Hair today,...
The Comedian Larry David once declared that he wasn’t funny until his hair started falling out.
Referring regularly to “his community”, David’s character in the series Curb your enthusiasm, uses his affliction to call out those who question his behaviour in this comedy of manners. David, who plays a version of himself in the show, wrestles with awkward social situations and subtle misunderstandings that provide an opportunity to satirize the act of virtue signalling, by aiming scorn and shame at a collective subconscious prejudice that society has towards those with little or no hair.
Hair is a peculiar substance that dies as soon as it appears to the eye. Although the follicles located beneath the skin contain living cells that what we call hair is made up of dead, hardened Keratin. Hair is dead, death itself. Baldness, in all its agonising forms, is a kind of afterlife. The victims, predominantly though not exclusively male, slowly slip into another realm of reality, a dimension constructed of vulnerability, absence and loss. When people find themselves in such positions, something changes. Perspective.
Baldness is a symbol of becoming, an outward appearance that shines with the truth that inside is an emptiness that unifies us all, a life within that is rushing toward death. Baldness is a form of re-incarnation, a development allowing, if not forcing, the human to accept the negative and press on without a need for hope but definitely a need for a hat.
The historical avant garde was littered with baldness, from The Bauhaus to the Factory the twentieth century brought important balding artists to prominence whose revolutionary pursuits and hairlessness have changed the way we encounter culture. Drawing upon this difference in perspective unavailable to those outside the bald community.
Pablo Picasso did not throw away his old clothes, cut hair or cut nails, because he was afraid that he would lose "parts of his essence" but who could disagree that when he accepted his baldness, got rid of his sweepover exposing the truth that he became iconic in ways impossible before. Death and its drive is the essence that the artist feared losing. The energy in the work of this tiny titanic figure is a need to experience the fear of obliteration.
Painting is an expression of our struggle to understand ourselves. It’s interesting that we use brushes made of animal hair or a simulation of it to depict and abstract what we know of our own experience. Death and coloured muck as tools for interpreting the world.
Andy Warhol famously wore wigs. Initially out of embarrassment and laterally as a means of mythologising the self. Like a big arrow pointing to the truth beneath the toupe. Much has been written and said about the wigs but little has been discussed regarding the artist's relationship with baldness and death. Andy’s fascination with death was an attempt to face up to his baldness. Disguising nothing the wigs are now free and have a life of their own, being exhibited all over the world.
Joseph Beuys was attempting to mythologise himself and the role of the artist as well. His struggle with hair loss was incongruous to his attitude as avant poseur or shamanic, enviro-taerian. He took to wearing an Indiana Jones hat that caricatured him sufficiently so as to make him seem heroic or naked without it. ‘How to explain pictures to a dead hare’,is a work that speaks for itself, it's his bald masterpiece. Though art history has interpreted a work rich in symbolism, Beuys himself said the piece was a contemplation on thought and speech. For me it is clearly an attempt to revive the production of keratin cells in the artist's scalp using honey and gold leaf, to create an alchemical reversal of materials. Beuys spoke to the dead hare/hair like an amateur botanist talks to their plants, encouraging growth through one sided conversation.
Balding auteur, Jean luc godard’s adaptation of Shakespears King Lear, a post apocalyptic quest to rediscover culture, the knowledge of which has been obliterated in the Chenoble nuclear disaster, the director plays the role of Professor Pluggy, an inventor and a hermit whose experiments and research are towards an illusive something he refers to as the “image”. Godard disguises his familiar, follically challenged appearance with a headdress made of jingling ornaments, video and audio cables. “His hair is made of hi-fi cables” Godard explained, “so that he is able to plug his head directly into the unknown”. Godard was a bald radical right to the end of his life ending it by medical assistance, his final act as controversy.
But we do not need cables or wigs to access the unknown, we don't even need to be bald. It is there in the mirror shining back at us every time we look. We are given the opportunity to change our perspective with every painting we encounter. Every song or piece of music we hear, every work of art is situated somewhere in the unknown. What can we be sure of? That for some hair is a thing of the past? Art doesn't explain, it doesn't provide answers or security or protection. It exposes us to the elements, it strips us bare. If an artist is any good they turn our view of the world on its (bald?)head. Art reminds us that we're all the same vulnerable, terrified creatures that we are trying to pretend not to be, struggling to keep the hair on our heads and our heads above water.
Owen Piper
Text for DONDE HAY PELO HAY ALEGRÍA
January 2026, Santiago de Chile
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