DS: So!  Since I haven’t seen you in a while, are you closest to Man, Woman, or Child?

CS: Closest to Child!  But since I’m doing these hair events, I’ve been growing the beard back.  It’s just not very long.  I have scruff, but it’s not a “beard” beard.

Chris Sollars, "Man Woman Child," 2011. 3 Framed C-prints, 20" x 26" each.

DS: I have to ask, which came first, the beard or the art?

CS: Well, even before the beard, I’ve always known that I wanted to make a wig of my long hair, which I’ve had since high school, and wear it at a later date. That’s why the title is Hair and the subtitle is When I’m 64.  I like the collision of those two moments of time—wearing hair from when I was thirty-four when I’m sixty-four.  So I think that piece came first.  As for the beard, I started growing it, and it just turned into its own thing.  My girlfriend took a long trip and by the time she got back, I already had a bunch of things I wanted to do with it.  Before I cut it, I wanted to let it grow a little longer and let it live on its own, and it inspired a series of works.  I’d done a performance in 1998 at Skowhegan where I went to a tool shop in Maine with a lot of old tools and was drawn toward this long handled axe… I personally tried to sharpen it and make a video of me shaving with it.  Of course, I didn’t have much hair back then, because I was 22, and I didn’t have the capacity to grow hair like I do now.  Anyway, I decided that with this new beard I wanted to do it again, with an axe.  Working with my wigmaker, however, I had to grow the beard as long as possible, and if I was going to shave it off with an axe, it wouldn’t work as a wig.  It’s a really a rare thing, to make a wig out of someone’s own beard hair, because you’re hand-knotting, and working with different clumps of hair—looping it like a rug—and it’s a difficult thing, even if your beard is really long, because it’s still so short.

Chris Sollars, "Hair: When I'm 64," 2011-2040. Hand-knotted wig made of human hair. Image courtesy of the artist.

Chris Sollars, "Beard," 2011. Hand-knotted facial hair. Image courtesy of the artist.

DS: It’s probably pretty brittle, too.

CS: Yeah. So I decided to do the beard wig first, and then grow back a beard that was substantial enough to shave off with an axe.  So that was the process.  And in between, before I cut off all the hair, I wanted to do a series of related videos.

DS: Were you intentionally trying to touch on issues of gender and masculinity?

CS: Well, yeah.  I named the triptych (the photographs of myself) Man Woman Child (2011) on purpose, because… Well, a child would never have a beard like that and a woman would never have a beard to that extent.  I’ve always had fine hair, and I’ve always been in between being kind of “girlie” and, well, not.

Chris Sollars, "Shave," 2011. Video still. Image courtesy of the artist.

DS: Shaving your beard with an axe is such an over the top gesture!  And you’re wearing this plaid flannel.  But I noticed that as you started to talk about your work, you weren’t talking about gender as much as you were talking about intersecting moments in time, or an interest in working with certain tools.

CS: Well, [the interest in the axe] led to that.  It led to the absurdity of knowing that I could cut down trees, but that I could also cut my face with the thing!  There’s a moment in the videos where there’s a cut or change or rupture that happens.  I’m thinking of the video edit like I am cutting hair, so there’s a real switch that happens, a change of one’s look, or the change that can happen with a cut when you juxtapose one image with the next.  Leading up to the show, in fact, and even currently, I’ve been hiding out a little bit, just until people have seen that work [and realize that Sollars is now totally clean-shaven]. It’s kind of a strange performance that’s still going on.  I was even wearing costumes to change my identity around town. I didn’t want to reveal that I’d cut my hair until the show had opened.  I realized as soon as I cut my long hair that that pieces like mine and like Chris Burden’s I Became A Secret Hippy (1971) don’t exist as just performances, but as pieces of our identity from that point forward.

Chris Sollars, "Hair Lay," 2011. Video still. Image courtesy of the artist.

Chris Sollars, "Hair Ball," 2011. Video still. Image courtesy of the artist.

Chris Sollars, "Beard Rub," 2011. Video still. Image courtesy of the artist.

DS: What about race? Does that play in at all?  I might be reading more into the project than what you intend, but I read an article in the New York Times about Matta Clark’s Clock Shower (1973), and writer’s spin was about how it was this glorious time in New York when this guy could walk to the top of the Clocktower building and cover himself in shaving cream and then diddle with the clock.  And my thought was yeah, if he’s white, he can do this.  Going from that thought, and looking at your work, which includes this golden ball of hair surveying a forest and the golden blonde Hair Lays and the Beard Rubs, which seem to be about marking or claiming in certain ways, I’m just curious if there are any thoughts about…

CS: …about identity in relation to race?  Well, I think that perception of where I exist culturally, or politically or socially, changes with the haircut.  Going back to Burden’s Secret Hippy, you might be a countercultural person, but you’re wiped of that in terms of your identity.  I guess that’s why I also looked at Ana Mendieta’s piece with the transplanting of the man’s beard onto her face, taking on that masculinity.  Or Adrian Piper’s Mythic Being.  So I’m aware of these female performances and cross cultural performances with hair and identity, and I was thinking, okay, so if there’s this white man art with these things opposed to it or juxtaposed against it, what is white male identity art?  Or what is it specifically to me?  I guess that’s why I focus so much on the hair as a material, like with close-ups of the hair grain, which I think of as wood grain.  Kind of just investigating what is it that my being is made up of.  You know, the scraggly curly beard hair, the long fine hair… What happens when I change?  When I’m separated from it?  How does it exist on its own as an abstraction, like with the Hair Lays, or the beard itself rubbing on things?  I think the masculine action of shaving with an axe kind of completes the picture of that identity of that person.  And I’ve been so influenced by a lot of that ‘70s work that I was curious about performing that investigation on myself.

In Stockpile (2011), Allison Smith treats the vast hall as a warehouse, creating an eerie stillness. Smith has stacked unpainted replicas of colonial American furniture—chairs, chests, muskets and tables—into a giant tower. Fresh ghosts, they come complete with packing crates, labels, and lengths of authentic period weaving. Despite her best efforts, the silent, monochromatic heap is dwarfed by the space. Crafted to human scale, the diminished pile references the inaccessible nature of human history, and perhaps also implies that “human scale” is increasingly irrelevant.

Suzanne Husky, "Sleeper Cell," 2011. BacKground, "Degrowth Quilt," 2011. Images by the artist.

Suzanne Husky and Brion Nuda Rosch each claim a mini-gallery space within YBCA’s main space. Like an anthropologist, Husky profiles practitioners of “Modernes Vies Sauvages”—rustic, off-grid lifestylers—and frames her investigations as her art practice.  In Sleeper Cell Hotel (2011), Husky installs several small huts, a reading area where one can research eco-activism, and a monitor with a looping eco-infomercial.  The huts, diminutive and pristine on the concrete floor, are bunkers-for-one, complete with woven quilts advertising “Degrowth.” Constructed of wood shakes and shingles with a hedgehog-like appearance, they are advertisements for a Thoreau-inspired lifestyle and a return to simplicity, and would be equally at home in the dirt and disorder at the Hayes Valley eco-activist farm and encampment that Husky researched.

Another of the mini-galleries houses a stunning collection of sculptures and collages by Brion Nuda Rosch. Carefully proportioned and constructed, the dozen totemic pieces covered with brown paint evoke both Joseph Beuys’s Braunkreuz sculptures and Brancusi’s studio installations. They are jammed together and positioned below eye level, so it is difficult to get a clear line of sight of any one sculpture, or of any of the elliptical photocollages on the walls. In the doorways of the tiny studio space, Rosch has also installed slender, L-shaped forms, like false lintels, so that a viewer must bow on entering, and bend to examine the works. If Rosch is recreating the claustrophobic crowding of his own studio against the background of the giant space, he has achieved a tour de force.

Upstairs from the main space, in a darkened gallery all his own, complete with motion detection sensors, Mauricio Ancalmo has installed Dualing Pianos: Agapé Agape in D Minor (2011). A giant rectangular loop of lace-like computer paper shapes the air, and passes through two Duo-Art player pianos, face å face, and a vintage word processer located midway between them. A cobbled-together affair with wooden rolling pins replacing its original rollers, the processor/typewriter is the heart of the triad. One piano is in tune, one out of tune.  The score moves through one piano and plays in reverse as it passes through the second. Occasionally, the pianos strike chords together, both dissonant and beautiful. The piece has a quiet, unpredictable meter and an aural spaciousness, which varies as viewers move around the space. Ancalmo collects and repurposes outmoded technological devices to create subversive and nostalgic narratives; this one feels like a conversation between old lovers—or a “dual,” not a “duel.” Lyrical and elegant, it is the star of the show.

Richard T. Walker, "the speed and eagerness of meaning," 2011, 3-channel video installation. Image courtesty Richard T. Walker and Christopher Grimes Gallery.

As a British artist currently working in the Bay Area, Richard T. Walker takes an enraptured look at the California landscape in his three-channel video, the speed and eagerness of meaning (2011).  Walker imports the great sweep of Joshua Tree National Park into his Yerba Buena space.  Uncannily evoking Glenn Gould’s video, “The Idea of North,” Walker’s is his “Idea of West.” A rambling philosophical voice-over seems off-kilter and pretentious as the artist stands in place with his back to the audience, facing the landscape à la Caspar David Friedrich. Unable, despite his rhetoric, to make sense of the beauty and vastness with himself in it, he builds a song instead, playing all instruments himself, overlaying one line of sound—drum, guitar, sticks, voice—over another, like the sedimentary layers of the stones in his landscape. It is his inchoate response to the grandeur and his own insignificance. A Brit, with fresh eyes, may see it all best.

Sean McFarland’s moody, dark photographs of foliage in Golden Gate Park, reminiscent of 19^th-century paintings and photographs of the forest of Fontainebleau, suffer from reflective framing and poor location. No glass at all and a quiet room might have helped make them more visible. And Chris Fraser’s camera obscura, Developing a mutable horizon (2011), located at one end of the upstairs balcony, is so remote that this reviewer and a gallery guide interrupted a couple in flagrante delicto.

Chris Fraser, "One line drawing the view from my studio window, 2009-10," 2009, Light installation. Image courtesy Chris Fraser.

In the exhibition prior to BAN6, Song Dong spread the entire contents of his mother’s lifetime home on the floor of the great hall at Yerba Buena, arranged according to category. Both the vastness of the project and the scale of the minutiae served the space well, with the best viewing place being a little balcony that overlooked the whole. This aerial view would also serve work like Christian Boltanski’s great piles of clothing memorializing the Holocaust, or the historic airplanes from the National Air and Space Museum. But there is no easy bird’s eye view for the breadth of work being done around the Bay, nor any inner coherence. The hard-working viewer has to put it together. There are substantial rewards.