gender, identity

“Lucy Schwob, who created the alter ego of ‘Claude Cahun’, manipulated photographic images of herself as Cahun, costumed, disguised and/or masked, which comprises one of the [twentieth] centuries first coherent bodies of work by a woman artist to call into question the very possibility of a unified self.” (Mirror Mirror, Whitney Chadwick)
“[H]er iconography of a fluid transgendered identity derived [in part] from the Dada and Surrealist explorations of sexuality and androgyny evident in Marcel Duchamp’s (1887-1968) gender-bending reinvention of himself through his alter-ego Rose Selavy. Articulating gender and sexuality as positional rather than fixed , Cahun’s self-representations continually return us to the ways that images, even those based on the most personal aspects of our self-identity, derive their meaning in the world from the complex sets if social and cultural signs ands codes on which we depend to make he world legible.
It is also possible to exaggerate the signs of femininity until it becomes almost impossible to locate a ‘self’ in the artifice of display and surface elaboration.” (Mirror Mirror, Chadwick)
“a restless need for metamorphosis […] her creative work was her form of rebellion against any idée fixe about Woman in general and herself in particular. Boasting about her dilettantism her eccentricity, and her unapologetic ambiguity, she used her work to disrupt ideas of gender, social identity, and femininity that were too restrictive…” (Rice, Shelley, Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman, Massachusetts:  MIT, 1999)

Masquerade & Identity
“Cahun’s oeuvre, with its consistent play with the instability of identity, its frequent deployment of masquerade, its penchant for masks and mirrors, is startlingly close to the terms of contemporary feminist thinking about identity, gender and sexual difference.” (Imaging Others, Rice)
“The notion of gender as masquerade, like Judith Butler’s conception of gender as fundamentally performative, resonated strikingly with Cahun’s work not merely because of the recurring appearance of costume and masks – the self as an affair of smoke and mirrors – but because it appears to enact the most radical part of Riviere’s argument. Womanliness, in Riviere’s account, did not mask something beneath it (say the pre-Oedipal, polymorphously perverse, lost continent if primal femininity) but was itself a vacancy, an emptiness.” (Imaging Others, Rice)

"Without a doubt, it is her self-portraits that have aroused the greatest interest among theoreticians of contemporary culture. Here the artist uses her own image to expose, one by one, the clichés of feminine and masculine identity. Claude Cahun (née Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob) reinvented herself through photography (just as she did in her writing), posing for the lens with an acute sense of “performance,” whether dressed as a woman or as a man, with her hair short, long or shaven (which was extremely incongruous for women at this time). However, to speak of identity is also to speak, indirectly, of the body, and by the same token, of the self-image that one projects and that becomes social as soon as it is shared.
Unlike other artists – mainly men – who made portraits but never or very rarely exposed their own person to the lens (Man Ray, Hans Bellmer, André Kertész), Claude Cahun was at once the object and the subject of her artistic experiments. This is borne out by the care with which she chose her poses and expressions, the backgrounds she used (fabric, bedspreads, sheets, hangings), and her use of specific props (masks, capes, overgarments, glass balls, etc.) – even if the real focus of the image was still the face. Some of these propositions can be found in the photographs of objects that she began in the mid-1920s and developed throughout the 1930s. The exhibition emphasizes the highly innovative quality of these experiments in which she explores questions and visual and symbolic procedures (staging, superposition of photos, photomontage) that continue her speculations on self-metamorphosis.

Claude Cahun (1894-1954) has something approaching cult status in today’s art world. However, her work was almost unknown until the early 1980s, when it was championed by the research of François Leperlier, after which exhibitions at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes (1994) and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1995) brought it to the public’s attention. Her life and work (both literary and artistic) bespeak an extraordinary libertarian personality who defied sexual, social and ethical conventions in what was an age of avant-garde and moral upheaval. Among her many photographs, it is undoubtedly her self-portraits that have aroused the greatest interest in recent years. Throughout her life, Cahun used her own image to dismantle the clichés surrounding ideas of identity. She reinvented herself through photography, posing for the lens with a keen sense of performance and role-play, dressed as a woman or a man, as a maverick hero, with her hair long or very short, or even with a shaved head. This approach was extended in innovative ways in her photographs of objects and use of photomontage, which asserted the primacy of the imagination and of metamorphosis. By exploring the many different analyses made of Cahun’s work since the 1990s, and ranging across its different themes: from her subversive self-portraits that question identity, to her surrealist compositions, erotic metaphors and political forays, this exhibition confirms the modernity of a figure that, as a pioneer of self-representation and the poetry of objects, has been an important influence for many contemporary artists.

Metamorphoses of identity and the subversion of gender
This set of photographs, going from 1913 to the end of the 1920s, includes some of Cahun’s major works, in which she staged her own persona, emphasizing disguises and masks, and working through variations on gender: feminine, masculine, androgyne, undifferentiated. Sexual ambiguity is consciously cultivated and calls established norms and conventions into question. In 1928, she even represented herself with her head shaved, wearing a singlet, in profile, or with her hands against her face, or wearing a man’s loose jacket. Some of the mise-en-scènes from this period seem to anticipate contemporary performance."

"Though the mask is generally considered a tool of evasion or concealment, Cahun’s many masks and maneuvers reflect rather than deflect. The artist and the individual are present within each disguise, any one of which represents an aspect of an extraordinarily complex self."