Dartmouth's hairy exhibit
Dartmouth College's Hood Museum of Art has issued the following press release:
On June 6 the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, in partnership with the Dartmouth College Library, will unveil a major public art commission.Our Hanover correspondent has taken a peek at the exhibit and comments:On view through October 28, the green house is a site-specific installation by avant-garde Chinese artist Wenda Gu created as part of the artist's ongoing global united nations hair monuments project. This massive sculpture was created from hair collected in 2006 from thousands of Dartmouth College students, faculty, and staff and Upper Valley community members. Resonating with José Clemente Orozco's utopian vision in his Baker Library mural titled The Epic of American Civilization (1932-34), the green house arises from the museum's hope that major contemporary art projects on campus will celebrate diversity and spark transformative moments in our audiences, specifically around the making and presenting of works of art.
Last spring and summer, Hood staff collected hair from local salons and two student and community "hair drives." An estimated 42,350 haircuts resulted in the accumulation of 430 pounds of hair, which was shipped to Wenda Gu’s Shanghai studio. The artist has combined it with brightly dyed hair from other parts of the world, fashioning a monument that is local in origin and global in conception. The resulting eighty-by-thirteen-foot hair screen will fill the main hall of Baker Library, the physical and intellectual heart of the Dartmouth campus. The hair screen is accompanied in Berry Library by a six-mile-long hair braid in twelve neon colors representing all of the countries of the world currently recognized by the United Nations.
Wenda Gu's united nations sculptures result from his dream that through his art he might unite humanity and encourage international understanding. He writes, "The united nations art project is committed to a single human body material—pure human hair. Hair is a signifier and metaphor extremely rich in history, civilization, science, ethnicity, timing, and even economics. [It] becomes the great human 'hair-itage.'" Wenda Gu’s sculpture at Dartmouth is a powerful statement about the living, human dimension of globalization and the diversity represented by our own community.
The hair "unites humanity" and "encourages international understanding." It also makes you not want to breathe when you walk down the hall!!The photo above depicts the exhibit as installed. Below is a photo of the artist "and hair panel."
In the current issue of the New Criterion, Roger Kimball analyzed why the art world is a disaster based on his visit to the inaugural exhibit at the new addition to Bard College's art museum. the green house illustrates each element of Roger's analysis, but perhaps most pointedly the third:
A third additional element in this sorry story has to do with the decoupling of art-world practice from the practice of art. Look at the objects on view in “Wrestle” [the inaugural exhibit]: almost none has anything to do with art as traditionally understood: mastery of a craft in order to make objects that gratify and ennoble those who see them. On the contrary, the art world has wholeheartedly embraced art as an exercise in political sermonizing and anti-humanistic persiflage, which has assured the increasing trivialization of the practice of art. For those who cherish art as an ally to civilization, the disaster that is today’s art world is nothing less than a tragedy.
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