{"id":290,"date":"2018-06-18T03:41:01","date_gmt":"2018-06-18T03:41:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/?p=290"},"modified":"2026-08-30T13:30:59","modified_gmt":"2026-08-30T13:30:59","slug":"umbrella","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/2018\/06\/18\/umbrella\/","title":{"rendered":"Umbrella"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>44\u201d mens black umbrella,\u00a0black human hair, black thread<\/em><\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_138\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-138\" style=\"width: 1024px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/SumOfParts_12.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-138 size-large\" src=\"https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/SumOfParts_12-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"1024\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/SumOfParts_12-1024x1024.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/SumOfParts_12-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/SumOfParts_12-300x300.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/SumOfParts_12-768x768.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/SumOfParts_12-510x510.jpg 510w, https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/SumOfParts_12.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-138\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Umbrella<br \/>44\u201d mens black umbrella<br \/>black human hair, black thread<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<div id='gallery-1' class='czr-gallery row flex-row czr-gallery-style gallery galleryid-290 gallery-columns-5 gallery-size-thumbnail'><figure class='gallery-item col col-auto'>\r\n                        <div class='gallery-icon landscape czr-gallery-icon'>\r\n                              <a data-lb-type=\"grouped-gallery\" title=\"Umbrella 44\u201d mens&#8217; black umbrella, black human hair, black thread\" href=https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/SumOfParts_12.jpg class=\"bg-link\"><\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/SumOfParts_12-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 1200px) 198px, (min-width: 992px) 162px, (min-width: 768px) 114px, (min-width: 576px) 105px, calc( 50vw - 30px )\" aria-describedby=\"gallery-1-138\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/SumOfParts_12-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/SumOfParts_12-300x300.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/SumOfParts_12-768x768.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/SumOfParts_12-1024x1024.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/SumOfParts_12-510x510.jpg 510w, https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/SumOfParts_12.jpg 1200w\" \/>\r\n                        <\/div>\r\n                              <figcaption class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-1-138'>\r\n                              Umbrella 44\u201d mens&#8217; black umbrella, black human hair, black thread\r\n                              <\/figcaption><\/figure><figure class='gallery-item col col-auto'>\r\n                        <div class='gallery-icon landscape czr-gallery-icon'>\r\n                              <a data-lb-type=\"grouped-gallery\" href=https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_9832-e1529323184317.jpg class=\"bg-link\"><\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_9832-e1529323184317-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 1200px) 198px, (min-width: 992px) 162px, (min-width: 768px) 114px, (min-width: 576px) 105px, calc( 50vw - 30px )\" aria-describedby=\"gallery-1-138\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_9832-e1529323184317-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_9832-e1529323184317-300x300.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_9832-e1529323184317-768x768.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_9832-e1529323184317-1024x1024.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_9832-e1529323184317-510x510.jpg 510w, https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_9832-e1529323184317.jpg 2000w\" \/>\r\n                        <\/div><\/figure><figure class='gallery-item col col-auto'>\r\n                        <div class='gallery-icon portrait czr-gallery-icon'>\r\n                              <a data-lb-type=\"grouped-gallery\" href=https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_1939.jpg class=\"bg-link\"><\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_1939-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 1200px) 198px, (min-width: 992px) 162px, (min-width: 768px) 114px, (min-width: 576px) 105px, calc( 50vw - 30px )\" aria-describedby=\"gallery-1-138\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_1939-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_1939-510x510.jpg 510w\" \/>\r\n                        <\/div><\/figure><figure class='gallery-item col col-auto'>\r\n                        <div class='gallery-icon portrait czr-gallery-icon'>\r\n                              <a data-lb-type=\"grouped-gallery\" href=https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_5072.jpg class=\"bg-link\"><\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_5072-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 1200px) 198px, (min-width: 992px) 162px, (min-width: 768px) 114px, (min-width: 576px) 105px, calc( 50vw - 30px )\" aria-describedby=\"gallery-1-138\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_5072-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_5072-300x300.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_5072-768x769.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_5072-1024x1024.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_5072-510x510.jpg 510w\" \/>\r\n                        <\/div><\/figure><figure class='gallery-item col col-auto'>\r\n                        <div class='gallery-icon landscape czr-gallery-icon'>\r\n                              <a data-lb-type=\"grouped-gallery\" href=https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_4793-e1529323266440.jpg class=\"bg-link\"><\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_4793-e1529323266440-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 1200px) 198px, (min-width: 992px) 162px, (min-width: 768px) 114px, (min-width: 576px) 105px, calc( 50vw - 30px )\" aria-describedby=\"gallery-1-138\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_4793-e1529323266440-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_4793-e1529323266440-300x300.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_4793-e1529323266440-768x768.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_4793-e1529323266440-1024x1024.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_4793-e1529323266440-510x510.jpg 510w, https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_4793-e1529323266440.jpg 2000w\" \/>\r\n                        <\/div><\/figure><figure class='gallery-item col col-auto'>\r\n                        <div class='gallery-icon portrait czr-gallery-icon'>\r\n                              <a data-lb-type=\"grouped-gallery\" href=https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_4785-e1529323212311.jpg class=\"bg-link\"><\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_4785-e1529323212311-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 1200px) 198px, (min-width: 992px) 162px, (min-width: 768px) 114px, (min-width: 576px) 105px, calc( 50vw - 30px )\" aria-describedby=\"gallery-1-138\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_4785-e1529323212311-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/IMG_4785-e1529323212311-510x510.jpg 510w\" \/>\r\n                        <\/div><\/figure>\r\n                  <\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Umbrella<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Umbrella began, for me, with an incongruous image: the fur-covered cup and saucer that Meret Oppenheim assembled in 1936, an ordinary object made suddenly intimate and strange by the wrong kind of touch. I wanted to work that same displacement of material onto a different body and a different history. The umbrella I chose, a forty-four inch men\u2019s model in unadorned black, belongs to a specific pictorial memory: the bourgeois men who crowd the rainy streets of Impressionist Paris, dry and composed under black canopies while the weather does its work on everyone else. That image carries its own coding of gender and class, an emblem of the Western businessman insulated from circumstance by an accessory he barely has to think about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Onto that surface I worked black human hair and black thread, using the same wefting and knotting techniques employed in wig construction, so that the umbrella is, in a structural sense, an enormous wig rather than a decorated object. The choice of hair was not incidental. The global trade in human hair for extensions and wigs is coded overwhelmingly as feminine, and much of the raw material passes through the hands of women in eastern countries, who sell or donate their hair as a source of income. I did not want to treat that trade as a simple story of exploitation. The hair has to be of high quality to hold value, which means the women supplying it are often better fed and better cared for, within their own economic circumstances, than the trade\u2019s more cynical reputation would suggest. Layering that history onto a masculine object let me hold two economies of the body in the same frame: the quiet vanity of hair replacement culture, which compensates for male pattern baldness, and the largely invisible labor of the women whose bodies supply the raw material for that vanity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The wig reference matters because wigs, unlike most prosthetics, are understood as instruments of beautification rather than correction. A man wearing a hairpiece is participating, whether he says so or not, in the same economy of extension and adornment that a woman uses hair to lengthen or thicken her own. Covering an object so squarely associated with male professional life in that material collapses a distinction that culture works hard to keep in place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I decided against staging the piece on a model or photographing it in use. Open and resting on the gallery floor, the umbrella keeps the readymade\u2019s blunt presence, an ordinary manufactured object, unaltered in form, transformed only by what covers it. But the hair also gives the object a second life as something closer to a body. Fully covered and splayed open, it reads less like an umbrella than like a small animal, dense and inert, caught somewhere between object and creature. That doubleness, readymade on one hand and something biomorphic on the other, is where I want the piece to sit. It should not resolve into either a straightforward critique of the hair trade or a straightforward joke about baldness. It should hold historical fact, formal reference, and a kind of dark comedy about the body\u2019s vanities in the same object, the way the other works in this series ask their materials to carry more meaning than their form alone would suggest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>44\u201d mens black umbrella,\u00a0black human hair, black thread Umbrella Umbrella began, for me, with an incongruous image: the fur-covered cup and saucer that Meret Oppenheim assembled in 1936, an ordinary object made suddenly intimate and strange by the wrong kind of touch. I wanted to work that same displacement of material onto a different body [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":138,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[8,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","has-post-thumbnail","category-a-selection","category-experimental-materials","post_format-post-format-gallery","czr-hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1752,"href":"https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions\/1752"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.christianfaur.com\/NewSite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}