Hey y’all! Sorry for the brief hiatus – going through big, exciting
life changes! But I’m back with a vengeance with one of my all-time favorite
artists, Claude Cahun.
Cahun is incredible, besides her art, for several reasons:
S 1) She
was born to a French Jewish family in 1892 in a world becoming increasingly hostile to
Jews, none of which prevented her from speaking out against injustice or
creating art.
2) She
was openly gay, in a committed relationship with her (amazing) partner,
Suzanne Malherbe (a.k.a. Marcel Moore), who was also a working artist
3) When
the island they lived on was invaded by Nazis, they revolted artistically
(posters plastered and thrown everywhere) so effectively that the soldiers
truly believed that there was an actual underground resistance network on the
island.
And that’s without even mentioning her spectacular photographs.
Cahun broke all the rules of identity and gender, 80 years before Postmodernism
would even get its name. Her self-portraits show her dressed as a man, buzz
cut, costumed as a clown, a weightlifter – her identities flit from photo to
photo, refusing any easy label or cohesive meaning. As Fiona (no last name
mentioned) from the Feminist Art Archive,
describes it:
“She understood herself as an ever changing collection of
identities, flowing from one to the next, rather than a single or linear
identity.”
I find Claude Cahun’s work striking and profoundly moving.
In a time when being different, othered, was often a death sentence, she
unabashedly claimed her identity, in whatever shape or performative
manifestation it came in. She challenged ethnic, sexual and gender codes in
order to create works that question our fundamental beliefs about who we are as
humans and spectators. She turns the gaze back on us and makes us ask – what do
we look for in a picture? Why is it unnerving when her gender code cannot be
read? What does this say about the sexual dynamics in looking? She turns
questions back towards the subject and how they have learned to look, to look
for – gender, sexuality, identity – in these representational practices.
Her works are vastly intriguing and largely ignored –
overshadowed by her male, Surrealist counterparts. But her work will always
stand out to me as innovative, daring and deeply brilliant.
Links:
Theodor Adorno's piece about Anti-Semitism and the turn towards the subject
She is on view in London now!
