Week 4, Manifestos, Poems, Performances: Claude Cahun and Dada Bending

Studies for a Keepsake (four heads under globes), 1925
imaged acquired at: http://www.lenatenaglia.com/art1thesis.html

Claude Cahun, 

"Under this mask, 
another mask. 

I will never finish 

removing all these faces." 

http://www.igpoty.com

Like an unfurling fern, Claude Cahun's depicted identity spirals outwards yet never quite loses what has come before, and it seems to encompass the many promises of identity.  Her images gesture for a bridging between the subject-object, the viewer and the viewed, for the spectator is likewise taken in and forced to confront sensuality intersecting with body politics.  A cochlear imagery seems apposite given that I have unknowingly run across one of Cahun's many masks before, specifically her "Autoportrait."  During the laborious hours of thesis research a few years ago, I came to know the feminist philosophies of Diana Tietjens Meyers, and interestingly enough, the cover design for her book, Gender in the Mirror: Cultural Imagery & Women's Agency, engaged my interest because of a black and white image that stared back at me, demanding to be confronted; it was Cahun's "Autoportrait."  In it Cahun reclaims the gaze by looking directly into the lens, holding taut the collar of a checkered jacket, her boyish haircut smooth, and her lips partially pursed.  It is a bold image of equanimity, and yet another side of her is captured in a mirror.  This double looks away, the pose speaking of the duality of the self and the fracturing of identities.  

"Autoportrait," 1929
http://www.artforbreakfast.com/galerie-claude-cahun,188.php

At that time I did not know much of Claude Cahun--born Lucy Schwob in 1894--indeed, I had never heard of her.  It is by a fortuitous stroke of events, a course in Surrealism and Dada, that has provided another reflecting encounter.  This time I was able to put a name, a socially constructed identity to the striking image, an image I wanted to know more about, and given the background on Cahun--albeit it has thus far been a cursory glance at her work--it seems her image is a slippery one that cannot be contained; instead, it is perpetually reconfigured and in turn perpetually challenges any notion of gender identity. 

Cahun's quote above, from Studies for a Keepsake, struck me not only because of its lovely figurative language detailing the peeling away of faces ad infinitum, but also because it zoomed in on a particular body part: the face.  So much of what I have come across regarding issues of gender focuses on the body as a whole, and while much of Cahun's photographic art does exhibit the body, the examples of her visual art and writing used here seem to use the face as a metonymy.  In Cahun's Disavowals (coined as an anti-memoir), she "vocalizes her desire to create art that will 'shorten the leash between my mirror and my body'" (Bucknell).  The curiosity of such sentiment lies in Cahun's own emphasis on the body.  What draws me to the quaternion of heads displayed under glass in Studies for a Keepsake and the dual profile in "Autoportrait" is the emphasis on the face.  Such accentuation proves puzzling because the head as a focal point emphasizes disassociation with the body. The targeting of the head then may suggest the psychological tethering of gender. This emphasis on the face led me to another moment where Cahun pans in on facial details, particularly those of a man.  In chapter VII of Disavowals Cahun reflects on a dream vision of her father:

          Curiosity keeps me awake in front of a man face: skin pockmarked, battered,   
          granulated--but white, but livid; the skull flat, the forehead covered in hemp; 
          nose, mouth tumescent...the eyes vacant.   

The methodical nature of her study here and how she centers in on the finer details of the face while the subjected face is devoid of emotion suggests again of a mind-body disconnect, and yet the face has the ability to stand in for the body, a site and space of defining.  This time, though, Cahun does the defining.   

Que me veux tu? (1929)
http://www.metmuseum.org/en/exhibitions/objects?exhibitionId=%7B36D81705-241D-4934-AB02-FD7C8DBBB3E5%7D&rpp=10&pg=17

A synoptic video on Claude Cahun from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art:
Amelia Jones on Surrealism, gender, and Claude Cahun


Works Cited
Bucknell, Alice.  "Entre who?  French artist probes identity."  The Chicago Maroon. 
     6 March 2012.  Web.  16 February 2013.  
     http://chicagomaroon.com/2012/03/06/entre-   who-french-artist-probes-identity/