Fat Haircuts

2012

Fat Haircuts

Fat Haircuts is a bookwork in which I ask the public to engage with notions of beauty either through direct participation as a model or as a casual reader of the work. Remember those giant “look books” from the hair salons of the eighties, filled with pictures of all the best, featheriest, blown-outest hair ever? You would flip through those books while waiting for your appointment to pinpoint exactly the look you wanted the stylist to give you, which they of course did to the best of their ability (and relative to their trained understanding of how to make that haircut look “good” for your face’s shape, even if it meant destroying the actual style you wanted in the first place). 

Of course, the further one is from society’s beauty ideals, the more likely they are to be told by their stylist “I’m a beautician, not a magician!” Hairstylists, barbers and aestheticians, like most of us, have simply been indoctrinated into a system that values certain physical characteristics above all others, the difference being that they have been given the tools by which to quantify those characteristics, dispensing remedies to our shortcomings in small doses like over-the-counter ugliness medication. No, they can’t make your face less round, but they can help make you LOOK like it is.

Fashionable Versus Fatness

In 1893, ethics theorist Herbert Spencer suggested that the artificial construct of fashion is not only a signifier of class, role and status, but in fact controls individuals’ place in our society, saying “Fashion is a form of social regulation analogous to constitutional government as a form of political regulation.” (Chapkis 86) If that is the case, then the oppression of those who fall outside the beauty ideals is regimented by the fact that we cannot fit within the narrowly-defined construct of fashion either because of our size, physical appearance, gender presentation, race, physical ability, or age, not to mention the class, role, and the status conferred on us by our lack of access to financial resources. If fashion controls my place in society, then regardless of what I aspire to, my place in society is limited by my body and its physical appearance. Though we may have the money to buy our way out of the fashion underclasses, until our bodies cease to be unfashionable, no amount of dressing-up will make us so.

Furthermore, there’s no such thing as a fat haircut. It is arguable that there are hairstyles that look better on “fat faces” but you can bet that every hairstyle has at one time or another been styled onto every shape of person, and you can bet that whether a style looks good or not has virtually nothing to do with the weight of the person wearing it. Certain styles that supposedly work better on fat faces, or clothes that we are told work better on fat bodies are in reality tools of camouflage, designed to make those that do not fit the beauty ideal blend in and become invisible. The word “flattering” means “makes you look more like us” because difference is despised in any system that promotes the following of trends.

I am fascinated by the ways haircut art performances and the grassroots queer community haircutting movement question fashion and its attendant rules. Some of these projects that have happened over the past decade include FASTWURMS’ Unisex: House of Bangs, Mammalian Diving Reflex’s Haircuts by Children, Dyke Haircuts, Butch Haircuts, Queer Haircut Collective, Lesbian Haircuts and Bike Shop, Lesbian Haircuts for Anyone. I am attracted to the connections they foster (within the queer and art communities) via physical contact and bonding, the economics of bartering/trade within subcultural communities, and the playful treatment of trust as a sport. 

Queer stylists emerged to fill a need within the queer community for “gender inappropriate” or subculture-specific styles; I see a need for a similar fat stylist movement. Unashamed fatness queers the body, and it is important in my practice to draw those connections. The old adage says “never trust a bald barber.” I want to know: do people fear a fat stylist as much as the stylist fears the fat customer?

  In September 2012, I put out a call for photos of fat haircuts via Facebook and various (fat/queer/art) activist groups of which I am a member. I invited people to either allow me to take their picture or to send me pictures of their “fat haircuts.” I asked for information including real name, modeling name for publication, hairstylist or barber, the name of the hairstyle, photo credit, and any other information they thought was relevant, making it clear that they could provide as much or as little of this information as they wished. In writing the call, I made several strategic decisions. The first was an omission: I did not define what a fat haircut was, but left it up to the reader to have to decide whether or not they had one, (and then, whether they wanted to share it in a book, and if so why). In this way, the performance of the work began long before the photos were even submitted, in my challenging people to wonder whether the call was directed at them, whether it was an accusation, whether they believed themselves to be fat and if they were okay with that, whether they felt their hairstyle was worthy of immortalizing in a book, what a fat hairstyle is, whether they had a “fat hairstyle,” whether they were okay with that, whether my project was self-aware/self-critical or simply documentary, and so forth.  This strategy engages people in the content of the work whether they choose to participate actively or not, as is their right, and ensures that the making of that decision is a critically engaged function of the work.

The second strategy I employed in the call for photos was the request for information, Through it I marked out space for participants to take ownership of the project and to be represented as real people and not simply as nameless models. I wanted their voices to be heard, insofar as they wished to share them. In doing this, I denied the fashion establishment’s strategy of turning models into glamorous clotheshangers whose identities are subsumed by the needs of the industry, and I made visible the people who are systematically rendered invisible within that same industry. 

Finally, accepting and including submissions from all who submitted, and encouraging people to send me photographs (instead of taking them all myself) was my third strategy in creating Fat Haircuts. This approach distanced me as the focus of the work even further than simply removing my body as the subject did. By being the organizer/compiler artist rather than creative genius/curator/photographer/designer artist, I worked to actively level the creative playing field within the work, allowing the creative acts of modeling, photography, and self-representation to be just as important as any of my own creative acts in putting the work together. 

Representation

Of course, by disseminating the call broadly and then accepting all submissions, I gave up some control over how the work would turn out; I enjoy flirting with this element of unpredictability; there is always some degree of the unknown in performance or in any work involving participation. To attempt to prevent it would be to suffocate the work. Fat Haircuts, however, truly relied on that unpredictability to generate content. The substance of the work lies not only in the photos and the object of the book, in the models’ performance, or in the artist’s intent – the content of the work also lies in the reality of who is represented, and why. Building pockets of unpredictability into my work is one of the ways I can make my art function as active research; by designing questions that can only be answered through the realization of the work, and analyzing the results, which are then used to inform new projects. 

Why, for instance, are most of the people who responded to the call women? Mostly I am sure this is because of my social and professional circles. The conference where most of the pictures came from was attended primarily by women; a greater percentage of the people I know and am friends with are women. That can’t be the whole reason though. A great majority of the people in my social sphere are white, for example, and yet the project is racially diverse. Another possible reason for the female-heavy response is that when we think of models and hairstyles, women come to mind more often than men. When it comes to signification, women and men are coded along gendered lines: women and representation, men and function. This work presented itself as being about representation, and thus garnered more responses from women. It is very important to me that the work, in the end, is not overtly “female” – several non-cisgendered people are in the book as well as people who may identify as  cisgendered women but present as butch, androgynous, or overtly masculine. This only adds to the project’s critique of “normalizing” beauty standards, as does the fact that a broad a range of ages and races are represented. 

Another curious aspect of the final product is that the call elicited responses from several well-known names in the fat activist world. This fact might change the project’s reception in those communities, giving it more currency, or a frisson of recognition. What does it mean if it is not a book of fat haircuts on random people, but the fat haircuts of famous academics, musicians, artists, bloggers, writers, and others from the fatosphere? Because these people make up a relatively small percentage of the book, it doesn’t devolve into a yearbook, a “Who’s Who of Fat Activism in 2012”. Rather, it simply helps to make one of the key points of the project: that the models are individuals; they are humans with personalities and flesh and blood bodies, not just ideas or images or clotheshangers.   

The Object of the Book

The desire to manifest this project as a mass-produced object, rather than as a traditional live performance was about harnessing the authority of the object, the book specifically (rather than harnessing nostalgia, or parody, strategies I have employed in other works that employ the authority of the mass-produced object). 

As Joanna Drucker states about art that utilizes the modes of product design, “The synthesis of mainstream culture industry production and fine art production makes it nearly impossible to distinguish them…with all that it implies about image rather than actuality.” (218) Making Fat Haircuts into a book lays bare the false nature of fashion as descriptive of anything true, or useful for anything rather than oppression. And when resistance is part of the rhetoric of such design-art, “As a product, it could well find its place in precisely the world it criticizes. This collapse of critical distance and cooperation is what gives (the) work its interest and edge… The art is at risk because it comes so close to participating in mainstream culture” (219) Here the art is at risk, rather than the artist or the models; this is where the work can succeed rather than simply sensationalize, by being risky rather than putting people at risk.

Drucker asks with what content artist-designers are able to imbue their work in its presentation as mass culture product, positing “The issue is not merely one of content, nor of form and production values, but of the capacity of the work to leverage the distinction between familiar formulae and the momentary epistemic disjunction that results in awareness and insight… Their semiotic condition is fraught with the perils of mistaken identity, of product branding… (the work must) call attention to the line that keeps these worlds distinct.”. (225-226)

By becoming the compiler-organizer of the Fat Haircuts project rather than genius-artist, I also assert the “thingness” of the work rather than its “objecthood.” In other words, by simply ‘publishing’ them into a book I make fat haircuts desirable as consumer commodities. I make the participants into models, and make their fatness consumable as a desired state of being. In contrast, Fashion Plate highlights the social difficulty of living in a fat body.

Implication of Others in the Performance of the Work

The implication of the other in the performance of my work is not just something I do in asking people to participate in my projects. Rather, if I had my way I would destroy the notion of “audience” entirely, and simply consider people part of site and context as an element of my work. In 1966 Allan Kaprow said in his Notes on the Elimination of the Audience: 

“Audiences should be eliminated entirely. All the elements – people, space, the particular materials and character of the environment, time - can in this way be integrated.  And the last shred of theatrical convention disappears… To assemble people and say that they are participating if apples are thrown at them or they are herded about is to ask very little of the notion of participation. Most of the time the reaction of the audience is half-hearted or even reluctant, and sometimes the reaction is even vicious and therefore destructive to the work… After a few years, in any case, ‘audience response’ proves to be so predictably pure cliché that anyone serious about the problem should not tolerate it, any more than the painter should continue the use of dripped paint as a stamp of modernity when it has been adopted by every lampshade and Formica manufacturer in the country.” (103)

In Fat Haircuts, the work’s performance began with the call for models; if the performance of the work started before people had decided whether to participate, then it is entirely reasonable to posit that anyone who received and read the call participated in and performed the work. On the other end of the spectrum, because the artwork exists as a book, or a performance that is meant to resemble (or “be read as”) a Book with all the authority of a Book, the work is not complete unless it is read by others; it is in the reading of the book that the work is activated, “performed,” and completed as art.