Katherine Rochester at Artforum:
IN 1974, a strand of hair twirled in a porcelain sink in room 503 of the Chelsea Hotel. It belonged to an artist named Bettina, who photographed its sinuous formations as water jostled it around. The resulting suite of sixty-three gelatin silver prints—Two Hours in the Life of One Hair Photographed in the Sink at One Minute Intervals While Agitated by Running Water—represented a selection from the 120 images she would have snapped given the stated parameters of the exercise. In fact, the series was vaster still, extending both backward and forward in time via works that explored organic forms through sundry media. Terminal Germination/Paris, ca. 1970, a black-and-white photocopy that preceded the photographs, comprised eight xeroxed drawings of morphing hair arranged in a two-by-four grid. Some vignettes had the grainy shading of excessive toner powder, while others were bleached out. Bettina followed these in 1971 with a group of wooden sculptures and line drawings exploring similar arabesque shapes. In the 1983–84 series “Retake/Outtake; Filmtwists,” she imagined a suite of monumental sculptures (never fabricated) for the city of Los Angeles, transforming the motif of the hair into ribbons of loosely woven metal, suggesting strips of unspooled celluloid.
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.