Deflecting The Grid: Mona Hatoum
Using diverse materials, Mona Hatoum's art often confronts viewers with bodies, barriers, and passageways. Much of her work also asserts repeating patterns of organic curves or terse boxes. As in "Pull" (1995) and "Traffic" (2002), "Untitled (hair grid with knots 3)" (2001) features hair threading a dialogue between curvi- and rectilinear shapes (and associative clusters tied to each). Unlike the others, however, "Untitled" complicates and tightens the conversation by locating it within a single body (the hair grid) that gestures toward apparent contraries simultaneously. This single form then conceals a doubling essential to its make-up. In this essay we will trace the significance of this doubling, and the subtle color distinction woven into the grid that unlocks its (shockingly) hidden discourse.
On exhibition now at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (June 2006) (third floor) hangs a relatively small, untitled grid in front of which very few museum attendees pause as they make their way through the gallery. The work is ‘Untitled (hair grid with knots 3)’ by Mona Hatoum (British, of Palestinian origin born 1952 in Lebanon). The physical dimensions of the piece are not provided, but there is information about the medium: the work is made of ‘human hair with hairspray tied to transparentized paper.’ The grid appears to be approximately 9 cm square. Three aspects of the piece generate interest: hair as an art medium; the inferred surgical dexterity required to weave strands of human hair into a relatively ordered grid without it collapsing into a disordered knot; and the estimated time such an enterprise might take. In this room of the gallery people gaze at pictures, but no one today gazes at the small untitled grid. No postcard, poster, or book containing a reproduction of ‘Untitled’ is for sale in the museum shop, nor can one find a picture of it on the Internet. It is, however, neither underwhelming nor silent. It suffers, however, from its grid: a risky projection of an overused modern form; a stale sign in a modern art gallery.
Interest in ‘Untitled’ flags because the grid deflects, so to speak, the initial look of the viewer. The grid appears to bear no visual content on which one might fix a continued look; no figure immediately appears to hang within it. And a ‘grid’ contextualized as art no longer seems to have power as a trope capable of provoking exigent questions about such things as the ‘modern condition’; the difficulty of plotting moral, psychosocial, or historical positions, etc. as ‘absolute coordinates’ on the connoted Cartesian map; the effects of empiricism or science on the imagination; the problems associated with hermeneutics; art as commodity whose value can, for instance, be charted on a grid’s plane, or entered into quadrants, etc., etc. These topics, of course, are still potentially interesting and relevant, but the grid’s ‘ordered emptiness’ no longer seems fit to provoke discussions. Or perhaps a small intimate grid made in 2001 too directly recalls the calm grids of Agnes Martin (1960s) to be that compelling. For whichever reason, when approaching the ‘Untitled’ grid there appears to be ‘nothing to see,’ and this drives one toward the text of the title card even faster than usual. One looks for a clue to what seems to be a riddle (Is there more to it?). Of course not all title cards function as keys to decode impenetrable or quiet art. In this case, however, the card satisfies the desire to know if and why this grid means something: the artist did not weave wire or textile but instead wove human hair, and this is a difficult and surprising project. ‘Untitled’ is then seen as a manual feat. Based on this conclusion evoked by the title card (which is larger than the grid) ‘Untitled’ might be grouped (or at least placed next to) what Dadaist Hans Richter described in the 1960s as art ‘whose content is reduced to nothing after the first shock effect’ (208). Similarly, it may fall into Roland Barthes’ category for
those productions of contemporary art which exhaust their necessity as soon as
they have been seen (since to see them is immediately to understand to what
destructive purpose they are exhibited: they no longer contain any contemplative
or delectative duration) [. . .]. (18)
‘Untitled’ is vulnerable to this categorization not because it may be summarized as ‘only’ a grid, but because it appears to be only a clever grid whose artfulness hinges on its shocking medium and the demands this medium presented to the artist. The reduced, categorical, even taxonomic explanation of its materiality as ‘human hair’ advances this limited reading reinforced by what the supposedly non-signifying title ‘Untitled’ signifies: the undifferentiated, the impersonal, and the non-contextualized (i.e., namelessness, pure form, perhaps even universality).
That ‘Untitled’ tempts a reductive reading, or risks being dismissed, perhaps contributes to its force. This is only true because the work is far more interesting than a punch line, so one can appreciate its dissimulation as such (it is like a box, or a series of boxes [a grid] holding a secret that requires effort to access). If one deflects what might be the weary signifieds or allusions that rush to mind as one approaches the grid, and manages to treat ‘Untitled’ not as a riddle satisfied upon reading the title card, there is much to see. The work requires, however, that one get physically very close to it (almost an impossible distance: about seven centimeters, a distance that suggests Hatoum’s proximity to the material as she manipulated it). At that distance if one looks carefully it becomes evident that ‘Untitled’ is not one human’s hair knotted to form a strand woven into a grid. The apparently unified brown grid is actually a grid woven of hair from two different people: one ‘thread’ is black, and the other is brown. Examined from a sharp angle this especially becomes apparent as the brown strand shines in the light.
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Prior to this instance when color enters the composition, the grid was overshadowed by its form and all those ideas with which it might be associated. The flash of light on the brown strand is a shocking moment, and it encourages one to enter the work which before had seemed resistant. The grid changes. It becomes larger than a woven paradox (i.e., the impersonal, untitled, inorganic, cold ‘grid’ that holds its shape is composed of hair—the personal, organic material whose function is to keep the body warm). Whereas before nothing appeared to hang in the grid, now in it hangs a relationship between two people.
Because one brown hair and one black hair together are not long enough to form the grid, hairs are knotted together. Brown is knotted to brown, and black to black; and the two move under and over each other. Having moved beyond the unified idea of the grid one sees that each strand is formally different; the black is straighter, and a little thicker; the brown has waves. Prior to the appearance of color differentiation within the work, the ‘human hair’ of the grid seemed to bear a single synecdochical relation: the viewer likely assumes the artist has woven her hair into a grid, and this assumption contributes to an evaluation of the work as a lyrical expression; looking at the art is, in a sense, looking at the artist who has woven herself into a grid by pulling out her hair, or collecting (valuing) that which imperceptibly falls only to be typically lost or discarded (as valueless). The moment of color allows ‘Untitled’ to acquire a new syntactical possibility; the viewer may now read a third person narrative on exhibition. The work no longer only addresses the viewer; the strands, or synecdochically the people in this grid interact with each other as one watches.
At that moment the grid recedes into the background of the work, and one begins to read interacting hairs as a conceit for a relationship. Looking carefully one can count the knots (mentioned by the title) and learn that each strand knots eight times. From this one might infer that the two people comprising the grid have roughly the same length hair. This observation, however, does very little to pin-down the encoded relationship. On the contrary it likely instills more ambiguity as the viewer is made to perhaps reassess previously unchecked assumptions. The thicker, straighter, black hair coupling with the thinner, wavy, brown hair might seem to suggest a romantic relationship between a man and a woman respectively. Yet of course this betrays a heteronormative bias revealing gender specific expectations respective to physiognomy and behavior (the assertive, strong, black hair versus the yielding, slight, brown hair).
Given that the hairs are long, and more or less of equal length, one could easily now infer a relationship between two women. Substantiating this hypothesis one notices how the strands couple to comprise physically mirroring loops at the grid’s edges. The vertical edges themselves mirror one another (each features distinctly six couplets). In addition, a black hair curls left from the lower corner of the grid, and a brown hair on the upper right parallels this direction and curling motion. Couplets, systematic order, paradoxes, the conceit of human hair, vacillation between the universal and the personal, the complexity of the trope, etc. combine to connote a type of poetry; specifically, one might recall John Donne’s metaphysical poems ‘The Funeral’ or the ‘The Relic’ where human hairs likewise function synecdochically, allowing a wanting lover to possess, in a sense, the object of his affection. ‘The Relic’ even involves the act of burying a wound human hair, and depicts the subsequent interpretation of this action after it has been encountered. ‘Untitled’ might now appear to evince a buried fraudulent relationship existing only in this grid-poem whose corners are messy and inelegant, whose strands are twisted and fixed artificially with hairspray. On the other hand, these could be the hairs of siblings, mother and daughter, close enemies, strangers, etc. It becomes clear that the looping and mirroring of strands bears no stable meaning (enemies may pattern each other—these strands could depict a pursuit; or, the strands’ movements might point toward heredity, one taking after the other). As the ambiguity woven into this grid appears too great, interest in the possible relationships contained within it recedes, and once again the calm order of the grid is foregrounded. One then recalls how color flashing in ‘Untitled’ allowed access to the formal loops, gaps, doublings, and knots as elements defining interplay between individuals and relationships. And as the personal strands cede to the previously deflected unified form of the grid, the grid’s waviness now seems trembling with kept meanings. It no longer belongs near Hans Richter’s category of clever art that merely shocks.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York, 1994
Richter, Hans. Dada Art and Anti-Art. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997.
About the Author :
Robert Machado is a professor, artist, and Chancellor’s Fellow in the English Ph.D. program at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. His work involves investigating color in text, and exchanges between modernist literature, art, and early-twentieth-century avant-garde film. His visual art has been exhibited on the West Coast of the U. S., and his abstract sound work (Civyiu Kkliu) has been published in the U. S. and Europe.