Hair Pieces

[Melissa Keys, editor]

Hair Pieces

Perimeter Editions, 2025

144 pp, 14.5 x 24 cm., coptic bind softcover

Edition of 1100

“I sense the power within the fingers/within an hour the power/could totally destroy me/or it could save my life"

                 - "Hairdresser on Fire" 

In my mid-teens the above lyric (a b-side to Morrissey’s first post-Smiths single, “Suedehead”1) spoke to my persistent need to reimagine myself every six months or so, by changing my style of dress and getting a new haircut. I would skip school and sit in a salon called Talking Heads, where a woman only a few years older than myself would help transform me. 

It was trivial teenage narcissism, for certain, but the transformative properties of hair is well-documented. 

An anthropologist friend of mine, Grant McCracken, wrote a book titled Big Hair: A Journey Into the Transformation of Self that sought to show how "hair is one of the imperatives of contemporary life. Hair matters in our culture because it is a way, perhaps the most important way, women transform themselves. And this is what the book is really about: hair as the matter and the method of our self-invention.”

Big Hair opens with a quote from boxing promoter Don King, who is instantly recognizable in silhouette because of his distinctive hairstyle: 

"Unless you grasp the significance of hair, you cannot know the power instilled in it." 

The works in Melissa Keys’ Hair Pieces all grapple with the corporeal, personal, and political power of hair. The book serves as an exhibition catalogue for the 2024 show of the same name, at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, but holds its own as a stand-alone volume. 

The works presented encompass a wide range of practices, including drawing, painting, performance, photography, installation, and video. 

Marina Abramović and Ulay appear on the cover, from their 1977 work Relation in Time, a 17-hour long performance in which they sit back to back with their hair intertwined until fatigue sets in and they start to become untangled. Many of the works that follow owe a debt to this now-legendary piece. 

Sonia Boyce’s video Exquisite Tension from 2005 documents a day-long performance of the artist braiding together the hair of a Black woman and a white man who sit side-by-side. Loving Care, is a 1993 performance by Janine Antoni, in which the artist mopped the floor of the gallery with her hair soaked in Loving Care hair dye “Natural Black”, conflating action painting with domesticity.  

In Belgian artist Edith Dekyndt’s video Indigenous Shadow Part.2, Martinique Island (2014) a flag made of black hair flutters in the wind above the rocky shores of Diamant, where a slave trade boat capsized, killing its hundred African captives [below].

Ana Mendieta’s Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants) [above, bottom] plays with gender fluidity as far back as 1972, cutting off her friend’s beard and glueing it to her own face. 

Hair Pieces also features works by Francis Alÿs, Georgia Banks, Polly Borland, Christina May Carey, Sadie Chandler, Debris Facility Pty Ltd, Edith Dekyndt, Karla Dickens, Jim Dine, Peter Ellis, Tarryn Gill, Mona Hatoum, Lou Hubbard, Jiang Jian, Nusra Latif Qureshi, John Meade, Ana Mendieta, Hayley Millar Baker, SJ Norman, J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, Patricia Piccinini, Rosslynd Piggott, Wes Placek, C.J. Pyle, Chunxiao Qu, Julie Rrap, Shih Yung-Chun, Charlie Sofo, Christian Thompson, Kemang Wa Lehulere, Louise Weaver, William Wegman, Helen Wright, Ai Yamaguchi, and Zhang Chun Hong; and texts by Santilla Chingaipe, Justin Clemens, Lisa Gorton, Melissa Keys, and SJ Norman.

I might’ve been inclined to include Tom Friedman’s pubic hair soap, Bob Watts Male and Female Underpants, the Bless Hair Visor and My So-Called Life by Liz Knox, in which the artist - an undergrad student at the time - cut her hair to mirror the various hairstyles of a character from the titular show.  

1. The A-side also refers to hair - a ‘suedehead’ is a skinhead whose let their hair grown in some. The title track to The Smiths’ The Queen is Dead contains the line "But the rain that flattens my hair, these are the things that kill me".