Hair Shirt Army

19 Men’s coats (German) size 56

Insur­ance price 30,000 Euros

Arti­cles of clothing made of small plastic bags sewn together; each bag (90mm x 115mm) contains a date label and sample of the artist’s hair from 1993 – 2013. The orig­inal Hair Shirt is fash­ioned after a leather Luft­waffe coat design and bears simi­lar­i­ties to the Hugo Boss leather coat, winter fashion 1998 – 99.

Who’s Boss — a collec­tion of works:

• Fashion Victim
• Hair Shirt
• Hair Shirt Army
• shower proof
• Art Prize
• Röslein Sprach…
• Boss Rune
• Your Rules
• Soul Brothers & Sisters
• Selec­tion

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Tanya Ury has been collecting her hair, from natural hair loss daily, and saving it in small plastic sachets with a date label since November 1992. Previ­ously some of these bags were sewn together to make large plastic sheets resem­bling ​“shower” curtains, one curtain each year, for the instal­la­tion Golden Showers 1993 – 99. Who’s Boss: Hair Shirt (2004) is made from plastic bags with hair from Ury’s collec­tion. 

It is an unlikely and unprac­tical article of clothing — some­thing between being a shower curtain and the contents of a mattress (under Hitler’s dicta­tor­ship, the Nazis collected shorn hair of women concen­tra­tion camp inmates to be used for mattress stuffing). It is also a German Luft­waffe coat proto­type that bears a resem­blance to the Hugo Boss 1998 – 99 winter fashion model, or it is liter­ally a hair shirt (word-play in English, for ​“hair shirt” is the demon­stra­tion of atonement).

The fact that one of the world’s most renowned fashion houses Hugo Boss owes its initial success to its support of the Fascist war machine, and its exploita­tion of forced labourers during the war years raises profound ques­tions surrounding the rela­tion­ships between fashion and mili­tary fashion, fashion and politics.

A Hair Shirt Army has been produced out of the remaining plastic bags with hair from Ury’s collec­tion and has been presented as a ghost­like instal­la­tion, whereby each coat was hung by trans­parent plastic thread, for the first time, in the crypt of EL-DE-Haus, the Nazi-Docu­men­ta­tion Centre, Cologne, Germany, 2014, whereby each coat was hung by trans­parent plastic thread.

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The ​“pyramid” shape design of coats that appear to rise up towards the ceiling in the instal­la­tion Hair Shirt Army and the image shower proof, was instilled as a visu­alised repre­sen­ta­tion of what concen­tra­tion camp func­tionaries were met with after a gassing took place in the gas chambers:

The concen­tra­tion camps were extra­or­di­narily effi­cient death facto­ries. One witness described a typical day of exter­mi­na­tion in the gas cham­bers of Auschwitz:

“Outside (…) the men on night-shift were handling a convoy of Jews, some 3,000 men, women and chil­dren, who had been led from their train into the hall 200 yards long and promi­nently labeled in various languages, ​‘Baths and Disin­fecting Room.’ Here they had been told to strip, super­vised by the S.S. and men of the Sonderkom­mando. They were then led into a second hall, where the S.S. and Sonderkom­mando left them. Mean­while, vans painted with the insignia of the Red Cross had brought up supplies of Cyclon B crys­tals. The 3,000 were then sealed in and gassed.

Twenty minutes later the patented mechan­ical venti­la­tors were turned on to dispel the remaining fumes. Men of the Sonderkom­mando, wearing gas masks and rubber boots, entered the gas chamber. They found the naked bodies piled in a pyramid that revealed the last collec­tive struggle of the dying to reach clean air near the ceiling; the weakest lay crushed at the bottom while the strongest bestrode the rest at the top. The strug­gling mass, stilled only by death, lay now inert like some fearful monu­ment to the memory of their suffering. The gas had risen slowly from the floor, forcing the pris­oners to climb on each other’s bodies in a ruth­less endeavour to snatch the last remaining lung­fulls of clean air. The corpses were fouled, and the masked men washed them down with hoses before the labour of sepa­rating and trans­porting the entwined bodies could begin. They were dragged to the eleva­tors, lowered to the crema­toria, their gold teeth removed with pliers and thrown into buckets filled with acid, and the women’s hair shaved from their heads. The dese­crated dead were then loaded in batches of three on carts of sheet metal and fed auto­mat­i­cally into one of the fifteen ovens with which each crema­to­rium was equipped. A single crema­to­rium consumed 45 bodies every 20 minutes; the capacity of destruc­tion at Auschwitz was little short of 200 bodies an hour… The ashes were removed and spilled into the swift tide of the river Vistula, a mile or so away. The valu­ables – clothes, jewels, gold and hair – were sent to Germany…¹

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I started my hair collec­tion 50 years after atroc­i­ties of the fascist régime were being perpe­trated in Germany and Europe. I have been living in Cologne since the early 90’s, observing unified Germany’s slow process of coming to terms with this past — the successes: so much has been made apparent — the fail­ures, where much remains hidden in a society that took up where it left off, with the same collu­sive leaders of industry. Hair Shirt Army is a double-edged symbol, where a peni­tent army has been built upon the bodies of the exploited.

This work would draw atten­tion to the contem­po­rary sweat­shop activ­i­ties of the Hugo Boss Company in Bangladesh and would so delin­eate a parallel between the exploita­tive activ­i­ties of forced labour before and during the Second World War but also currently, by the same company.

Tanya Ury

1 Leo Kuper, Geno­cide: its Polit­ical Use in the Twen­tieth Century 133 – 34 (1981), citing Milos Nyiszli, Auschwitz 1960: Ch. VII. A similar harrowing report from Hoess, the director of the Auschwitz camp, can be found at IMT Docs, supra note 231, Vol XI, tran­script pgs 416 – 417 on P 149 – 49 War Crimes Against Women: Pros­e­cu­tion in Inter­na­tional War Crimes Tribunals by Kelly Dawn Askin books​.google​.de/​books

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Presen­ta­tion

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Solo Exhi­bi­tions

2014 (13.2. – 21.4.) Tanya Ury’s Hair Shirt Army, an instal­la­tion, spon­sored by the Kulturamt (Art’s Council Cologne), will be presented for the first time in the vault of EL-DE-Haus, the Nazi Docu­men­ta­tion Centre, Cologne (D), opening 7pm, 13^th February, with an intro­duc­tion by Professor Dr. Ernst van Alphen, Leiden Univer­sity (NL). A programme of events includes a perfor­mance concert archive burn out with ​“Suspended Beliefs”, impro­vised poetry with impro­vised music: Tanya Ury (voice), Gernot Bogumil (trumpet), Kasander Nilist (double bass), Hans Salz (percus­sion)

Group Exhi­bi­tions

2015 (22.3−1.11) 6 of 19 coats from Tanya Ury’s Hair Shirt Army is presented in Daniel Spoerri’s group exhi­bi­tion ​“Lieben und Haben – Lieb­haben, Sammeln und Sammler“ (Loving and Having – Cher­ishing, Collecting and Collec­tors). Spoerri’s 85^th birthday exhi­bi­tion is in the Spoerri Exhi­bi­tion House, Hader­s­dorf am Kamp (A). The opening is Saturday 21^st March 2015, at 4 pm www​.spoerri​.at/​a​k​tuell…

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Publi­ca­tions & Press

2006 (5.2006) Image of Hair Shirt in Jahre­sausstel­lung (yearly exhi­bi­tion) cata­logue, Kunstverein Rosen­heim (Art Centre), (D)

2008 (11) Hair Shirt discussed in article on Tanya Ury (in German) by Hartmut Bomhoff, Jüdische Zeitung (monthly), Berlin (D)

2014 (February/​March) Flyer and poster with image of shower proof, for Who’s Boss: Hair Shirt Army in the Nazi Docu­men­ta­tion Centre, Cologne (D)

2014 (13.2) ​“A Personal Memo­rial”, article on Who’s Boss: Hair Shirt Army in the Nazi Docu­men­ta­tion Centre, Cologne, by Susanne Kreitz in Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger (Cologne City Gazette) D)

2014 () ​“Hair Shirt Army in the Vault”, article on Who’s Boss: Hair Shirt Army in the Nazi Docu­men­ta­tion Centre, Cologne, by Susanne Schramm in Köln kompakt – Rheinische Post – Neuß-Greven­broicher Zeitung (Cologne compact – Rhine Post — Neuß-Greven­broich Paper) (D)

2014 (13.2) ​“Not a vendetta against the Boss Company”, article on Who’s Boss: Hair Shirt Army in the Nazi Docu­men­ta­tion Centre, Cologne, in Kölnische Rund­schau (Cologne Review) (D)

2014 (13.2) ​“Hugo Boss and the Nazi Past”, article on Who’s Boss: Hair Shirt Army in the Nazi Docu­men­ta­tion Centre, Cologne, by (ehu) in Köln Nachrichten (Cologne News) The Online News Maga­zine for Cologne (D)

2014 (26.2. – 26.3.) ​“Tanya Ury: Who’s Boss – Hair Shirt Army” with image of shower proof, by Barbara Hess, in Stadtrevue (City Revue)

2014 (3.5) Inter­view (22:18 minutes on 18^th April) with Tanya Ury by Brigitte Lang and Rebecca Mann, on the instal­la­tion Who’s Boss: Hair Shirt Army in the Nazi Docu­men­ta­tion Centre, Cologne, including extracts of Ury’s concert perfor­mance archive burn out, with Suspended Beliefs: Tanya Ury (text/​voice), Gernot Bogumil (trumpet), Kasander Nilist (double bass), Hans Salz (percus­sion)), online on Allewel­tonair (D) (All the World on air) as podcast – ​“can’t dance without my shadow” www​.allewel​tonair​.de/t…

2014 (5) Inter­view with Tanya Ury by Verena Krippner, online at this link: fish​ing​fore​mo​tions​.de/ (D)

2015 (23.1.) ​“Arbeiten am Archiv” (Working on the Archive), 50-minute radio programme in the series ​“Das Feature” (The Feature) on Tanya Ury by Dr. Astrid Nettling (director Burkhard Reinartz), from 8:10 till 9 pm on Friday 23^rd January, Deutsch­land­funk (D) www​.deutsch​land​funk​.de…

2015 (22.3−1.11) Tanya Ury’s Hair Shirt Army is repre­sented on a double side in the cata­logue for Daniel Spoerri’s group exhi­bi­tion ​“Lieben und Haben – Lieb­haben, Sammeln und Sammler“ (Loving and Having – Cher­ishing, Collecting and Collec­tors). Spoerri’s 85^th birthday exhi­bi­tion is in the Spoerri Exhi­bi­tion House, Hader­s­dorf am Kamp (A)

www​.spoerri​.at/​a​k​tuell…

down­load cata­logue: www​.spoerri​.at/​d​o​wnloa…

2015 (30.4.) ​“The Art of Jewish Hair”, an article about Salon Style, a www​.studiomu​seum​.org/e… group show at the www​.studiomu​seum​.org/ Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City, including a para­graph on Tanya Ury’s Hair Shirt, by www​.tabletmag​.com/auth… Marjorie Ingall, in Tablet Maga­zine (USA) www​.tabletmag​.com/jewi…

2016 (6) 2 Docu­men­ta­tion photos by Tanya Ury of her artwork Who’s Boss — Hair Shirt Army, exhib­ited in EL-DE-Haus, The Nazi Docu­men­ta­tion Centre of the City of Cologne in 2014, published, in a book section on her Jewish-German family history, in ​„Der jüdische Friedhof Köln-Bock­lemünd“ (The Jewish Ceme­tery in Cologne-Bock­lemünd) by Barbara Becker-Jákli, Emons Verlag publi­ca­tions ISBN 978−3−95451−889−0 (D)

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Artist’s Writ­ings & Publications

2005 ​“Stets gern für Sie beschäftigt…” (”Always glad to be of service…”) cata­logue, ifa Galerie, Berlin (D)

2005 (1.4.) Who’s Boss project presented in Anti-Flick-Collec­tion Edition

of Texte zur Kunst, in the TAZ news­paper, Berlin (D)

2006 (14−18.6) Who’s Boss as archival mate­rial, Performing Rights Library a four-day confer­ence and accom­pa­nying programme of live events Perfor­mance Studies inter­na­tional (PSi) #12: Performing Rights, Queen Mary, Univer­sity of London (GB)

2007 (7) Publi­ca­tion of Who’s Boss article in Translate/​Narrate issue, volume 20, n.paradoxa, Inter­na­tional Femi­nist Art Journal, London (GB) web​.ukon​line​.co​.uk/n.p…

2015 (30.4.) ​“The Art of Jewish Hair”, an article about Salon Style, a group show at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City, including a para­graph on Tanya Ury’s Hair Shirt, by Marjorie Ingall, in Tablet Maga­zine (USA) www​.tabletmag​.com/jewi…

2016 (6) 2 Docu­men­ta­tion photos by Tanya Ury of her artwork Who’s Boss — Hair Shirt Army, exhib­ited in EL-DE-Haus, The Nazi Docu­men­ta­tion Centre of the City of Cologne in 2014, published, in a book section on her Jewish-German family history, in ​„Der jüdische Friedhof Köln-Bock­lemünd“ (The Jewish Ceme­tery in Cologne-Bock­lemünd) by Barbara Becker-Jákli, Emons Verlag publi­ca­tions ISBN 978−3−95451−889−0 (D)