Claude Cahun: “Other” Identities, “Other” Possibilities Elizabeth Weber The surrealist photographer Claude Cahun occupies a unique position among her peers. While other European surrealists sought to make revolutionary art by accessing the irrational, subconscious mind, they often did so without freeing themselves or their work from the binary systems society uses to organize and categorize the world and its people. While some of the art produced by the European surrealists during Cahun’s lifetime (1894-1954) subverts the moral order through these binaries, it seldom transcends them to do so. Claude Cahun, on the other hand, made truly transgressive art. For the surrealists of her time and place, social taboos presented many opportunities to engage in subversive art. Few offered a yield as fruitful as sexual taboos. However, in an essay for Cahiers Melusine, Georgiana Colville reveals that for most of the male surrealists and many of the women as well, this subversion was usually more superficial than substantial (“De l’Éros des femmes surréalistes et de Claude Cahun en particulier”). Whether the male surrealists were excluding the output of their female peers from exhibitions or demanding that the women pose as mere sexual objects in their (the men’s) art, the typical binary of dominant, aggressive male and submissive,
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passive female was not challenged (Colville, par. 17-20). Colville also states that despite the group’s frequent flaunting of BDSM aesthetics and practices, never was this done in a way that truly deviated from conventional gender roles (par. 17). Unsurprisingly, the women of the group did make art opposing this, but rather than developing a new system of signs and ideas, they often expressed themselves in relation to the men’s work, appropriating symbols such as the phallus for themselves (Colville, par. 16). When these reactions to oppressive male practices addressed representation of the self, it often occurred as a reaction to prevailing standards of beauty—that is, they still operated through the male gaze. In contrast, Cahun did not seek to redefine sex and gender through the existing binary system or somebody else’s definition of her. Instead, Colville proposes, her work sought to undefine them, or render them without a fixed definition. “Claude Cahun a osé se fabriquer un éros autre et indéfinissable,” states Colville (par. 24). This movement beyond extant dichotomies allowed her art to be truly subversive, both sexually and politically. Indeed, the sexual and political are closely linked in Cahun’s life and work. By abandoning the roles of “model daughter” and “well-bred young lady” without simultaneously embracing a purely masculine identity, Cahun presents “a third
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kind” that “calls into question binary thinking” as it pertains to class and social mores, not just gender (Colville, par. 25-27 and 39-42). It makes sense that an openly-lesbian Jewish woman living at this time would use her art to express her multiple marginalization, but the genius of Cahun’s oeuvre is that it does so without depending on the visual codes of those who would marginalize her. These photographs, by evading or smashing easily-defined binary roles such as masculine/feminine and upper class/lower class, illustrate not only identities but possibilities. How did Cahun accomplish this? Consider the 1927 photograph I Am In Training, Don’t Kiss Me [fig 1]. Cahun has somehow become a parody of both masculinity and femininity. Her overdone, doll-like makeup and carefully-crossed legs make her appear more like a man in drag than a female inhabiting the typical accoutrements of womanhood. At the same time, the elaborately-decorated barbell suggests that this figure is engaged in the proper manly pursuit of a muscular physique. What kind of gender representation is this? No word for it exists in our language. Meanwhile, the pasties Cahun is wearing confuse everything. Because they are worn over clothing, it is unclear if they function to emphasize a sexual body part that would otherwise be nearly invisible or to hide the mere suggestion of
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something as indecorous as nipples. The overall image is like a giant neon arrow pointing at gender performativity. In her essay “Uncanny Resemblances: Restaging Claude Cahun in Mise en Scene,” Katy Deepwell identifies a common mistake critics make when they compare Cahun’s work to other work that addresses gender and sexuality: interpretations that seek “to problematise feminine identities without engaging in its necessary correlate, the problematising of masculinity” (47). I Am In Training, Don’t Kiss Me addresses both binary gender roles while also illustrating a life lived in the gray area between them. Deepwell refers to this phenomenon as “the situation of the works within the codes of representation manifest in popular culture which the artist’s work both maintains and subverts” (47). In this work, Cahun has clearly moved out of the artistic realm of the other surrealists and into an uncharted territory, “beyond the staging of the ‘self’ as play or masquerade within the prescriptive Surrealist images of the muse/femme-enfant” (Deepwell 49).
The very tools we use to define gender are here
turned against themselves, resulting in an image that is playfully confusing. Not all of Cahun’s work creates confusion through visual conflict. In her 1927 photograph Self Portrait [fig. 2], this is accomplished through denial or obliteration of identity rather
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than through the formation of an identity that defies definition. This image is cropped close around Cahun’s head, a standard way to photograph a portrait. The emphasis on the face in this kind of shot typically allows the most access to the person, since it is by the face that people identify one another. She also appears as straightforwardly masculine, with short hair and a type of collar commonly found in menswear framing her head. This would create a very accessible image but for one very obvious thing—Cahun’s eyes are obscured by the dark lenses of her goggles. It is hard to tell if they are completely blacked out, so that we cannot see Cahun’s eyes and she cannot see us, or if these goggles are some sort of apparatus that allows her to see the viewer while preventing viewers from seeing her eyes. This makes it difficult to read her expression. Is that a playful smirk forming on Cahun’s face, or a grimace of dissatisfaction? Also, the common understanding of eyes as “the windows to the soul” and the part of the face that imparts specific information about mood, personality, and identity makes the strategic decision to cover them an act of denial. Regardless of what the person in this image might see or understand, we cannot properly see or understand her. If a portrait is a statement of identity that tells us about the sitter, this one says, “You
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cannot identify me; you will never really know about me,” contrary to a typical surrealist portrait of a woman that might (depending on the maker) say, “Here is a woman as I conceive of her,” or, “Your conception of me as a woman is (in)correct.” It reveals in a very traditional way, only to then conceal in a way that is strange, unusual, and even paradoxical. Yet, Cahun also uses the eyes to make statements while leaving them visible within the photograph. For example, in the 1929 photomontage Miroir des Illusions [fig. 3], Cahun (in collaboration with Marcel Moore) uses the eyes to disrupt a common binary: that of subject and object, or looker and lookedat. The collage features a mirror containing the reflection of a glaring Cahun, her face covered but for those flashing eyes looking back at the viewer. She does not present any clear gender, and we are not sure if the face we see is looking at itself in the mirror, or at us. Complicating this further is the eye below the mirror, which contains the inverted reflection of the same face, uncovered. This one definitely seems to be glowering from its upside-down position within the right-side up eye, but is that look for the viewer, or the owner of the eye, or both? This tangled web of beholder and beheld shatters the binary typically used to process a portrait. Anyone who looks at it lands in a minefield of criss-crossing gazes, one of which
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may or may not be directed at a de-gendered self (the viewer’s self, through Cahun’s mirror). Even if the viewer navigates the image successfully, Cahun still hides part of her face and refuses to present as either a man or a woman. This treatment of binaries also appears in other works that don’t deal specifically with gender. Such works reflect how Cahun was not only positioning herself as “other” to gender, or sexuality, but to many other false dichotomies within society. While images like 1928’s Self Portrait in Robe with Masks Attached [fig. 4] suggest that our faces, or identities, are not singular or narrowly defined but things we can put on, take off, and interchange, Cahun is interested in making statements about much more than masks and faces. The gray area between the poles of constructed binaries is the real point of many Cahun artworks. This gray area is a realm of possibility, of openness to possibility. Gen Doy, in an essay for Meta entitled “Claude Cahun – A Sensual Politics of Photography,” posits that Cahun often “used the subversive potential of sex and gender questioning” in a playful manner, but “underlying it is a serious and principled commitment to the self in relation to sexuality and politics” (2). Furthermore, Cahun’s writing “attack[ed]…the Stalinized Communist Parties’ views promoting a directly political art,
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rather than an art that was imaginative, seductive and suggestive and thus, ultimately, more politically engaging and involving” (Doy 1). It then stands to reason that viewers must consider Cahun’s otherness as being not exclusive to gender and sexuality when viewing her images. They also include both “working-class struggle and bourgeois contempt,” for Cahun did not fit neatly into any categories—political, sexual, or otherwise (Doy 2). As Cahun looked beyond the immediate binaries of her gender and sexuality, so must those seeking to evaluate her work. The ambiguity within an image like The Angel [fig. 5] illustrates this well. Does the pose of Cahun’s angel indicate that she is newly fallen or about to ascend? Does the theatricality of the image suggest that becoming holy is as easy as putting on a costume and therefore possible for everybody, or that holiness is just an act, nobody’s reality? Cahun’s shiftyeyed angel seems more guilty than holy, in any case. The contradiction of a devilish seraph exposes the lie of the evil/good binary, for nobody is purely angelic or purely demonic. The “other” Cahun embodies here is, in reality, the only actual identity—the one that places a person somewhere in between the polar opposites. That angels are commonly conceived
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of as having no biological sex or gender makes this photograph even more complex, adding another layer of meaning. Similarly, Cahun approaches binaries of race in the 1939 photograph Untitled (Hands) [fig. 6]. This image avoids the potential trap of imaging the body to either appeal to or react against the way other surrealists sexualized the female form. Instead, it focuses only on a collection of hands. Impossibly, they are depicted as all four springing from the same person, though one hand is very tiny, while the other three are large, and one hand has dark skin, while the other three have light skin. The owner of these hands contains contradictory traits in one person—large and small, African and European. Just as Cahun has expressed her otherness through her gender and sexuality, and just as she explicitly expressed political otherness through her writings, here she expresses an “other” state first by aligning herself with a racial other, then by invalidating the binary of size. The effect is so bizarre that the resulting image can only be classified as surrealist art, yet it does not rely on surface-y sexual taboo to achieve this. Cahun had, therefore, set herself apart from her surrealist peers in a significant way. Deepwell calls her work “a set of resistances and refusals,” “a critique,” and “not just another spectacle of woman” (50). As groundbreaking and important as the
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work of other surrealists may have been, many of them remained tethered to, and limited by, the social mores they claimed to eschew. Likewise, subscription to these binaries stunted their artistic and literary work. Claude Cahun, on the other hand, transcended uniform identity, shattered false binaries, and made deeply fascinating photographs that, even today, are rich with possibility.
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Images
Figure 1. Cahun, Claude. I Am In Training, Don’t Kiss Me. 1927.
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Figure 2. Cahun, Claude. Self Portrait. 1927.
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Figure 3. Cahun, Claude. Miroir des Illusions. 1929.
Figure 4. Cahun, Claude. Self Portrait in Robe with Masks. 1928.
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Figure 5. Cahun, Claude. The Angel. 1929.
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Figure 6. Cahun, Claude. Untitled (Hands). 1939. Works Cited Colville, Georgiana. “De l’Éros des femmes surréalistes et de Claude Cahun en particulier.” Cahiers Melusine. March 2006. [http://melusine.univ-paris3.fr/astu/Colville.htm] Deepwell, Katy. “Uncanny Resemblances: Restaging Claude Cahun in Mise en Scene.” n.paradoxa. December 1996. [http://www.ktpress.co.uk/pdf/nparadoxaissue1_Katy Deepwell_46-51.pdf] Doy, Gen. “Claude Cahun – A Sensual Politics of Photography.” Meta Magazine.
Undated. [ http://www.meta
magazine.com/index.php?id=13]
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