Hanns Eisler Nail Salon (H.E.N.S.), an ongoing project by the artists Arlen Austin and Jason Boughton, is a nail salon/performance artwork that brings together beauticians, undocumented workers, activists, artists, and the New York City public to raise awareness of recent court cases brought by manicurists against beauty salons and to stimulate public debate about "unseen" and unregulated labor. H.E.N.S. takes its name and its music from Hanns Eisler, a 20th-century German-Austrian composer perhaps best known for his socially engaged and aesthetically radical collaborations with the playwright Bertolt Brecht. Eisler's music, banned by Nazi Germany, blacklisted in the US, and forgotten by the world of fine art, questions the distinctions between “avant-garde” and “popular” traditions, and imagines new artistic-political relations. He wrote some of the most potent hymns to workers' rights. H.E.N.S. strives to invest Eisler's political and artistic project with an attention to race and gender difference worthy of the contemporary beauty industry--to give an old Marxist a new manicure. The project began with a performance on September 2, 2010, at Scaramouche Gallery. Austin and Boughton presented a lecture connecting the gallery's Lower East Side location to the labor struggles at nail salons that have proliferated in the neighborhood. The lecture was accompanied by the musicians Ming-Yi Chuang-Smith and Elzebieta Pollak performing Eisler lieder and two beauticians offering manicures to the audience. Subsequent manifestations of the project have taken place at the artist Kara Walker's temporary project space, Ludlow 38, and at Trinity Church, engaging tactics ranging from agit-prop musical performance to the distribution of promotional art posters produced by the group.
H.E.N.S. is an associated artist project of Moving Theater. Through this program, Moving Theater provides funding, administrative support and critical discourse to discipline-defying, frontier-crossing projects in the performing and visual arts. This program is made possible with a generous grant from Rockefeller Brothers Fund and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, and from the New York State Council on the Arts.
H.E.N.S. is an associated artist project of Moving Theater. Through this program, Moving Theater provides funding, administrative support and critical discourse to discipline-defying, frontier-crossing projects in the performing and visual arts. This program is made possible with a generous grant from Rockefeller Brothers Fund and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, and from the New York State Council on the Arts.