Edisa at work, 2009, photo by Alex Kahan
As a child, dance artist Edisa Weeks attended Quaker meetings with her family. These meetings involved group meditation and sharing, conducted without leaders or hierarchy. As an adult artist, she found herself in a field defined by elitism and a rigid division of roles. The artists were expected to demonstrate their skill, passion, and cleverness to a separated, passive audience. There was none of the mutuality or intimacy of the Quaker meetings of her youth. She wanted her art to be a way of connecting with people, not a way of asserting her superiority to them.
Edisa is far from alone in this impulse to break through the “fourth wall” – it’s been a major thrust in experimental performing arts since at least the 1960′s. Her dance company, Delirious Dance, has done things like performing in private living rooms, exploring through movement the awkwardness of encounters between strangers.
Chashama, an arts organization based in midtown Manhattan, invites visual artists and performers to use storefront windows in the city as special venues to reach a broad audience including many that might not enter a gallery or theater. When she was offered access to this forum, Edisa hit on the idea of inviting people to get their hair done. The wacky sense of fun with which she tackled the task was a hit, and since the first window event, Edisa has done people’s hair at many parties, benefits and festivals.
Applying dinosaurs, 2009, photo by Alex Kahan
The conventional beauty school approach to hair essentially moves people towards conformity with certain established style norms, smoothing over their peculiarities. Edisa, on the other hand, tries to push the quirks to the limit. Upon meeting each new “client”, Edisa’s first question is, “How crazy can I get?” The response to this question provides the first gauge of the personality she’s working with. As she begins to play with the person’s hair, she’s assessing the shape of the head, the quality and strength of the hair and what it might support. At the same time, she’s observing the style and colors of the person’s clothing, how they speak, how they respond to touch, and so on. She’s surrounded her workstation with a huge array of flowers, toys, and sculptural and decorative items, from which she chooses the elements of her construction, weaving extravagant headdresses that may be silly, scary, or lovely.
Some of Edisa's decorative items, 2009, photo by Fred Hatt
Edisa's hands, 2009, photo by Fred Hatt
Edisa weaves flowers into a child's hair, 2009, photo by Fred Hatt
I was acquainted with Edisa and had seen her performance pieces, but the first time I saw her doing hair designs (at a benefit party for Chashama), I was amazed at the speed with which she worked and at the variety of what she created. The people wearing her creations looked blissful, as though their own unique beauty had been perceived and manifested in art, on their own heads. I immediately identified with what Edisa was doing, because the impulse to use art to connect to people is exactly what I’ve explored both through body painting and through portraiture. So many artists use their talents to put themselves above people, to impress them or preach to them. It is beautiful to encounter an artist like Edisa, who seeks rather to celebrate and uplift her audience. It’s a mutual gift – they offer her their heads as a creative playground, and she shows them how much fun can be had there.
Applying a feather boa, 2009, photo by Alex Kahan
Queen of Burlesque, 2009, photo by Alex Kahan
When Dinosaurs Ruled the Head, 2009, photo by Alex Kahan
Cleopatra, 2009, photo by Alex Kahan
Applying flies, 2009, photo by Fred Hatt
Catching flies with honey, 2009, photo by Fred Hatt
Fiber Optics, 2009, photo by Alex Kahan
Zombie Apocalypse, 2009, photo by Alex Kahan
How to impress your friends, 2009, photo by Fred Hatt
You can see more examples of Edisa’s hair designs at her Delirious Hair Design website.
Photos in this post were taken by me and by Alex Kahan at Edisa’s Delirious Hair booth at the DUMBO Art Under the Bridge Festival last month in Brooklyn.
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5 Comments
Fred, the composition and expressions you’ve captured are wonderful. With your camera you bring even more life to such colorful and whimsical objects d’art! I like Edisa’s outlook: “to celebrate and uplift her audience”. Edisa’s face and expression evoke this, and you gracefully capture it in your photographs.
Thank you, Lori. I took some of the photos but others are taken by my good friend Alex Kahan.
Edisa’s work is just one small example of what I see as an important movement in art in the last two decades, a movement to see art as a gift from artist to audience. Lewis Hyde has been the most important theorist behind the movement, and the Burning Man festival the most important event. The art establishment represented by museums and curators and critics has almost entirely missed this movement, more taken with the shiny objects of bubble-economy artists like Koons and Hirst.
Fred, I had to take awhile to get back on this because I needed to find time to sit down and read the full NYT article on Hyde. I’m sure glad I did a good read-through and didn’t skim. I think this is the best line in the piece (which I’m sure Hyde would be glad that I repeated here
) “…along with such mainstream icons goes a shadow tradition, the one that made Jefferson skeptical of patents… the one that led the framers of the Constitution to balance ‘exclusive right’ with ‘limited times.’ It is a tradition worth recovering.”
And then reading further on (can you tell I was excited about this article?) we read the snippet that closely brings home your point about art as a gift to the audience “aboriginal societies in which the person of consequence — the man or woman who is deemed worthy of adulation, respect and emulation — is not the one who accumulates the most goods but the one who disperses them”…
And it’s also interesting how in his current book he’s trying to rewrite our idea of history by debunking the myth that Ben Franklin was a self-made man (his discoveries were based on “pre-existing knowledge and scientific collaboration”).
And I’m now going to share this article with a poetry friend because he explains “why he devoted so much of his time and energy to something as nonremunerative as poetry”.
Thank you for the brain food this morning! And I hope no readers take my comments as a crib sheet – read the article!
-Lori
Lori, you’ll want to check out Hyde’s book The Gift.
Sometimes I build the writing in these posts around the images I have, but then someone’s comment gets me to say my central idea more directly than I ever got to in the original post. Thanks for making it a dialogue!
You nailed the central idea on the head in your comments, Fred. Thanks for expanding on this topic. It’s so much food for thought! I’m heading to the library later today and will pick up The Gift (I just searched the catalog, and it’s there! Sometimes my library isn’t so great with artsy books, but this is a classic.)
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