Reactions to hair art vary

Some people are freaked out; others are fascinated.

HANOVER, N.H. (AP) — The massive banner in Dartmouth College’s Baker-Berry Library runs the length of the vast foyer, bright green lettering stretching from end to end.

But the gut reactions that artist Wenda Gu’s latest installation provokes aren’t because of its size, but its contents: 420 pounds of human hair. A viewer’s first impulses are to lean forward and scrutinize the swirling, flattened locks; stealthily sniff (it doesn’t smell); and fight the urge to touch it — and perhaps quickly recoil.

Sophomore Julian Ng has spent a lot of time with “united nations: the green house,” which hangs just feet from the information desk where he works. Part of his job involves handing out brochures on the artwork and explaining that the unrecognizable green lettering spells the words “educations” and “advertises” superimposed on each other.

Ng says viewer reactions fall into two camps: the freaked out and the fascinated.

“A lot of people don’t understand that it’s hair,” he said. When they do, “they get really freaked out.”

Then again, “I’ve seen a lot of people try to look closely to see different hairs,” he said.

Results of 42,000 haircuts

Hair for the 80-foot-by-13-foot banner was collected over several months last year from 42,000 haircuts of Dartmouth students, faculty, staff and local residents in Hanover. It was shipped to China, where workers in Gu’s Shanghai studio dyed and shaped the locks into paper-thin panels held together by a film of Elmer’s glue and tied together with twine. It and a second work, “united nations: united colors,” displayed in another part of the library are the latest installations in Gu’s worldwide “united nations” project, begun in 1993 and all made from human hair.

Dartmouth’s Hood Museum commissioned Gu to create art in unexpected places. Museum director Brian Kennedy said placing “the green house” — one level above 1930s-era murals by Mexican painter Jose Clemente Orozco — was intentional.

The banner’s “green house” title and green lettering symbolize not just Dartmouth, whose nickname is “the Big Green,” but money. Gu’s unconventional medium, and his message — that education and capitalism are inseparable — have drawn mixed responses since the unveiling in June.

Gu’s second installation is a braid of roughly 71⁄2 miles of hair purchased from wig factories in China and India. Rising from a spaghettilike mass and hanging in long loops on both sides of the library’s central corridor, it elicits a generally positive reaction.

Stainless steel medallions attached to sections of braid dyed in electric colors bear the names of 207 countries. Written backward, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, leaving viewers to puzzle over the letters (Finland becomes “dnalnif,” Lebanon “nonabel”).