Six miles of hair in avant-garde work at Dartmouth

What this work , titled "the green house," by Wenda Gu , a 52-year-old Chinese artist with studios in New York and Shanghai and a growing international reputation, is supposed to mean is not immediately clear. Conflating the words "educations" and "advertises" and rendering them in Dartmouth's school color green (besides being grammatically perplexing) might imply a social critique: A diploma from an upper echelon school such as Dartmouth is as much an advertisement of social status as a symbol of educational achievement. The hair, on the other hand, might signify something that all people, whatever their status, have in common. So the whole screen embodies tension between elitism and democracy.

If Gu's work is a critique of Ivy League privilege and power, it's ironic in that it is also being billed as the most important commission of a public artwork by and for Dartmouth since the Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco's creation of a suite of wall paintings in a lower-level reading room at the Baker Library in 1932-34. The politics and aesthetics of Orozco's social realist vision, titled "The Epic of American Civilization" and still on public view, stirred up such a storm of controversy at the time that a plan to continue commissioning major artworks for the Dartmouth campus died, only to be revived more than 70 years later with the present work by Gu.

Gu's piece probably will not arouse the kind of controversy that Orozco's did. Its obliquely intimated themes of class, privilege, and democracy are now so integral to the pedagogical ideologies of liberal arts colleges everywhere, it's hard to believe many eyebrows will be raised. Reflecting influences of such textbook-certified political artists as Hans Haacke and Barbara Kruger , Gu's work is more academic than revolutionary.