 |
 |
 |
UVLife Online
Art in the Upper Valley: It Takes a Village
By Andi Diehn
|
Stand on one side of the Wenda Gu exhibit, “the green house,” hanging in the main hall of Baker Library, and you can look right through the curtain of hair, out the windows on the far wall, across the Dartmouth Green all the way over to the Hanover Inn and the top of Main Street. Beyond the 80 by 30 translucent panel of hair, members of the community walk, drive, ride bicycles and push strollers. Their bodies are part of this monumental work of art by virtue of the fact they are present on the outside and they are present on the inside — at least, their hair might be.
While most people visit their hairdresser once every couple of months or so, staff from the Hood Museum found themselves stopping by 28 Upper Valley salons and barbershops every week during the months of June through September of 2006. No, these weren’t high growth months. They were collecting 430 pounds of local hair to ship to Gu’s studio in Shanghai where he and his assistants mixed it with glue and created the huge panels that have hung in the Baker Library since June. That’s about 42,350 haircuts. That’s a lot of hair.
The Hair
“There’s a minority of people who, when they see the exhibit, wonders what makes this art,” says Brian Kennedy, director of the Hood Museum. “Then there’s the majority who are surprised by how it looks and the thoughts it provokes. For many, the hair has been transformed into a thing of beauty.”
A nearby hallway in Berry Library is lined with a 6-mile long braid of hair collected from wig factories in China and died different neon colors This exhibit is called “united colours.” Silver tags with the names of member countries of the United Nations, spelled backwards into unfamiliar words like “arrodna” and “lagenes,” hang embedded in the braid.
Connie Stearn, a hairdresser from Tanglez N Tanz in Lebanon, N.H., who collected hair for the project, asked at the opening why the names of the countries were spelled backwards. “I was told that spelling them backwards makes them equal,” she says. “I thought that was interesting.”
When Gu was commissioned by Dartmouth College to create a work of art, he was also asked to give Dartmouth a message. Embedded within the sheet of hair are fluorescent green, superimposed words: “Educations” and “Advertises.” These words are also made out of hair from Chinese wig factories and are presented less to promote an exchange of ideas, a conversation.
Art affects different people in different ways, and “the green house” may serve to give hairdressers a new perspective on something very familiar. “An elderly lady beside me said the hair looked like lace,” says Stearn. “Working with it every day, I never would’ve thought of that.”
The Artist
Wenda Gu has been making art out of human hair since 1993 when he began his united nations project, a series of monumental sculptures dedicated to promoting globalism and transcultural understanding. Born in China in 1955, he now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., with his wife and baby daughter, and travels extensively for his art.
Gu’s United Nations sculptures combine hair from all different races, nationalities, ethnicities and cultures. By doing this, he is providing the world with a model of what the human race might strive toward. He writes, “A great ‘utopia’ of the unification of mankind probably can never exist in our reality but it is going to be fully realized in the art world.” Toward this end, he has used the hair of an estimated four million people worldwide in his United Nations project.
“the green house” and its companion exhibits — “united colours” and “forest of stone steles” installed in the Hood Museum — are the first works of art commissioned by the college since the Orozco murals in 1934. The Orozco murals, installed in the reserve room just downstairs from the green house, depict the conquest of the Americas and were highly controversial when first unveiled. Since then, art at Dartmouth College has mostly stayed within the sanctioning walls of the Hood Museum. Now, Dartmouth’s reception toward art is undergoing a sea change.
“When I interviewed with President Wright over two years ago, he expressed the desire to find art in unexpected places,” says Brian Kennedy. “When art is part of public life it creates a more dynamic relationship between the viewer and the art. I had worked with Wenda Gu in Australia and thought he could really engage the community at Dartmouth.”
While some artists may feel that an audience is secondary to the art itself, Gu feels that a project isn’t quite realized until it’s been contemplated by other people. “I’m just an originator,” says Gu during a podcast produced by Dartmouth College. “When my creation is finished, the work is only finished halfway. When my work is displayed in a public space, the second creation starts. The audience, their interpretation of my work in the public sphere, is the second part of the creation. They complete my creation.”
Kennedy echoes this sentiment. “Using all of our own hair made it a participative process. In critiquing it, we critique ourselves. As the viewer, we are the subject looking at the subject,” he says.
The Village
“It blows me away, it’s just so huge, so amazing,” says Margot Schafflinger, owner of Hilde’s Beauty Salon in Hanover, N.H. “I am very impressed with the size.”
Hairdressers and barbers often get requests for the hair that falls to their floors (to keep deer out of gardens, for instance) but perhaps none so unusual as the Hood’s. When hairdresser Mariel Patterson from Country Cuts and Styles in Orford, N.H., first heard she’d be collecting hair to send to Shanghai for an art project, she was somewhat skeptical. “I thought it was weird at first,” she laughs. “But now I think it’s really neat. We kept the hair in a box and dumped it about 20 times.”
Comments written in three available books near the greenhouse show an emotional public reaction to the exhibit. “There are some very witty remarks about bathtub drains!” laughs Kennedy. “But many people are quite intrigued and fascinated.”
One comment signed by “Dartmouth Parents” expresses dismay, remarking that the exhibit recalls for them the pile of shoes at the Holocaust museum. On the other hand, Kennedy describes the reaction of a woman who felt the art project resonated with her. “A lady mentioned to me that hair is so important because she’s currently going through chemotherapy and losing her own.”
Stearn isn’t surprised at the emotions, positive or negative, evoked by the exhibit. “Hair is what makes you an individual,” she says. “Hair is who you are.”
Andi Diehn is a freelance writer living in Enfield, N.H., with her husband and two children. She has long brown hair and a great appreciation for art that makes her think.
More Info
More information about Wenda Gu and his exhibitions at the Hood can be found at http://hoodmuseum.dartmouth.edu/exhibitions/wendagu/index.html
|
|
|
|