Naked Cities

“When I nibble at your elastic hair, it seems to me that I am eating memories.”

Charles Baudelaire

Female hair, the word, its image, evokes immediately a heteroclite collection: tresses, symbols,

crimes, religions and crossing- borders from one urban landscape to another. While its appearance is intertwined with the dominant discourse of cultural particularism, reduced to a moral object for a certain European middle class idea about body politics, its strange materiality is an object for commerce, Chinese hair, Black hair from India, and blond hair at a cheaper price thanks to the utopian ambitions of the liberators in Central and Eastern Europe. The hair, covered or styled, in the suburbs or in the chic neighborhoods, is an image wrapped in the smell of gun powder and révlon. It is a visual product of the imperial regime of representation. 

Mandana Moghaddam’s series, Chelgis is inevitably a part of such a context.

Interestingly enough, the series is a reminder of a place where women’s hairs, accidentally, became an alibi for domestication of the radicalism at the end of the 70’s. Tehran, a vast urban landscape like a gigantic bug, is made of metal and concrete with no memory and no visible female hair in the public space. The specificity of such a place is not to be missed and I prefer to highlight it by paraphrasing Alfred Jarry: After all, the real scandal is that everyone is naked under his or her clothes. But Jarry’s wittiness fades away before memories from the contemporary history. The universal scandal turns into a local representation: The female hair - as arbitrary as a sign could be - functions, since some time, as a metonymy for the scandalous but neglected nakedness of a modern city. It is as if the openness of its streets, boulevards and parks has been by displacement an object of punishment and retaliation by the monitored covering of the hair in the public space.  

This urban scenery is an odd combination of monumentality in a Christo project and compulsive fascination for wrapping and covering in Clairambault’s photographic archive. Chelgis stands as a contrast to such a landscape. The three pieces in Chelgis series are not preoccupied with the unfolding of a fascinated gaze as it has been the strategy of a considerable part of the feminist art. Contrary to the critical strategy, Chelgis seems to be an attempt to suspend the fascination by attacking its meaningfulness. In Chelgis I, for instance, a mass of braided hair is placed inside a glass cube as if captivated, put in bottle. The piece is not an explanation of the formal code and its male fantasy-based raison d’être. Instead, it undermines the very meaning of the fascinated gaze (of spectator) that seeks to unveil the supposedly secret nature of the object. In a way, the delicate point lies here. These hair strings, like many works of contemporary art from outside Europe, are situated between two faces of the same male fantasy:

while the first codification system is preoccupied by eroticism of the hair, the second is an aggressive gaze searching for self-recognition in the misery of the Other, this self-recognition is usually called cultural identity.

Chelgis in its totality, is situated at a distance from the romanticist veneration of  “hair”. In the poetry of early modernism, the most uncompromising instances of which is Baudelaire, the hair is elevated to the level of a cult of truth that resides in the absolute Other. This cult finds its contemporary elaboration in the Portuguese poet and filmmaker César Monteiro’s works: a surrealist homage to a heroic and profoundly singular fetishism that evolves around female hair. A singular and tragic (because of its distinct impossibility) fetishism that is opposed to the social competent and communicable commodity fetishism. Such a strategy is far from the tone and structure in the works shown in Chelgis. Neither does the piece take side with the critique of reification of woman’s hair. In fact, the obsessive concern about women’s hair, which made it into a major issue as early as in the middle of the 70’s, employed such a radicalism as its alibi. Chelgis opens up undeniably and inadvertently a position between these two positions and this is what gives the work its contemporary importance.

Dariush Moaven Doust,

Psychoanalyst, Dr in Philosophy