Claude Cahun - Behind the Mask, Another Mask

'Shuffle the cards. Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me'.

Claude Cahun and Gillian Wearing, Behind the Mask, Another Mask, at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

This exhibition draws parallels between the two artists. Both of them share a fascination with the self-portrait and use the self-image through the medium of photography to explore themes around identity and gender, which is often played out through masquerade and performance.

Even though I am great fan of Gillian Wearing's work, my real interest lay with Claude Cahun when I went to see this exhibition. Consequently, this post is about Cahun's work. Most of Wearing's work that was shown in this exhibition I saw at Whitechapel Gallery in 2012 and you can see it here .

Naming and identity was so central to Cahun's life, that writing this post has caused me problems. Our language has not yet evolved to speak outside binary gender. Personal pronouns are intended to define, yet I did not have the language to refer to Cahun. Some transgender people use the pronoun 'they' to refer to themselves, but I found this really difficult, so I am using the female pronoun in square brackets.

Claude Cahun was named Lucy Schwob when [she] was born into a Jewish intellectual family in Nantes, Western France, in 1894. At school [she] fell in love with Suzanne Malherbe, who became [her] life-long partner. The couple moved to Paris in the early 1920, where they adopted the gender neutral names Claude Cahum and Marcel Moore. While there, Cahun studied literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne and they both became involved in the Surrealist movement and increasingly with politics.

Cahun challenged gender roles in a society where they were rigidly enforced. A biologically born woman, [she] portrayed and embodied the tropes of conventional masculinity. [She] shook the foundations and helped sow the seed for challenging the binaries of gender. [She] championed the idea of gender fluidity, describing [herself] as 'neuter', putting [herself] outside the usual categories of gender.  In [her] autobiography, Disavowals, [she] wrote: 'Shuffle the cards. Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me'. [Her] adoption of a sexually ambiguous name, and [her] androgynous self-portraits display a revolutionary way of thinking and creating.

Furthermore, [her] participation in the Parisian Surrealist movement diversified the group's artwork and ushered in new representations. Where most Surrealist artists were men, and their primary images were of women as isolated symbols of eroticism, Cahum epitomised the multiple possibilities of genders and of the body.

'Under this mask, another mask',  wrote Cahun. In this [she] pre-empted the current feminist philosophers' work, and in particular, the work of Judith Butler, (1990), who sees gender as performance. Butler sets out to criticise our outdated perceptions of gender, which is limiting in that they adhere to the dominant societal constraints that label gender as binary. 'Gender probes to be performance - that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed', writes Butler. She continues: 'when we say that gender is performed, we usually mean that we've taken on a role; we're acting in some way.... To say that gender is performative is a little different... For something to be performative means that it produces a series of effects. We act and walk and speak and talk that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman... we act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or simply something that is true about us. Actually, it is a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time'.

Thus, Butler perceives gender as being constructed through a set of acts that are said to be in compliance with dominant societal norms. This performance is ongoing and out of an individual's control. In fact, rather than an individual producing the performance, the opposite is true. The performance is instead what produces the individual. Gender performativity is realised throughout many aspects of our lives, specifically in our infancy and young childhood, our teen years, and finally our adult lives. The socially constructed aspect of gender performativity is perhaps most obvious in drag performance, which offers a rudimentary understanding of gender binaries. 

 Gillian Wearing, Shami Chakrabarti, 2011, (gelatin silver print).

The mask Chakrabarti holds was prompted by the comment to the artist that her public persona is mask-like, often interpreted as 'grim', 'worthy', and 'strident'.


Early Self-Portraits:

In this section of the exhibition we see Cahun's transition from young woman, to young boy, to [her] fully formed, gender-neutral self, as [she] described it.

silver gelatin print, 1914

In this early self-portrait the artist's head, with her wild, Medusa-like hair spread out across the pillow, appears disembodied, as though floating above the sheets. It is possible that this image, in which she looks like an invalid in a hospital bed, refers to her earlier periods of ill health and anorexia. In common with much of her work, the likelihood is that although the concept was Cahun's, the photograph was taken by her partner, Marcel Moore.

silver gelatin print, 1913

Self-portrait (seated on granite rocks), (sepia toned silver gelatin print, 1915)

Cahun has cropped [her] hair so that [she] looks like a young boy. Moore's presence is felt in the form of the shadow in the lower right-hand corner of the image.

Self-portrait (shaved head, material draped across body), 1920, (modern silver gelatin print from original negative of 1920)

In this strikingly contemporary image Cahum stands against a dark backdrop.

Self-portrait with shaved head, looking over left shoulder, (copy print, silver gelatin print after an original silver gelatin print of 1920)

Self-portrait (reflected image in mirror with chequered jacket), silver gelatin print, 1928

Cahun plays on the notion of duality and Narcissus in this image. With golden hair and bronzed skin, [she] looks over [her] shoulder at the viewer, [her] reflection looking away from the mirror.



Surrealism:

When Cahun and Moore moved to Paris they were immersed in the culture of the city and befriended the founding Surrealist, Andre Breton. They became increasingly involved in politics, and later protested against the spread of Fascism in Europe.

Cahun's surrealist activity took many different forms, including writing and object-based work. Whereas the majority of Surrealists were men, in whose images women often appear as eroticised objects, Cahun's self-portraits explore female identity as a multifaceted construct.

Double Exposure in a Rock Pool, 1928, (silver gelatin print)

Cahun created surreal, staged self-portraits using her whole body as an object on the beach and in rock pools. In this photograph Cahun created a mirror image of [herself]f lying in a rock pool, a diaphanous fabric draped around [her] body.

Naked Reclining on Sand with Coiled Seaweed, 1930, (silver gelatin print)

Je Tends les Bras (I extend my arms), 1932, (modern silver gelatin print from an original negative)

A performative pair of arms, assumed to be Cahun's, appear to emerge from a granite gatepost. It is as though the artist is wearing the rock. The phallic monolith, fused with [her] feminine, ornamental arms produces a meaning that cannot be attributed to either gender.

Studies for a Keepsake, 1925, (four silver gelatin prints mounted on card)

Cahun's disembodied head floats in different poses like a specimen, enclosed within a glass bell jar. At the time [she] made this work, Cahun was concentrating on creating assemblages of objects and photographing them in the Surrealist tradition. In this work [she] objectifies [herself]; with painted lips an shoulder-length hair, [she] appears trapped by [her] female identity.

Performance:

In 1937, to escape the spread of Nazism in Europe, Cahun and Moore left France and moved to a house in St Brelade's Bay, Jersey, an island where they had spent childhood holidays. Cahun continued to make surreal, staged self-portraits, which were less androgynous and more feminine. [She] also created a series of intriguing and playful performative works in pastoral settings.

When the German forces invaded Jersey in 1940, Cahun and Moore produced counter-propaganda tracts in active resistance of the Occupation. They were arrested in the summer of 1944 and sentenced to death. Although the sentence was eventually commuted, they were imprisoned in separate cells for almost a year until the Liberation in May 1945.[Her] post-Liberation work comments on the oppression of Occupation.

With Round Frame, 1938 (silver gelatin print)

Photographed against a doorway, and dressed in a housecoat, Cahun holds a circular frame around her face, as though [she] is appearing in a conventional painted portrait.

In Cloak with Cloaked Figure, 1939, (silver gelatin print)

In this group of works, Cahun plays with portrait conventions and stereotypes, using the architecture of La Rocquaise as a backdrop. With a nod to [her] Surrealist past, [she] appears as a cloaked figure in a double portrait next to a mannequin twin version of [herself].

Memento Mori:

After [her] release from prison Cahun suffered from ill health and yet [her] late works show [her] boldly confronting death. Cahun poses in diaphanous clothing, reminiscent of an angel, with the churchyard, where [she] would be buried, as the backdrop. Cahun died in 1954 at St. Helier hospital, Jersey.

Marcel Moore and Claude Cahun, 1950, (silver gelatin print).

This late image of the couple shows them in bathing suits, posing either side of an archway in the garden of La Rocquaise. Hauntingly, Cahun's face and torso have been defaced; a possible portent of her death four years later.

Cindy Sherman - 2

 

 

 

Cindy Sherman - A Retrospective, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

 

We saw this exhibition in New York in April 2012.  This is the second post on this vast exhibition that spanned the majority of Sherman's working life - you can see the first post here .

 

 

Even though Cindy Sherman always photographs herself, her photographs are not self-portraits, but rather an investigation of contemporary identity and the nature of representation. In her photographs she reveals and critiques the artifice of identity and how photography is complicit in its making. Through the variety of characters and scenarios that she employs she addresses the anxieties of the self in our society by projecting personas and stereotypes that are deep seated in our shared cultural imagination. Her work reveals how surface appearances and the fleeting images that we are bombarded with are often mistaken for content and depth.

 

Sherman insists that she is not a photographer but instead, an artist who uses photography. She is concerned with the way photography has shaped our world, particularly in the construction of female identity. She presents female identity as masquerade, and consequently places herself in the centre of postmodern discussion on the nature of femininity, defining Woman as a construct that depends, for social, political and erotic reasons, upon masks and masquerade. The woman who is constructed by culture, is according to Joan Riviere, already an impersonation. Womanliness is mimicry, it is masquerade. Gender exists only in representation. 

 

 

The Centrefolds (1981):

 

 

The Centrefolds are send-ups of men's erotic magazine centrefolds, depicting a variety of young women, mostly in supine positions, photographed close up and cropped so that they seem compressed into the frame. In many of the pictures the women are in a state of reverie of day-dreaming, staring outside the picture frame. The characters are in extreme emotional states, ranging from terrified

 

 

 

 

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to melancholic

 

 

 

 

 

#88.

 

 

Sherman plays into the male conditioning of looking at photographs of women, but she takes on the roles of both male photographer and female pinup. They are the antithesis of what a viewer expects to see in a centrefold. 

 

 

 

 

 

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Fashion photographs:

Sherman's photographs for her first fashion commission for a New York boutique are parodies of fashion photography combining elements of slapstick humour and theatricality. Rather than projecting glamour, sex or wealth, they feature characters that are far from desirable : they are goofy, angry, challenging conventional notions of beauty and grace. These are powerful and strong women and the characters have an eccentric almost gothic quality. 'I'm disgusted with how people get themselves to look beautiful. I'm much more fascinated with the other side... I was trying to make fun of fashion'.

Her next commission was for Vogue: 'This is going to be in French Vogue. I've really got to do something to rip open the French fashion world. I so wanted to make really ugly pictures... The first couple of pictures I shot they didn't like at all... That inspired even more depressing, bloody, ugly characters'. The characters have bloodshot eyes, bruises, and unflattering pancake makeup  with a suggestion of implicit violence, but the clothes are luxurious and expensive.

When Harper's Bazaar and Comme des Garcons hired Sherman, they were embracing her challenge to the conventions of high fashion and beauty and were acknowledging that their own clothes and media influence were complicit in the masquerade of fashion. The ideas of the postmodernists were now co-opted by the very media they were commenting on.

 

 

 

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The Fairy Tale Series (1985):

 

Jewel-like colours and menacing visions, encompassing a nightmarish perspective on the world - something that becomes increasingly pronounced in Sherman's work in the years to follow. With the Fairy Tales she introduced prosthetic parts as a stand-in for the human body, a practice that would soon replace the figure altogether.

 

 

 

 

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Disasters (1986-89)

 

In this series she continued with the themes and motifs explored in the Fairy Tales: mutilated body parts, blow-up dolls, rotting food and substances that look like vomit, faeces and blood. 'I wanted something visually offensive but seductive, beautiful, and texture as well, to suck you in and then repulse you'.  These grotesque works marked a turn away from the representation of women. 'I'm pretty disgusted with the art world in general. The boy artists, the boy painters, the collectors, the crawl, the climb, and stabbing each other to the top sort of competition. I don't know why that work would come out from those feelings, but I think I wanted to make something that I couldn't imagine anybody buying'.

 

 

 

 

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The sex pictures (1992):

 

Sherman wanted to make explicit pictures but was not interested in photographing herself nude, so she used dolls bought from medical supply catalogues, arranged them to simulate sex acts and mimic hard-core pornography, and photographed them, sometimes in extreme and disorienting close-up - a mix of female and male that evoked the crossbreeds from the fairy tales.

 

Mannequins and sex dolls are usually idealised versions of women's bodies with unrealistic proportions and Sherman's use of medical dolls with gaping orifices and her mix of female and male parts

 

 

 



 

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challenge fetishized female sexuality. She forces viewers to confront their own preconceived ideas about sex, pornography and erotic images. 'They were a refusal to make a sexy image about sex' she argues. 'I never wanted to do that. Nudity can be a cop out. That is why I use fake tits and asses, to avoid sensationalisms, which I wanted to subvert'.

 

The sex pictures are distinctly unerotic. While the scenarios are pornographic, the bodies themselves are sterile and medical, and they simply mimic erotic poses and acts. They make one keenly aware of the cycle of fetishism and voyeurism on which pornography thrives. 'I got the feeling at the opening and at the other times I would walk into the gallery that people would look around and quickly leave. I think someone told me that they couldn't stay in the gallery very long... I think the show made people very uncomfortable'.

 

At one level, the sex pictures were Sherman's response to Jeff Koon's paintings of himself having sex with his wife, a former porn star also known as Cicciolina. 'The censorship issue is important... I felt that my previous show was so commercially successful that it made sense to go out on a limb in these difficult times. I thought I might as well really try to pull out all the stops and just make something that directly deals with sexuality and censorship without compromising my values'.

 

Her sex pictures reflect a fear of the body and suggest the degeneration and dehumanisation of sexual desire. Her photographs are also a critique of the Surrealists who engaged a fantastical dismemberment of the female body.

 

 

 

 

 

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Uncomfortable viewing indeed.

 

 



 

 

Source:

 

 Cindy Sherman: Johanna Burton, John Waters, MOMA.