hogback as a depiction of Viking housing. It is difficult and perilous to interpret any of these house-like forms as actual or accurate depictions of houses. While I believe this evidence makes it safe to conclude that Viking housing had curved roofs, or rather, that the curved “roofline” was a prevalent feature to the Viking sensibility, that does not necessitate that every curved “roof” found in contemporary objects depicts houses. Clearly, two commonalities were integral to the visual vocabulary of Viking imagery—the curved roof, and projecting beast forms.
The purpose or meaning of these beast forms continues to confound scholars. Frequently, they have been employed in attempts to determine chronology. Lang tentatively proposes that earlier hogbacks display naturalistic endbeasts, which later devolve into stylized creatures and eventually disappear altogether. Richard Bailey considers the opposite chronology would be a more natural assumption, but discourages that as well. “There is no reason to believe that hogbacks with end-beasts are later than those without. And it would be as easy to suggest a development from a bodiless animal to a full-bodied beast as it would to propose the reverse.” So, we must content ourselves to analyze endbeasts for purposes other than chronology.
Beasts held special significance to the Vikings. As we have already seen, the Vikings included images of creatures in their depictions of architecture—most likely, Viking homes were equipped with beasts on their gables or buttresses. The most common Viking ornament from this era are ribbon beasts in the Jellinge style, often difficult to discern amid a jumble of interlace. Creatures abound in Scandinavian mythology. Obviously, animals were integral elements to the Viking sensibility, but to unpack their meanings is complicated and as convoluted as the twisted bodies of ribbon beasts.
The most consistently naturalistic endbeasts carved on hogbacks are bears. To the 20th century eye, these endbeasts resemble teddy bears or cute cartoons, but a thousand years ago, bears were respected and feared as the ferocious and dangerous animals that they are. Bears are incredibly strong and large carnivorous animals who will attack when threatened. They appear in Scandinavian mythology as emblems of the Berserks, the warrior followers of the god Odin. The Berserks would fight in a fit of frenzy, possessed by the spirit of a fierce creature. They would appear in the guise of, or wear costumes as bears or wolves. Like bears, the Berserks were ruthless and tenacious in attack, seemingly impervious to pain; they were the ideal warriors.
Twelfth-century British bestiaries attest to the continued associations with bears as posessed warrior types. The Welsh Armes Prydein likens the Welsh in battle against the Saxons as “a bear from the mountain.” The Historia regum Britanniae VII contains several mentions of bears aligned with certain personality traits. Its colorful and derogatory epithets derive from lasting impressions of bear connotations. One character is derided as a “bear who had been rolling in the filth of his wickedness since youth.” Indeed, bears seem to progress from icons of battle and fury to emblems of sordid lust and squalor. Never do bears appear as respectable, noble creatures in the British sensibility.
The bears that cling to the sides of hogbacks are seen most clearly in the group excavated from the Brompton site. Adhering to the British disdain for the ferocity of bears, scholarship comparing Viking art to its Anglo-Saxon contemporary, on occasion, has scoffed at these stone carvings. “These remarkable Brompton carvings must … be treated as a more or less freak adventure in art, out of the main line of sculptural development and hopeless of posterity.” I prefer to examine these endbeasts in order to determine their significance for a group of people at a specific moment in history.
With the exception of the two of poorest quality (Brompton 5 & 6), these bears wear muzzles. A notable variation of the muzzle appears on Brompton 9 where the bear holds it paws over its own jowl in an act of self-muzzling. In fact, hogback endbeasts from every region wear muzzles more often than not. Lang suggests that the muzzle may be a habitual continuation of Jellinge style beasts, which are often fettered in some way. But Jellinge beasts are visually more similar to interlace pattern and fantastic decoration than these primarily naturalistic and recognizable animals. I read the muzzle feature as a clear symbol of the taming or domestication of the wild warrior. Such a reading is consistent with the shape of the Viking house, another motif of domesticity.
Further implications may be drawn from the fact that bears did not live in England in the 10th century, but that they are native to all of Scandinavia. The carvers of these stones were familiar with the forms of bears to depict them with varying degrees of verisimilitude. It is not important to know whether Anglian or Scandinavian artists carved these stones, or who commissioned them—what is relevant is that bears are a sign of foreignness to England; they represent the Scandinavian homeland that was left behind by the Vikings. That they are muzzled and domesticated indicates a deliberate denial of the ferocity natural to bears. If the depiction of bears implies Odin’s warriors, then their muzzling points toward an abstension from fighting.
It would be consistent with their rapid assimilation to English culture that the Vikings would relinquish warrior practices. The Christian English advocated peace and denounced the pagan adventurous spirit of the Vikings. The Vikings, eager to settle England as their home, would have sought to prove their own new-found Englishness through a display of domestication and denial of derogatory Viking barbarism. The hogback bowed house shape recalls Scandinavian heritage but also connotes a solid concern for the home. The bears likewise convey a recollection of Scandinavia, while their muzzles assure a passive complacency suitable to the English notion of civilization.
Although most hogbacks are decorated with endbeasts, interlace patterns, and/or vague architectural references, not a single hogback contains any inscription, and only a select few depict narrative scenes. Lang categorizes these latter hogbacks as “Type VII—Illustrative Type,” and comments on their broad distribution throughout the hogback region, but indicates no reason to consider these separately from the general classification of hogbacks. I will describe the seven extant illustrative hogbacks below.
Gosforth 1, called “The Warrior’s Tomb,” illustrates a warrior scene on one side and carries interlace patterns along with a Jellinge beast on the other. Endbeasts are absent from the gable ends, but one side depicts the damaged and worn figure of a man in a kirtle with a belt on his hips. Gosforth 2, known as “The Saint’s Tomb,” depicts humans fighting serpentine monsters on each side, and on the gables, underneath muzzled dragonesque endbeasts, appear images of the Crucifixion. The hogback from Heysham illustrates animals and humans interacting on each side, flanked by fully developed, if poorly carved endbeasts. Each side of the Lowther 1 fragment features shallowly carved human figures, some with their hands held as if in prayer. Lowther 2 depicts warrior figures in a boat carrying shields, facing an army on land also carrying shields. Underneath is the figure of a serpent. Sockburn 5 clearly illustrates the Scandinavian mythological story of the god Tyr losing his hand to the wolf Fenrir in the attempt to muzzle the fierce beast. Finally, Sockburn 6 depicts a Valkyrie and a raven, both associated with the god Odin.
The common theme that links these illustrations together is the warrior motif. However, the only two that overtly reference warriors, The Warrior’s Tomb and Lowther 2, depict the figures in non-confrontational poses. They stand ready with their shields and armor, but do not clash swords. Likewise, Sockburn 6’s Valkyrie and raven are associated with warfare, but do not actually fight as warriors. (Lowther 1 is not a complete hogback, and must be discounted for this argument as the human figures do not combine to make a fully readable narrative.) Such non-fighting warrior types support my supposition that hogbacks represent an effort to portray the Viking in a peaceful, Anglicized manner.
The only scenes of confrontation appear on The Saint’s Tomb, where humans battle snake creatures, and Sockburn 5, depicting the Fenrir wolf myth. The Saint’s Tomb is particularly engaging, as the hogback also includes the crucifixion scene. Whereas in Scandinavian mythology, the snake signifies the world serpent who encircles the earth, in the Christian religion, snakes are associated with evil and temptation. Whether the humans represent Vikings denying their heritage or Christians fighting insurgent pagan beliefs, the Christian concept of good vs. evil informs the entire composition. The crucifixion scene on either end secures such a reading. Clearly, the Saint’s Tomb champions the Christian victory over pagan ideas.
The myth depicted on Sockburn 5 relates the story of Fenrir, the huge and menacing wolf who was an offspring of the trickster god Loki. No fetter was strong enough to hold Fenrir until the world dwarves devised a muzzle made from ephemeral, intangible notions—the roots of a mountain, the noise of a moving cat, and the breath of a fish. Fenrir would only allow the god Tyr to lay the resulting cord upon his jaws. The muzzle held, but not before Fenrir bit off Tyr’s hand. A notable variation in this hogback’s depiction of the tale is that Tyr’s hand has yet to be bitten off. Perhaps this indicates, like the muzzling of the endbeasts, a desire to portray Viking tendencies with a gentler, Anglicized understanding. It is unclear whether the endbeasts themselves on this hogback wear muzzles.
The uncertain function of hogback stones has troubled scholars in their efforts to reinvent the world of Viking Age England. With a fair amount of trepidation, most agree that hogbacks were a form of grave-covers. Lang refers to them throughout his catalogue as such, with no apology or explanation otherwise. “Hogbacks belong to the genus of recumbent grave-covers which include flat slabs, coped stones, sarcophagi and shrine tombs of various construction.” Holger Schmidt emphatically agrees with Lang’s assertion. “I wish to stress that the hog-backs are first of all grave-covers found within Scandinavian settlements.” Bailey weighs the evidence more skeptically, and questions the assurance of such a conviction. Bailey writes, “It would be natural to assume that hogbacks were grave-covers. We cannot be certain of this because no grave has been found in clear association with one of these stones…” In a later text, Bailey asserts his position as to the purpose of hogbacks in analogy to a function regarding grave marking. “I believe that this monumental type represents a development of the shrine-tomb known in earlier Anglian England at sites like Peterborough (Hedda’s tomb), with the shape of the monument being adapted to contemporary architectural types.” I appreciate Bailey’s hesitancy to absolutely classify hogbacks as a form of grave-cover, and believe that other possibilities must be considered before such an assured statement can be proffered.
That no hogback has ever been excavated in clear association with a grave make any assumption in that regard dangerously presumptuous. Although most hogbacks were found in church settings, they were found primarily incorporated as building stones in the fabric of later Norman churches. Theoretically, they could have been imported from elsewhere than the churchyard. The ones that were excavated outside in churchyards have unclear provenance. The Heysham hogback was purportedly discovered during the digging of an early 19th century grave, perhaps with a spearhead underneath. Documents to this account must be hazy at best, since all modern references to it regard this claim with doubt. The group of hogbacks that comprise “The Giant’s Grave” at Penrith have clearly been rearranged several times at least throughout the last number of centuries, and quite possibly earlier since their original placement during the Viking Age. In fact, what appears here to be four separate hogbacks and two standing shafts is more likely only one complete hogback and three halves. Neither the Heysham hogback nor The Giant’s Grave offer useful evidence for reconstructing the original function of hogbacks.
A number of contemporary standing crosses do exist in their original positions, and therefore perhaps could suggest other uses for outdoor stone carving. In his study of inscribed stone crosses, John Higgitt finds that “The principle functions which the inscriptions reveal are memorial and votive.” but warns that, “The evidence of the inscriptions on the inscribed crosses need not apply to uninscribed crosses. The uninscribed crosses may lack inscriptions because they are different in kind.” Such qualifications render this comparison frustrating, as none of the hogbacks are inscribed, and that hogbacks surely differed in precise function from standing crosses. But what is useful is that memorial and votive purposes can justify pieces of stone carving as well as gravemarking. Bailey likewise enumerates purposes other than gravemarking for stone crosses in graveyards. “Their function was not so much to mark burials as to the visible reminders of an unseen world—a role which was signalled by the Anglo-Saxon word for a cross, becun (a conspicuous symbol).” However, Bailey later reminds us that when the Vikings took over this art form, they revised its function, and that later crosses were more likely to be used as grave-markers.
Furthermore, hogbacks are not as conspicuous as standing crosses. In fact, their low horizontality, unless they were originally placed on some kind of pedestals, would have made them difficult to study unless one knelt before it. But kneeling prayer directed toward these hogbacks seems unlikely given their only quite rare references to Christianity. Certain Irish crosses bear a church-shaped capping that resembles the architectural quality of hogbacks, which suggests perhaps a more solid connection between the two forms of stone carving. However, there is a distinct difference between a church shape that looms from a lofty height, reinforced in its Christian reference by the cross that supports it, and a house shape set low to the ground only rarely and tenuously aligned with Christian iconography. Moreover, these architectural cross cappings are only found in Ireland, where none but a solitary hogback exist. Nevertheless, the architectural motif and placement within the churchyard surely suggests a connection of intention and situation between standing crosses and hogbacks.
Comparisons with shrine tombs are similarly problematic. Reachable and readable by their viewers, shrine tombs are limited to aid in understanding the purpose of hogbacks that apparently were not intended to be easily accessed. The Danish Cammin casket, already mentioned as analogous in shape to the hogback house design, was possibly used as a jewel box, as was the Bamberg casket, probably made in the same workshop. House-shaped objects of Anglo-Saxon origin were likewise used to carry precious objects, but generally of a religious nature—shrine tombs held saints’ relics. Bailey cites examples of small house-shaped boxes, now lost, with holes for the devoted to reach in and touch relics contained within.
These developed into solid stone shrines, such as Hedda’s Tomb, which provides the clearest analogy to hogbacks. Basically equivalent in size, shape, and material, the hogbacks differ from Hedda’s Tomb mainly in surface decoration. Whereas Hedda’s Tomb depicts standing saints carved in familiar upright European medieval poses, hogbacks feature Viking-style decoration. When human figures do appear, they never wear the robes or bear the same proportions as the figures on Hedda’s Tomb. This difference could easily be explained by a difference in aesthetic. More significant surface differences are the appearances of narrative mythological scenes and, of course, the endbeasts. Such anachronistic formal schemes muddle a direct connection between shrine tombs and hogbacks. What is more, even the finest hogbacks are never carved with the same quality or care invested in the best shrine tombs, grave covers, or standing crosses.
The rarity of Viking-style graves in England, complete with burial mounds, weapons, and other burial goods, indicates that the Vikings quickly adopted the English style cemetary, making Viking graves and English graves virtually indistinguishable. If hogbacks were grave-markers, they would have served to differentiate certain graves from others, an effect that would have been at odds with the Viking goal to assimilate. Therefore, I conclude that hogbacks were not grave-markers, but rather, existed in the churchyard context in order to commemorate absent persons or more general ideas. Their span of existence, most likely limited to the years between 920–970, implies an immediate, specific desire to communicate via these anachronistic objects. That they ceased to be produced, or evolved into more distinctly Anglo forms, indicates that the Viking settlers who created the hogbacks no longer had the need to express their desire to assimilate. Their status in Britain was already settled—by the late 10th century, Britains of Viking origin had established themselves among the native Anglo-Saxon British. A status quo was achieved that no longer urgently demanded to be proved.
Perhaps the hogbacks were votive reminders of family ancestors back in the Scandinavian homeland, who had not converted to Christianity, but were nonetheless worthy of salvation. Another possibility would be that the hogbacks represent the desire of a group of people to be accepted in their adopted land. Therefore, they are more in keeping with, although not equivalent to a solid shrine such as Hedda’s Tomb. These monuments do not contain or mark any specific physical object or body, but rather, commemorate a concept integral to the Christianization of the Vikings. Such a solution to this great mystery would be in keeping with my reading of hogbacks as a tool of peaceful assimilation of the pagan Viking into a Christian world.

Illustrations

1 Viking invasions in Britain

2 The distribution of hogback sites in England and Wales

3 The reconstructed Viking-age house in Trelleborg, Denmark

4 The Birka coin

5 Bronze model of house on top of iron rod, found in 10th-century grave in Klinta, Öland

6 The Cammin casket

7–17 Brompton hogbacks

18–19 Gosforth 1—The Warrior Tomb

20–21 Gosforth 2—The Saint’s Tomb

22–23 Heysham hogback

24–27 Lowther 1

28 Lowther 2

29 Sockburn 5

30 Sockburn 6

31 Viking-period grave slabs

32 Hedda’s tomb

33 Crathorne 3

34 Penrith—The Giant’s Grave

35–38 Standing crosses

39 Church shape on top of Muiredach’s cross, Monasterboice, Ireland

Bibliography

Addyman, P. V. “The Anglo-Saxon house: a new review.” Anglo-Saxon England I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972.
Anglo-Saxon and Viking Age Sculpture and its Context: papers from the Collingwood Symposium on insular sculpture from 800 to 1066. James Lang, ed. BAR British Series 49, 1978.
Bailey, Richard N. England’s Earliest Sculptors. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1996.
—————. Viking Age Sculpture in Northern England. London: Collins, 1980.
Cramp, Rosemary. Studies in Anglo-Saxon Sculpture. London: The Pindar Press, 1992.
Cramp, Rosemary and J. T. Lang. A Century of Anglo-Saxon Sculpture. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Frank Graham, 1977.
Curley, Michael J. “Animal Symbolism in the Prophesies of Merlin.” Beasts and Birds of the Middle Ages: The Bestiary and Its Legacy. William B. Clark and Meradith T. McMunn, editors. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.
Davidson, H. R. Ellis. Gods and Myths of Northern Europe. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1964.
—————. Scandinavian Mythology. London: Paul Hamlyn, 1969.
Firby, Margaret and James Lang. “The Pre-Conquest Sculpture at Stonegrave.” The Yorkshire Archaeological Journal. Volume 53, 1981.
Higgitt, John. “Words and Crosses: The Inscribed Stone Cross in Early Medieval Britain and Ireland.” Early Medieval Sculpture in Britain and Ireland. John Higgitt, ed. BAR British Series 152 (1986) p. 125-152.
Kendrick, T. D. Late Saxon and Viking Art. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1949.
Lang, James. “The Hogback: AViking Colonial Monument.” Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 3. Oxford: Oxford University Committee for Archaeology, 1984.
Poems of the Vikings: The Elder Edda. Patricia Terry, trans. Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1969.
Richards, Julian D. Viking Age England. London: B. T. Batsford Ltd./English Heritage, 1991.
Schmidt, Holger. “The Trelleborg House Reconsidered.” Medieval Archaeology. Volume XVII, 1973.
Stone, Lawrence. Sculpture in Britain: The Middle Ages. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1955, 1972.
The Vikings in England, and In Their Danish Homeland. The Danish National Museum, et al. London, The Anglo-Danish Viking Project, 1981.
Wilson, David M. and Ole Klindt-Jensen. Viking Art. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966, 1980.

Which brings me to the inevitable question: are there coffee breaks after death?

This question has been raised countless ways in countless cultures. Food and consumption are inextricably linked to death and the mourning ritual among totally divergent cultures, for various consistent reasons. I will address several practices which I have sorted according to which party does the consumption: the deceased, the mourners, or nature; and for whose benefit does eating occur: the deceased or the mourners.

First, I will look at the ritual of the deceased eating or being served food for their own benefit. Foodstuffs or its accoutrements—pots, jars, and the like—are commonly included in the ritual of disposing of the dead. For example, the Riverine Yumans throw food onto the pyre in which they cremate their dead. By providing the dead with food on their final journey from the living world, cultures that include food in their funeral practices intend to insure that their dead will be adequately provided in the afterlife.

The Badagas require their dying or deceased to eat in order to ensure a good journey in the afterlife. Shortly before death occurs, the dying person is to swallow a coin dipped in butter. This rite of hana benne (‘coin butter’) is done even for children and those dying in hospitals, as it is thought that a person cannot get to heaven without this coin to pay for the food, drink and tolls on his journey there, and the butter will give him strength for it. Dying people tend to choke on the coin, hastening death, which has inspired the alteration of the custom to insert the buttered coin into the mouth after death.

The deceased may also be served food not to aid them in the afterlife, but in order to benefit the survivors. Where the Days of the Dead are celebrated, food is provided for the deceased on an annual basis. As Jed discussed this last week, I will not describe the Days of the Dead ceremonies in detail, but will briefly consider the implications and associations of their providing food for the dead. During the Days of the Dead, families set up an altar to honor the dead spirits, including bread of the dead, sweets in the shape of skulls, fruits and vegetables, and other foods associated with the dead. No one would eat anything laid out on the altar for fear of antagonizing the spirits of the dead until the morning of the second Day of the Dead, when the spirits are thought to have left. In one account, a celebrant expressed the belief that the angry ghosts would tie their feet up in the night if they ate from the altar. In this case, the living provide food for the dead in order to protect themselves from the wrath of angry spirits. Food serves to placate the deceased and maintain their non-confrontational interactions, if any, with the living.

Similarly, mourners themselves may eat or share food with the deceased in order to protect themselves from angry spirits. Ancient Finnish people believe in the immortality of the soul and fear that ghosts will haunt the living unless thoroughly appeased and fully reconciled with all of their surviving intimates. At their funerals, participants partake of liquor, and the deceased is also provided with liquor in the grave. A domestic animal is often slaughtered, a practice which suggests a sacrificial meal. During mourning, the survivors eat and drink alcohol in a memorial meal by the grave, together with the deceased as it were, so as to prevent him from getting angry. According to one author, all this reflects the survivors’ guilt and the projection of their own feelings onto the deceased. As social interaction centers around meals, the living strive to amend whatever remaining differences they have with the deceased during ritualized meals, so as to avoid haunting by a still-angry spirit.

In the Limbu culture, mourners may eat food in order to capture the spirit of the deceased. When a violent death occurs, the soul has no opportunity to resolve itself to death, and therefore roams the earth in search of its body. Such a death is often treated with a chaotic funeral and mourning period. Domestic animals are sacrificed and cooked for the participants of the funeral, in an attempt to capture the spirits of the deceased. Unless they consume the sacrificial food, the Limbu risk being haunted by unhoused spirits.

To achieve the same freedom from haunting by spirits, mourners may also practice ritualized restrictions from eating. After a normal non-violent death in the Limbu culture, close relatives enter a period of mourning for several days during which they are not allowed to eat foods coated in salt or oil. At the end of the mourning cycle, relatives, friends, and neighbors attend a feast for the dead. The principal mourners sit in front of the feast until after the offerings have been made to the deceased’s spirit. Then, the guests are fed and the period of pollution with the spirit of the deceased is ended. Eating normal food marks the finality of a soul’s presence and power on earth. According to the author, “close relatives undergo a social death through isolation and are reborn at the mourning feast, where their connections to the deceased are severed.” Therefore, restriction from food denotes a social death associated with the real death of a relative. Eating implies resurrection for the living, and final, complete death for the dead.

The Sebei eat only special foods and are restricted from other foods during the mourning period to cleanse away the pollution of death. The major ceremony during the Sebei mourning ritual is called “chasing away the death.” The ritual aspects are devoted to matters that serve as purification of the mourners. Involved are the slaughter of a bull from the herd of the deceased and the distribution of the meat. Widows and brothers of the deceased are restricted from certain foods during the liminal period. For both the Limbu and the Sebei, death pollutes those closest to the deceased, and they must ritually alter their diets in order to cleanse themselves of death and rejoin the fully living.

Mourners not only use the ritual of eating to benefit themselves, but also consume food to assist the dead. In The Death Rituals of Rural Greece, Loring Danforth gives a detailed account of the eating rituals associated with mourning in rural Greece and attempts to understand them in a framework of the social structure. The primary purpose of eating in regard to a Greek death is to ensure the forgiveness of the deceased’s sins. Food and drink are distributed in the church courtyard after burial and five years later at exhumation to this end. Traditional foods include sweet red wine, koliva (boiled wheat with sugar, cinnamon, nuts, and raisins), bread, honey, pastries, sweets, and other candies. Upon receiving an offering of food, each person recites, “May God forgive her/him.” People at a burial, with the exception of the immediate family of the deceased, must ritually each a handful of koliva and a piece of bread along with wishing for forgiveness on behalf of the deceased before proceeding to the house of the deceased. None of the food left over from the distribution at the graveyard may be brought back into the house of the deceased. Later, the survivors serve water, cognac, and candy and then coffee and pastries. Afterward, “the priest lights a candle and places it in a tray of koliva, beside which are a glass of wine and a slice of bread. The koliva, wine, and bread are together known as the makario (that which is blessed). After the priest recites a prayer over the makario, he distributes it to the close relatives of the deceased to eat. Everyone then repeats the wish that God forgive the deceased. Finally a simple meal is served, usually consisting of rice, potatoes, or beans; olives, cheese, and wine.” On the third day, ninth day, and six months after death, koliva and sweets are again ritually consumed in the church courtyard, and the family of the deceased hosts another serving of cognac, coffee, and biscuits. With each meal, mourners repeat the wish that the dead be forgiven of all her/his sins.

For forty days following the death, friends and relatives visit the immediate family every night to bring a meal and keep them company. The relatives of the deceased consume no meat during these forty days. On the Sunday morning prior to the fortieth day, the family supplies bread and wine for a liturgy performed in honor of the deceased. “Then people return to the church. Here, in the same location where the body of the deceased lay forty days earlier, stands a tray of wheat boiled in milk and sweetened to form a kind of pudding.” The pudding, called panhidha, is also referred to as makario, like the plate of koliva, bread, and wine at the funeral meal. Makario is also similar to the word used to euphamistically refer to the deceased. Afterward, the family serves a more elaborate meal than the funeral meal, which includes meat, indicating that the family is beginning to reincorporate itself into normal social life. This forty day period is analogous to Christ’s death and resurrection.

In rural Greece, mourners eat vicariously for the dead who are believed to have the same needs as prior to death. The author quotes an experienced mourner discussing the needs of the deceased, “It has a mouth and hands and eats real food just like we do. When you see someone in your dreams, it’s the soul you see. People in your dreams eat, don’t they? The souls of the dead eat too.” The survivors strive to aid the dead in finding their necessities. They believe that the food distributed at funerals will find its way to the dead. “People say: ‘We distribute food so that the dead will eat, so that the dead will find food in front of them.’” On the five All Souls’ Days throughout the year, each woman in rural Greece exchanges plates of food with her neighbors and bring offerings of koliva, bread, cheese, olives, and fruit to the village church where they are blessed by the priest and distributed in honor of her dead relatives. The blessed food is eaten on behalf of the dead.

In the Badaga culture, food is used as bribery to appease the needs of the dying. Visitors from neighboring villages come to the home of a dying person, bringing with them gifts and milk for the family of the sick person. The family must feed the visitors. Visitors are necessary as no one should die alone in Badaga society, so serving good food is the traditional method of tempting visitors to be companions for the dying when approaching death. Without companions assisting them at the time of death, the Badagas would experience difficulties and complications in the afterlife.

Seventeenth-century England saw both ritualized, commercialized, and professional consumption of food associated with death. Food was habitually consumed, partly as hospitality but also to act as a focus for ideas about the redemption of sin: the refusal of a dole would have been grossly disrespectful to the deceased and to the bereaved. In seventeenth-century Herefordshire a ‘sin-eater’ consumed the sins of the deceased by eating a loaf of bread and drinking a bowl of ale over the corpse as it journeyed to the grave; for this he was paid six pence by the bereaved. Special biscuits were produced for funerals, with wrappers specially printed for the occasion.

In the end, through one means or another, the dead themselves end up being consumed by nature. The body decomposes, or is burnt, or, in the case of the Sebei, the dead is placed in a bushy place for the hyenas to devour. The Sebei funeral is entirely concerned with the living and only cursorily interested in the body, not the soul, of the dead. By allowing nature to consume the deceased, living Sebei are free to focus on their own recuperation from a death close to them.

The Greek justify nature’s consumption of the dead through an understanding of cyclical nourishment and rejuvination. Essential to this justification is the association of human life to plant life. Plants die and then rejuvinate annually. The metaphor of human life as plant life is therefore an attempt to deny that human death is final. It is an assertion that human life, like plant life, is repetitive; that there is life after death.… The use of koliva, the boiled wheat distributed at death rituals, symbolizes the resurrection of the dead.

As Danforth explains it, “Food passes from nature to culture; it mediates the opposition between nature and culture.… When human beings eat products of the earth they are literally establishing an identity between themselves (culture) and their food (nature).… Culture becomes nature. The natural becomes the cultural through the mediation of food.… If plants are food, and if human beings are like plants, then human beings must also, at least in some contexts, be food.” Death reverses the food chain relationship between nature and culture. Human beings and plant life form a mutual nourishment for each other. If that which dies is really eaten, then from death there emerges life.

For most cases in rural Greece, the liminal period of death does not end until five years after death, when the flesh is thoroughly decomposed and the bones are exhumed. Wine is poured over the body at the funeral to ensure that the bones will be left clean after the five year liminal period. The soul will not be admitted to heaven until the flesh is decomposed, or eaten by the earth. Thus there is a clear parallel between the consumption of food by the living at the memorial services and the consumption of the body of the deceased by the earth. Both kinds of food, the koliva, panhidha, and bread, on the one hand, and the body of the deceased, on the other, must be eaten in order for the soul to enter paradise. And, as I noted earlier, the word makario denotes both the body of the deceased and the traditional funeral foods. Both forms of makario—the food and the body—are given the same treatment; both are blessed by the priest with the same cross, initials, and candles. Therefore, the Greek understanding of earth eating the dead assists the living to justify belief in everlasting life, and aids the dead to reach heaven.

To conclude, I have found that the ritual consumption of food shares consistent significance throughout diverse cultures. First, I described examples of the dead being served food to assist them in the afterlife. Next, I listed practices where the dead are served food or mourners eat food on the behalf of the dead in order to appease the dead and keep them from haunting the living. I also noted restrictions on eating observed to cleanse mourners of the taint of death. Following, I related instances where mourners eat in order to aid the deceased in the afterlife. Finally, I considered the dead as food itself, to be eaten by the earth as part of the entire food chain of nature.

As Woody Allen puts it in Love and Death, it’s like one big restaurant. At the end of the film, when he’s describing to Diane Keaton what it’s like to be dead, he tells her, “You know the chicken at Tressky’s? It’s worse.”

Significant Omissions: Thomas Gainsborough’s Mr. and Mrs. Andrews

There is an obvious lack of traditional criticism on Gainsborough’s work at UCSC’s McHenry Library. As a representative UC student, I can understand and sympathize with this lack since, unless forced to do so because of a research paper, I would never have been interested enough in Gainsborough’s art to research it, let alone discover that the supply of information is but minimal. This profound lack of interest in Gainsborough, both on the part of UCSC’s library and myself, UCSC’s art history protégé, is symptomatic of the university’s greater values and priorities, within art history, education, and scholarship in general.
McHenry Library contains hardly any of the standard biographies and criticisms on Gainsborough which are cited in every later work on the subject. These include William Whitley’s Thomas Gainsborough, the standard biography; Mary Woodall’s compilation of Gainsborough’s Letters; Fulcher’s early biography; Armstrong’s oft-cited monograph; Hayes’ original groundbreaking catalog; or Thicknesse’s rare but extremely important and controversial biography, written in memory of his friend. McHenry’s collection includes a few of Hayes’ catalogs, Waterhouse’s highly esteemed catalog, and Reynolds’ tribute to his fellow artist included in his Discourses. One might notice that the authors of each of these standard texts are Englishmen, who would naturally feel compelled to praise and defend one of the few great artists from their country. Mostly Gainsborough is represented at UCSC by several “coffee table books” and repetitive, unoriginal, and superficial biographies. From these omissions, certain assumptions can be deduced about UCSC’s attitudes toward Thomas Gainsborough. Either the school feels that his work is not worthy of the effort to collect pertinent traditional, historical works, or these values broaden to all of art history: that UCSC simply is not concerned with accumulating older, traditionally based art historical works.
UCSC is obviously much more concerned with art theory than art history. A survey of just the titles of art history courses offered alludes to this fact. (Courses such as “Constructing Representations,” “Myth and Gender,” “Humanisms and Historicisms,” and “Contemporary Masculinities” abound whereas more traditional survey courses or courses focused on a single artist are rare.) Accordingly, UCSC’s library houses books in the form of the “new art history”—books which, while not dealing solely with Gainsborough, include analyses of him within frameworks of non-traditional art theories. Thus, many of UCSC’s more theoretically based books dealing with the art of Gainsborough do not have such obvious titles as (dare I suggest) Thomas Gainsborough or even The Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough. Instead, they are grouped under thematic (and consequently sometimes vague) titles such as Barrell’s popular The Dark Side of the Landscape, Bermingham’s Landscape and Ideology, Paulson’s Emblem and Expression, Buchwald’s article in Studies in Criticism and Aesthetics, or Berger’s Ways of Seeing. UCSC’s preference for this type of theoretical material is further strengthened by loyalty within the UC system, and that Bermingham is a professor at UC Irvine. Or just as likely and with the same results, all of the UC schools developed their emphases on art theory concurrently, and have fostered one another’s development in that direction.
These theoretical texts have certain distinguishing attributes in common. They tend not to value paintings as “better,” “worse,” or “masterpiece” based on a Renaissance ideal of painterly quality. Instead, they accept the established attribution of Gainsborough’s work and work within it. In the preface of his 1915 monograph on Gainsborough, Whitley criticizes this method of scholarship. “Most of his biographers seem to have assumed that little or nothing new could be discovered about him, and that the only thing to be done was to re-arrange the existing material to the best advantage.” (Whitley, pp. vii-viii) Yet postmodernism has allowed scholars to rearrange old material in combination with otherwise unrelated sources and in fact say something much different. Their theories are new, if their materials are not. Later writers on Gainsborough have used theories of Marxism, Freudian psychoanalysis, semiotics, and structuralism to deconstruct traditional, common notions of the paintings. And, as many of these writers are from the United States, they do not feel the English pressure to heroicise their native Gainsborough. However, although their views might appear objective, every writer works toward some goal. The agendas of postmodern works vary according to their individual ideologies, whereas the traditional monographs tend to address a single artistic personality.
While I vehemently believe that postmodern theory is equally as important as (and as the student who was bred in the postmodern classroom, infinitely more interesting than) traditional scholarship, I cannot help but wonder if UCSC has gone too far in its exclusion of earlier works. Traditional art scholarship contains research and shows roots of theories that are missing in later works. By ignoring the primary and standard literature on Gainsborough, UCSC has dehistoricized an important landmark in the history of art. Both traditional art history and postmodern art theory have their roles in the realm of art scholarship. Neither should replace the other.
When specifically focusing on Gainsborough’s Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, one must by necessity look toward more modern criticism. Standard literature on Gainsborough tends to focus on Gainsborough’s personal life and superficially on some of his works. Until fairly recently, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews has been overlooked. The first mention of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews occurs in Armstrong’s 1904 biography of Gainsborough. The painting only receives minimal attention in the catalog of pictures following his main body of text. “An early picture, painted at Auberies, near Sudbury,” is the only description of “Mr. and Mrs. R. Andrewes.” (Armstrong, P.257) The couple’s first names are not even important enough to mention, and “Andrewes,” if not misspelled, is at least spelled differently by choice in almost every later description of the painting. Neither Reynolds, Thicknesse, Fulcher, nor Whitley ever mention the existence of a Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, yet writers on Gainsborough commonly cite these studies as invaluable documents in the study of Gainsborough’s art.
Mr. and Mrs. Andrews must wait until Waterhouse’s 1953 overview of British painting and then his extensive catalog, published in 1958, before it receives the general respect of a recognized masterpiece. Here, with no written precedence for deeming it as such, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews fills the role of the young Gainsborough’s early masterpiece. “It may be to a small extent an accident that certain of these small-scale pictures, notably the Mr. and Mrs. Andrews…, by being combined with a landscape background of just the same degree of fresh informality, should happen to be rightly seen as masterpieces by modern eyes.” (Waterhouse, 1958, p.17) Yet although Mr. and Mrs. Andrews is a “masterpiece,” important enough to deserve a color detail and black and white plate in this influential catalog, Waterhouse gives the painting no further description or comment than this one sentence.
In fact, Waterhouse’s captions to the plates of this painting and the information within the catalog listing itself are contradictory, and misleading. In the catalog portion of his monograph, Waterhouse places Mr. and Mrs. Andrews in the collection of London’s National Gallery. But in his “Index of the Present Owners of Paintings”, the painting is part of G. W. Andrews’ private collection. At this time the National Gallery in London must have been negotiating for or planning to buy the painting which perhaps was on loan and was eventually acquired in 1960. This would explain its sudden emergence as an established but unstudied masterpiece. But Waterhouse gives no provenance of the painting (unlike his careful notes of most of the other paintings in his catalog), leaving his readers to draw their own conclusions as to its whereabouts.
Waterhouse further misleads his readers by calling Mrs. Andrews Mary. Catalogs of the National Gallery tell us that her full name was Frances Mary Carter. Every scholar following Waterhouse confidently refers to her as Frances Carter. Waterhouse’s outstanding, and one would think obvious mistake was never directly corrected or chastised by later writers. Instead, they consistently call her Frances, and just as often praise Waterhouse’s intensive study. The mistake first of all, and also its being ignored by later scholars, point to a common lack of interest in discerning facts about this painting. More than that though, it reveals a lack of interest in Mrs. Andrews as an important element of the painting unto herself. She is acknowledged only as a possession of her husband. Her own identity (and women’s identity in general, one might expand, at least in Waterhouse’s case) is not even important enough to validate. For such an accepted masterpiece, the portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews holds much mystery in simple, factual areas that should be the least troublesome in the analysis of any painting.
Mr. and Mrs. Andrews goes on to be further ignored in important studies on Gainsborough. After Waterhouse breaks the ice by at least mentioning the painting, every later monograph does the same: they bring up the Andrews portrait as an early masterpiece and then refuse to discuss it much further. John Hayes, in his first book containing paintings by Gainsborough, cites Mr. and Mrs. Andrews as the classic example of involving “figures and landscape one with the other,” (Hayes, 1975, p.41) then says no more about the painting until its entry in the catalog. Other major works by Gainsborough are worthy of several paragraphs in the same introductory discussion of this book. In the catalog, Hayes describes the painting in one concise paragraph, covering apparently every necessary aspect of the work, as his 1982 discussion of the work contains no new information. Furthermore, the huge Tate show of 1980-1981 of Gainsborough’s work, which John Hayes curated and for which he wrote the accompanying exhibition catalog, did not include this supposed masterpiece. The show’s book does briefly mention the painting in its introduction as “an opportunity for Gainsborough to display his powers as a landscape painter.” (Hayes, 1980, p.42). In the margin is a one-by-two inch black and white reproduction of the painting. How can such an important masterpiece be reduced to a minuscule reproduction in what is supposedly the comprehensive exhibit of a master’s work? Such shoddy representation of the painting devalues rather than emphasizes its monumentality.
Perhaps traditional literature shies away from analyzing Mr. and Mrs. Andrews because it stands alone as an atypical work in the realm of Gainsborough’s oeuvre. In the little that is written about this painting in traditional literature, why Gainsborough did not continue painting in this manner is a question repeatedly posed. “One would have supposed that…Gainsborough’s art would have developed along the lines of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, especially when he was working in a genre which was in request with country patrons. But such did not prove to be the case.” (Hayes, 1982, p.203) Traditionalists point out that here Gainsborough paints from nature and that the portrait equals the landscape in importance. In his later paintings, Gainsborough uses the landscape as a mere background for his portraits, or the figure is used as an excuse for a landscape. Furthermore, although there is evidence to suggest that Gainsborough continued to sketch from nature, his later paintings were of idealized landscapes, painted from imagination or miniature models. “In a sense [Mr. and Mrs. Andrews] is at once the promise and fulfillment of all that Gainsborough might have been.” (Waterhouse, 1953, p.174)
Whereas the traditionalists stop at idly wondering why Gainsborough did not continue in this vein, later theoretical writers combine standard information about the artist with other information to answer that question. In Landscape and Ideology, Ann Bermingham devotes a large discussion to the analysis of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews. “Although Gainsborough’s portrait Mr. and Mrs. Robert Andrews of about 1748-1749 is often taken to exemplify the genre of the outdoor conversation piece, its atypicality is striking.” (Bermingham, p.28) First, Bermingham notes that the typical conversation piece is set in a landscape garden. Gainsborough’s farm setting renders impossible the conventional trope of man’s integration into a self-made “nature.” “Unlike the traditional garden setting that naturalizes behavior based on an ideal of nature, the field in this painting reveals the particular economic relationship to the land on which the Andrewses’ behavior is based: economic productivity.” (ibid., p.29)
Instead of removing the figure to the fantasy of ideal nature which in reality would be a planned part of a cultivated property, Gainsborough stresses the mutual effects of land and man upon each other. By placing figures in a landscape garden, typical conversation pieces deny the very method by which the people depicted are privileged enough to afford a landscape garden, and to afford the leisure to enjoy it. Mr. and Mrs. Andrews allows no such denial. The source of their wealth, their crops, is clearly as important as Mr. and Mrs. Andrews’ presence in the portrait.
There is a more honest form of integration into nature in this painting than in other conversation pieces. Mr. Andrews is depicted comfortable and casual on his property. His gun and dog show signs of his hunting, also drawing him closer to the nature of his surroundings. Meanwhile, his property shows the signs of his management; the enclosed land is organized and well planned by man. “Andrews bears the mark of nature, naturalness, and nature bears the mark of human nature, cultivation.” (ibid., p.29)
There is a timelessness and truthfulness in this painting that could not have existed if it showed a landscape garden. A landscape garden is a conspicuous sign of leisure, one in which even the most privileged person could not constantly live. It has a time limit—at some point people enjoying the landscape garden must leave it and return to the “real world.” Although not actually in direct contact with the dirt and work of their “real world,” the Andrewses at least have not attempted to deny its existence.
This very honesty in the painting enables Bermingham to explain why this type of painting was not continued. The farm is visible, easily understood evidence of manual labor. A landscape garden, even though constructed, appears to be entirely natural and unrelated to human intervention or intention. “The Andrews portrait remained an unpopular anomaly, then, not because work was something the gentry did not do but because any suggestion of labor in the context of a leisured gentry was unacceptable.” (ibid., p.31)
Mr. and Mrs. Andrews contains too many mixed signals for the comfort of the gentry. Mr. and Mrs. Andrews obviously have leisure time—to hunt, to wear finery, to sit for their portrait. Their well-tended crops stand as proof that they did not work the land. While the Andrewses play, workpeople care for their source of income. “Even as the painting celebrates a self-identity of proprietor and property, it betrays an alienation.” (ibid., p.31) The owners are naturalized in their land, yet they are not a part of it. Much safer is the painting that is a total fantasy. Knowing the history of landscape gardens from a postmodern perspective, one could realize that paintings of them imply the same estrangement from the land. But on a purely visual and uninformed level (on which Gainsborough always claimed to be painting), a landscape garden holds no threat. It is merely a pleasing piece of nature. The portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews comes dangerously close to revealing rich people’s sordid truth. As Gainsborough was supported by painting rich people’s portraits, it stands to follow that he would retreat to a more benign, accepted manner of depiction.
John Barrell, in The Dark Side of the Landscape (1980) discusses eighteenth century English landscape painting in terms of Marxism. He focuses on the division between the classes, and the way in which wealthy people are represented in the landscape, and how they liked to see the poor. “What is likely to be true, or course, in any developed or developing society; but what has often been denied about English society in the eighteenth century is that its members exhibit any consciousness of class at all.” (Barrell, p.2) Rich landowners wanted to see themselves and the poor happily coexisting in nature; the poor being poor and happy, and the rich being rich and happy.
Barrell chooses Gainsborough’s late series of “cottage door” paintings to exemplify the wealthy eighteenth century Englishman’s ideal landscape. “The rustic figures become…more and more ragged, but remain inexplicably cheerful.” (Barrell, p.16) Barrell explains that wealthy landowners wished for a semblance of harmony among the classes, when in actuality both the rich and poor harbored resentment for each other. The poor resented their opposing class for obvious economic and political reasons, and the rich for feeling alienated from their own property. Barrell discusses landscape painting that portrays the two classes as content and self-satisfied.
By his omission of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, one must assume that this painting was purposefully overlooked. It does not agree with his argument. Indeed, as Bermingham’s book explains, this painting portrays the unfulfilled desire for the rich to be integrated into nature. The displays of wealth and nature seem to be diametrically opposed. Marcia Pointon too discusses Gainsborough’s later works as a safer domain in which he could paint. “It seems not extravagant to suggest that Gainsborough may possibly have developed the cottage subject in response to this appreciation for the elegaic, paradisal qualities in his landscapes.” (Pointon, p.450) In late portraits and his cottage door pieces, Gainsborough is often commissioned to paint wealthy patrons in the costume of the peasant. In comparison, his early Mr. and Mrs. Andrews seems blatantly truthful in how it depicts the upper class.
Still other writers acknowledge Mr. and Mrs. Andrews’ apparent differences from Gainsborough’s later paintings, yet they continue to regard it as the prototype and representative conversation piece. “This is the typical English conversation piece of the sort developed and elaborated upon by Zoffany a decade later. Demarcation and definition are all.” (Paulson, p.216) Bermingham and Barrell would argue that demarcation and definition are precisely what sets this piece apart. There is too much demarcation—the property is owned by the Andrewses, yet they cannot touch it. And too much is defined—we can readily see that the Andrewses are wealthy. They are overtly proud of their wealth, rather than modestly hiding in the false setting of an expensive oil painting’s landscape garden.
In the broad coverage but concise style of his Ways of Seeing (1972), John Berger takes on this issue of pride in ownership. Despite what is shown in Mr. and Mrs. Andrews-—a young couple and their prosperous land—there is also the fact that the painting exists at all to document the image within it. “Why did Mr. and Mrs. Andrews commission a portrait of themselves with a recognizable landscape of their own land as background?…The point being made is that, among the pleasures their portrait gave to Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, was the pleasure of seeing themselves depicted as landowners and this pleasure was enhanced by the ability of oil paint to render their land in all its substantiality.” (Berger, pp.107-108) The Andrewses had the double pleasure of owning the land depicted, and of owning the painting that depicted them owning it.
Paulson and Rosenthal concur with Berger that Mr. and Mrs. Andrews portrays a man showing pride in ownership. “Whereas [other conversation pieces] usually set their subjects in a park, Andrews’s park is his farm, and we are meant to admire his progressive farming, lines of stubble showing that he has used a seed-drill, as well as his possessions: his dog, and his wife.” (Rosenthal, p.42)
Like the seeds that are drilled into Mr. Andrews’ farm, scholars of Gainsborough have had it drilled into their heads that Mr. and Mrs. Andrews depicts pride in ownership, but in a different way than other conversation pieces. It is painted from nature, the portrait and landscape are equally important, and it shows a farm rather than a landscape garden. Most significant, the pride is shown overtly. The Andrewses show no shame of being rich, unlike paintings that are just as expensive but try to portray the goodness in poverty and humility.
Only Bermingham, and Barrell in his backhanded way, address the issue of why Gainsborough quit painting in the style of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews. We have the concurrence of traditionalists like Waterhouse and Hayes who, focusing directly on Gainsborough, state that he did not continue this style—that Mr. and Mrs. Andrews is an oddity among conversation pieces. Berger, Paulson, and Rosenthal use Mr. and Mrs. Andrews as the exemplary conversation piece in their arguments. The painting does indeed help their discussions, but using it as representative of a genre of paintings is misleading, and even they must admit, false.
Doesn’t the very fact that these writers choose Mr. and Mrs. Andrews from all the hundreds of conversation pieces prove that it is somehow different? Doesn’t the label “masterpiece” imply that a painting stands alone? If there was nothing to differentiate it from the others, it would not be a masterpiece, it would be just another like all the rest. There would be nothing special, nothing noteworthy about the painting. It would not be worth remembering. And so, it would not be worth discussion—why would authors write about the common when they can have the extraordinary?
It is strange that such an important masterpiece remains unfinished; stranger yet that scholars have not chosen to analyze the artist’s omission. The National Gallery’s scientific description of the painting (it is referred to by its catalog number rather than its name) is the first to note the unpainted portion of Mrs. Andrews’ lap. “It appears that she was intended to be shown holding a pheasant.” (The National Gallery, p.220) Hayes also comments that the blank spot was to have been a pheasant shot by Mr. Andrews, judging from the shape outlined. (Hayes, 1975, p.203) Perhaps it is due to my lack of imagination that I have been unable to perceive the shape of a pheasant or any bird in this piece of unpainted canvas.
Regardless of whether it was supposed to have been a pheasant or not, this significant omission on the part of the artist deserves more attention than it has received. On top of my decision to analyze this aspect (or lack thereof) of the painting, I am forced once again to analyze the scholars who have collected information on Gainsborough before me. Like UCSC’s library that has chosen to exclude traditional literature on Gainsborough, Gainsborough’s critics have chosen to exclude discussion of the missing pheasant.
Of the writers who bother to mention that there is an unpainted portion of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, most do not say more about it than that it was supposed to have been a dead pheasant. Jack Lindsay offers one possibility as to why Gainsborough might have left the painting unfinished. “Already he seems to have disliked returning to a work when he had once stopped working on it.” (Lindsay, p.26) This excuse is unbelievable. Why would the rest of the painting be so carefully worked when the blank spot is not even sketched in? And contrary to Hayes’ suggestion, the pheasant is not outlined except by where the paint ends. There is absolutely no painted evidence to suggest the intention of a pheasant. Furthermore, why would the Andrewses accept an incomplete painting? They had commissioned a finished portrait; it seems as though there would be a specific reason to want to own a painting with such a defined spot missing.
While it is true that Gainsborough often left his later paintings unfinished, every portion of the paintings is brought to the same point of resolution. They are not worked in the patchwork fashion of completing one feature before starting another. Gainsborough’s contemporary artist and rival Joshua Reynolds praised him for “his manner of forming all the parts of his picture together; the whole going on at the same time, in the same manner as nature creates her works.” (Reynolds, p.251) In view of Gainsborough’s normal painting style, the missing pheasant seems even more peculiar.
Once again we must turn to Bermingham to answer the questions that no one else will, but in this case even she is not willing to speculate much. Not even worthy of being included in the main body of her discussion, Bermingham’s pheasant explanation is reduced to the position of footnote. Here she devotes one sentence to justify Gainsborough’s omission. “Since birds often carried erotic connotations, the dead pheasant might have seemed inappropriate and thus left unfinished.” (Bermingham, p.202) Although Bermingham does not discuss the matter any further, her suggestion provokes further investigation. First, notice where the pheasant is not painted. Then bring Freud into the argument and let the analysis begin.
Given that birds carried sexual connotations (although the unscandalous presence of birds in still-lives disputes this), then the placement of the pheasant over the woman’s genitals is meaningful. The fact that it was not painted, Freud would suggest, is even more significant. The male artist fears the female genitals, so he hides them by a dead pheasant. But the pheasant becomes so much a euphemism for the genitals that the two are indistinguishable. In disgust, the artist effectively castrates the woman himself. He does not give her the pheasant—all she has is a void between her legs.
Does the fact that the pheasant was to be dead insinuate something of even greater magnitude, along these same lines of Freudian logic? With bird equaling sexuality, then a dead pheasant must imply passive sexuality. From Jack Lindsay’s chapter on Gainsborough’s friend and first biographer Philip Thicknesse in his 1981 monograph, we know that Thicknesse was extremely sexist. He not only felt that a woman’s place is in the home and that here “greatest pleasure should consist in rendering herself agreeable to her Husband” (Thicknesse, Thoughts on the Times, 1779, quoted in Lindsay, p.210), but that she should not excel in any way that would call attention to herself. He forced his wife to quit performing music when he married her, and was well known to disapprove of the opinionated Mrs. Gainsborough. It would not be too unreasonable to assume that Gainsborough himself would have shared some of these beliefs with his friend. With this sexist attitude, he would try to control female sexuality by killing her pheasant, so to speak. By rendering the pheasant powerless, Gainsborough could conquer his fear of the female genitalia. But he is unable to even depict the dead bird—he is impotent.
Disregarding the pheasant, Gainsborough does not even try to complete Francis’ dress. He obviously has trouble dealing with the female pelvic area. Gainsborough himself was a newlywed at this time; might we conclude that he had a fear of the unknown? Whatever the answer may be to the mysterious missing pheasant, this aspect of Gainsborough’s art is a field waiting for discussion. It is easy to conclude that the traditionalists would not want to discover that he was a misogynist or worse, a latent homosexual. But a postmodern author, such as Ronald Paulson with his Freudian background, would jump at the chance to discover sex and intrigue in British landscape painting.
I must admit that I was pleased to discover that sex and intrigue can be an integral part of Gainsborough. In fact, with postmodernism, sex and intrigue can be points for discussion in virtually any topic. Such is the beauty of postmodernism. While I disapprove of UCSC’s choice to exclude traditional writings on Gainsborough, one might notice that I have not agreed with or discussed deeply anything the traditional writings have said. Rather, it is what they have not said that has interested me. But it was necessary to see the standard texts to know what they omitted. If being a postmodernist is, as Whitley disdainfully described the practice, simply rearranging old material with a new system of organization; and if UCSC has truly trained me to be a postmodernist; then I must necessarily have access to the traditional texts in order to practice what I have been taught in theory. Postmodernism may be making fun of traditionalism, but no one will get the punchline unless they understand the joke.

We frolicked with burlesque dancers at this show! Everyone who knows me knows that I like a good frolic.

Complaining about unreliable transportation, as captured by Rodney Cuthbertson.

At Broadway Studios, looking like a proper 80′s band in all our glory. Photos by Victor Andrews.

Technically our second public show, our gig at The Eagle felt like our debut performance. The Eagle Tavern was a San Francisco landmark – a divey, gay, motorcycle bar, full of memories and graffiti. I miss that place and I’m proud to have played it in its heyday.

Within 3 days of each other, we had our first public shows. This was at Martuni’s – technically the first show in front of a real paying audience!

Before we went primetime, we played an invitation-only show for our friends who could be trusted to give honest feedback. It built our confidence and polished our performance for our first real show.

Our very first gig ever was at our very own drummer, Mark’s wedding to the wonderful Carol. Alas, we didn’t play Hava Nagila.

Check out Marcy Mendelson’s hot photos from our debut performance!

Melinda started out as a complete unknown. Then she was born. Still, relatively few people knew her. Over time, Melinda’s network grew, and now she is not only known, but has a website, which proves her existence.

Melinda studied art and art history, focusing on unusual mediums often in the context of installation and performance art. Highly influential were her college internship at the Franklin Furnace and graduate school studies with performance artist Linda Montano. Melinda later became interested in technology when collaborating on Anime Noir, an erotic online multiplayer game. Eventually, Melinda abandoned her art/art history career for one more technology based, working mainly in consumer electronics companies. Straddling visual culture and technological immersion, Melinda focuses on UX (user experience) in her work.

Melinda practices American-style boxing and has a mean left hook. She fronts an Adam Ant tribute band called Madam and the Ants.