It’s a thought we've all had in our more reflective moments: “If my hair were long enough, could a performance artist braid it into thin strands, cover it in glue, thread it into the fingerboard of a violin, and play it with a bow?”
At last, Lithuanian artist Tadas Maksimovas has answered that age-old question. In this video, created to promote Lithuania’s annual Street Musicians Day, Maksimovas, working with musician Eimantas Belickas and stylist Ieva Sereikytė, turns his own several-foot-long coif into serviceable violin strings, which Belickas then ably plays.
While not necessarily the most beautiful sound ever produced by a violin, the stunt does effectively convey Maksimovas’ point: That music, and performance, is everywhere, and in every thing. At the end of the video, Maksimovas shaves his massive mane off, presumably as an artistic statement, and, even more presumably, because his glue-filled hair probably felt as gross as anything ever has in the long, storied history of hair.