Claude Cahun – Dream Genie.
David Annwn introduces a major exhibition of Claude Cahun’s photographs and photocollages as part of Parallel Lives at Leeds Art Gallery …
It is difficult to fathom or turn away from these amazing photographs.
A woman – or is it? – with a slicked-back male hair-do and massive kiss curls purses her lips towards us. Across the front of her vest are written the words ‘I Am In Training. Don’t Kiss Me’. She sits like an overgrown adolescent between two cartooned beach balls. Her gaze is tough, playful, deadpan – as if our uncertainty as we look into the picture-space gives her a kick.
Another shows the subject as a young sailor thug, with hands in the pockets of his cord trousers, seeming to swagger aggressively towards the viewer in a huge roll-neck jumper.
The more you look, the more curious you become. An androgynous skinhead (1967?) or punk with cropped hair (1977?) gazes at the viewer thoughtfully posed against jagged plastered-over cracks in a wall. Yet the date of the shot is … 1917.
In the next photo the skinhead has sprouted two heads joined at the neck, one of which cranes around to stare at the other. The work is full of sudden shocks and enigmas. An alien, doe-eyed Madonna with a bulging cranium. A raffish blonde dandy decked out in a suit of harlequin diamonds.
Who is this fantastical creature trying out so many costumes and roles, who seems so confident and timeless? The views are surreal and bizarre, criss-crossing gender, age and identity. They seem to be part of the same world as David Bowie’s Ziggy, or the man wearing the floral dress on The man who sold the world, or Rocky Horror’s wig-wearing vampires. The poses might remind the more arty amongst us of Cindy Sherman yet they were taken over thirty years before Sherman’s first conceptual portraits.
Adrian Searle calls Cahun ‘A cross between Sinead O’Connor and Nosferatu’, which is pretty close to the mark but that combination is only one of her chameleonic shifting shapes: Transgender, inter-gender, Sci-Fi transsexual, lesbian, butch, queer queen and genie of multifarious dreams and secrets. You name it: it’s here and more besides.
Yet her poetry and other writings tell us that Cahun refused to be classified, that her creative project involved playing games with gender in order to reject labels and the construction of gender entirely. She was aware that society always confronts modern humans with the need to choose who oneself and everyone is. She wrote in reply: ‘Choosing solves nothing.’ Even the third sex was a limitation. No artist has managed so successfully to make and unmake themselves. Try as you might, these pictures just won’t fit. They simply won’t let us be; more accurately: they won’t let us be simple.
Cahun’s life was as fascinating as her theatrical autoportraits and thronging sometimes nightmarish photocollages. Born as Lucy Schwob in a prosperous French Jewish family, the rebellious young artist soon changed her name to a man’s, as did her partner Suzanne Malherbe, who adopted the monicker Marcel Moore and helped Claude with her staging of self-portraits. They rubbed shoulders with Surrealist royalty in Paris: Tristan Tzara, Man Ray and Andre Breton. Breton, the Pope of Surrealism, thought that Cahun possessed one of the most original minds he’d ever encountered and encouraged her to write as much as she could. When other artists were flirting with Communism, Cahun rejected the regimentation which came with such systems.
Cahun and Moore moved to the island of Jersey which was occupied soon after by the Nazis. The pair soon decided on their personal subtle form of resistance – leaving hand-made anti-Fascist leaflets in different public places – but they were betrayed, caught and sentenced to death by the Gestapo. Both women survived the war but imprisonment seriously weakened Cahun. After her death in 1954, her work lay undiscovered for years until a removal expert with an interest in Surrealism spotted it by accident. He was astounded by the audacity of the images he’d unearthed.
Cahun was a head-on person plural. Her photographed selves still come right at us, evoking our most intimate sympathies, confronting our assumptions and challenging viewer participation. The exuberance and menace and bravery, the refusal to lie down and be ‘normal’ are registered in every defiant photographic glimpse she gives us.
Between June 6th-September 7th there will be a major exhibition of Claude Cahun’s photographs and photocollages as part of the Parallel Lives: Claude Cahun & Marlow Moss at Leeds Art Gallery accompanied by the groundbreaking Agender Conference 16th-17th June. This will be a remarkable opportunity. Her work has rarely been exhibited. In over 50 years, there have been a handful of shows in London, Paris, Tokyo and Munich and now, in 2014, Leeds. Don’t let it pass you by. It’s a revelation.
Find A New Collaboration to Celebrate Claude Cahun & Dylan Thomas at: mannart@wordpress.com