Off the Top of Your Head:

Hair as Subject and Medium in Art at the

End of the 20th Century

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction

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

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

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

Chapter 5 Conclusion

Bibliography

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. 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.

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, Robert Gober, 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.

Back to Table of Contents

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.[1]

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.[2] In his hair pieces, the substance of hair is only occasionally associated with the human form. One of these, Rocky, 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, 1992, in which a Rocky-like “head” sits atop three mattress springs, Esquire, 1990, where the base is an upright railroad tie, and Haircut, 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. 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.[3]

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.”[4] 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.[5] 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.[6]

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.[7] 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.”[8] 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.”[9] 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?, 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[10], bell hooks[11], and Lisa Jones[12] 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.”[13]

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.”[14] 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.[15] Grandiose hairstyles or lofty headdresses command attention and connote a regal demeanor, functioning as a crownlike symbol of honor and privilege.[16] 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.”[17] 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.[18] 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.[19] 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.[20]

Bag Lady in Flight, 1982/1990,[21] takes Hammons into this abstract territory that somehow speaks of femininity. It cleverly recalls Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending the Staircase, 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...”[22] 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.”[23] 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.”[24]

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. 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, 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, 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, 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, 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,”[25] 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.”[26] 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.

Back to Table of Contents

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. 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.[27] 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.”[28] 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.)”[29] 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.”[30] 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.[31] 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.”[32] 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.”[33] 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 stubb