Big wig

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Laura Bannister interviews artist Dani Reynolds, who holds the Guinness World Record for world's widest wig.

At the tail end of January, 2017, Drew Barrymore appeared on The Tonight Show—beside an ecstatic Jimmy Fallon—donning stage blacks and the widest-known wig in the world. Constructed by prop specialists Kelly Hanson and Randy Carfango Productions, then lugged onstage by three assistants in Tonight Show-branded tracksuits, the colossal hairpiece was difficult to wear: a person must step underneath and into it, which Barrymore did to keen applause.

That evening, Barrymore ("already the world's coolest person" according to Fallon) attempted to beat three Guinness World Records. In 30 seconds, she applied as many rounds of lipstick as she could and ran through multiple paper banners that read “GO DREW!” (for the record of most paper breakaway banners split while timed). But the wig, a sculptural mass both girlish and feral, was the most elaborate of her attempts: a tangle of honey blonde and jaunty red bows, hulking and matted like a medieval pelt. Stretching to two feet and seven inches across, the wig beat the previous record-holder by over a foot.

Half a decade later, inside the South Australian gallery Adelaide Contemporary Experimental—a space some 10,600 miles away—the artist Dani Reynolds eclipsed Barrymore’s record with their own big wig. Modeled off the Tonight Show spectacle, as well as the artist’s own hair, theirs was a mass of camel-brown synthetic clipped to resemble a dollhouse, and supported by a structure of aluminum rods. Celebrity wig-maker Matt Johnson, acting as an independent witness, praised the caricatural furbelows and flouncy grooming: “You’ve got a center part, you’ve got some on-trend clips, layers, texture … it’s all happening.” Reynolds’ performance—a slow-spinning balancing act, with both hands upturned to the heavens, like a spotlit starlet—was a meditation on fame, failure, isolation from the art world, and the relentless, often arbitrary goal-setting essential to the pursuit of an artistic career. (They later likened their approach to “a hybrid live audience talk show/performance,” channeling the roles of Fallon and Barrymore—hype-man and luminary—simultaneously.)

The prior administrative process undertaken with the Guinness World Records corporation—invisible, protracted, labyrinthine—was as much a part of the The Widest Wig Work as its public reveal. It cast a neat metaphor for the extent to which, for the not already wealthy, an art practice is increasingly reliant on bureaucratic hoop-jumping, competing with peers for finite resources. (“Between 2018 and 2022, I hadn’t managed to receive any funding” the artist told me, “which made generating work so tough.”) Shortly after the record was made official, I got in touch with Reynolds, and we talked about what a supersized hairpiece—and a claim to fame that usually doesn’t make you famous—might mean.

HAIRY

THE WHITE CUBE

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