Artnose Artists

 Juan Peccadiño (The Barber of Solihull) 

  Born Seville, Spain, 1960. Self-taught.

Peccadiño

Juan Peccadiño, the self-styled 'Barber of Solihull', was born in Seville in 1956, the son of a meat-packer and part-time toreador. 

He moved to the West Midlands in the early 1970s where he became involved in the local music scene. 

In 1979, after three years touring as a roadie with the Pink Fairies, he enrolled at the University of the West Midlands where he studied critical theory, completing a PhD on the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, which he later published as Horizontality as Vertical Thought. 

In 1985 he re-trained as a hairdresser, setting up the Situationist Salon, a "Cryptic Barbers' Co-operative" which aimed to impart theories of consciousness to customers while having their hair cut and beards trimmed. 

He was arrested in 1989 after subjecting half a dozen blue-rinsed pensioners to subliminal recordings of Maurice-Merleau Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception while having their perms set.

Peccadiño later raised £4 million of first-round start-up venture capital to launch the internet's only online barber shop in which customers were emailed instructions on how to create their own mullets and flat-tops. The company folded in 2001 with debts of £12 million, but Peccadiño continues to operate as an "ironic coiffeur", or as a practitioner of what he describes as "postmodern performative preening". He signed an exclusive not-for-profit deal with Artnose in January 2002, offering visitors to the site an opportunity to relive the Situationist Salon experience. 

Since repositioning his barber's business as 'anti-beaux-arts praxis', Peccadiño has eschewed the re-styling of hair, dismissing the blue-rinse as a tricological manifestation of reactionary thought, instead advocating shearing and shaving. 

He has described the growth of hair as analogous to the inexorable march of capitalism and sees the role of the barber as symbolic of class struggle. "Like capitalism, it doesn't matter how you control hair, or re-shape it, it just grows again. We must all seek to cut capitalism off at its roots, shave Mammon at every opportunity. Mere restyling is not enough. The shaven head is a powerful signifier of the plight of the lumpen proletariat throughout history, the cut of choice for slaves, political prisoners and the dispossessed. Meanwhile, how many city bankers do you see with shaved heads? None."

To book an appointment in the Situationist Salon, email editor at artnose dot org

Artnose Artists - Quick Links

  Yuk Foo & Fuk Yoo
  Wim Waals
  Euan Mee
  Pixel Popadopoulos
  Diego Vasquez
  Juan Peccadiño (The Barber of Solihull)
  Mimmo Gulbenkian

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