Gillian Wearing & Claude Cahun: Under the Mask at National Portrait Gallery

“Under this mask, another mask. I will never finish removing all these faces.”

Claude Cahun

Gillian Wearing confronts us at the exhibition entrance, wearing Cahun’s face but holding her own. Opposite, Cahun gazes back in the original photograph Don’t kiss me, I am in training, circa 1927. A strong man with a vulnerable, feminine twist or a feminine figure seeking and embodying stereotypical masculine values? The artwork’s provocative power by one of the first queer photographers we know of has a subversive power and energy which has not aged in a society in which we are only just starting to talk seriously about gender fluidity and queerness in mainstream media. Wearing’s work aptly reflects Cahun’s desire to blur and disrupt portraiture and appearance by making it staged, constructed and altogether unrealiable in getting the full picture.

This exhibition had the rare appeal of being as much an intimate conversation  between two artists rather than a simple tribute of a living artist to an older body of work. Death and seven decades separate 20th century photographer Claude Cahun from contemporary artist Gillian Wearing, but it feels as though their ideas have interconnected and bounced off each other with sharp clarity and insight across their respective contexts. When Wearing discovered Cahun’s work, it has already seeped into discussions around identity, feminism and gender…and Wearing had already set a course for her practice around her own image, or rather its erasure. The notion of the mask is central to her work – a disturbing and engrossing performance for the camera in which Wearing creates hyperrealistic masks of her family, friends and artistic inspirations and poses in their guise. Her eyes alone betray the identity behind the mask…but is there yet another mask to remove? And yet another?

Gillian Wearing, Me as Cahun Holding a Mask of My Face, © Gillian Wearing, courtesy Maureen Paley/ Interim Art, London

“Shuffle the cards. Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.”

Claude Cahun, Disavowals

Self-portrait from Cahun’s ‘I am in training don’t kiss me’ series, c1927. Photograph: Courtesy Jersey Heritage Trust

Claude Cahun was jointly a writer and a visual artist; in fact, her most important work, Disavowals, is an intimate collage of journal entries and face plates, whose visual and literary associations and poetics. Created in collaboration with her partner Marcel Moore, also an artist, photographer and writer, the book refuses to be intellectual or rational, revelling instead in dreamlike and surreal interconnections. Interestingly Cahun did not identify with the Surrealist label, even though her work is now mostly classified as such through its strange absurdist metamorphosis and collage. In the same way, there has been much debate about Claude Cahun’s “true” identity and how it may be “labelled”…in a contemporary LGBTQ+ spectrum. Is Claude Cahun a butch lesbian, trans, non-binary, genderqueer? In many ways, she is all of those things: she was in a  lesbian relationship with Marcel Moore till her death and definitely identified with the butch and androgynous identity constructed by lesbian artists at the time. However, this does not mean she cannot also be seen through a nonbinary and genderqueer lens. This is the point in which it becomes complex to curate a queer and gender non-conforming artist with contemporary labels, while being well aware that the artist themself perhaps would neither have enjoyed nor identified with them. Where do we draw the line between erasure and recognition of a particular time and context? We will never know if Cahun would identify as nonbinary prefer “they” pronouns, or alternate between “she” or “he”..  Claude Cahun’s (dis)avowal as a queer artists reflects a fluid relation to gender, but this does not neccessarily disavow her ties to lesbianism in any way. Labels are meant to be scratched over, boxes upturned. Perhaps that which makes Claude Cahun the first true queer artist is the way in which she still manages to subvert and escape our expectations and assumptions…even those of LGBTQ gatekeepers. Whichever pronouns she would have chosen to use now, it is fair to say she maybe would have identified beyond the lesbian signifier available at the time and which encapsulated a wide range of butch, gender non-conforming and trans sensitivities. This is why we need to embrace all aspects of her legacy, rather than in-fight or straight-up exclude trans or nonbinary readings of her work and life. She is not herstory’s to keep jealously out of any other queer discourse or influence. Yes, it is complex. But so is identity. We need to embrace this complexity and ambiguity in full – which is why I am glad this quote was displayed within the exhibition, but somewhat frustrated it was not unpacked more in written interpretation.

“I am in her, she is in me; and I will follow her always, never losing sight of her.”

Claude Cahun, L’idée-maîtresse, 1927

There are further problems with the way in which this queerness is negociated within the exhibition, however, the first being that Cahun’s partner, Marcel Moore, deserved an equal seat at the table. Discourse around Cahun and Moore’s work together, including an excellent chapter on the duo in Tirza True Latimer’s Women Together/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris, shows their photographic and litrerary productions as a creative duo.  While the exhibition curators are fine with the display of this gender non-conforming statement, there is a strange lack of mention of the context of the book itself, or of the fact it was, as much as the visual production on display, largely a collaborative work over forty years with Moore. She is mentioned in the role of the lover and partner, but sparingly. In fact, they could both be considered as both life and artistic partners, engaging in a queer and activist practice which was fighting against the largely straight-men dominated art world. The political and radical act of adopting butch/masculine-of-centre appearances and androgynous names was a bite back against not only society at large, but the artworld’s sexist and homophobic bias at the time, in which women were relegated to muses or written out as artists altogether. This also fed hand in hand with antisemitic bias and aggression in artistic circles: as a Jewish queer woman, Cahun escaped erasure and embraced resistance. With the arrival of Nazism on the Isle of Jersey on which they had escaped from Parisian centres of influence, this political resistance became even stronger – as the couple fearlessly slipped propaganda works to soldiers. Even though they were posing under their original “feminine” names and as sisters, their activities were discovered in 1944, leading to imprisonment and a death sentence stopped by their liberation in 1945. Although Moore is mentioned through this record, she is still somewhat sidelined. The problem is that erasing fully or partially Cahun’s queerness and her collaborations with Moore does not make her works less powerful in their visual quality but their intimate meaning and context are devalued and decontextualised. No, you do not neccessarily need to know an artist’s sexuality or gender to appreciate their work – which has been many people’s somewhat exhausted argument every time an institution attempts to curate a body of work which isn’t by straight white men. However in Cahun and Moore’s case this collaborative, gender-fluid work is intentionally queer and feminist in its nature, in its context and in its means of production.

 

“We never get to know ourselves. We are forever changing and contradicting ourselves. We’re always evolving.”

Gillian Wearing

The opposing argument would be that this is framed as a Cahun and Wearing exhibition, not a Cahun and Moore monographic exhibition. That there would a weird imbalance between one gaze and another if there was a second, more covert one to be mentioned alongside Cahun. However, I’d argue that highlighting the queerness inherent to Cahun and Moore’s work would not subsume or sideline Wearing’s work in the slightest – on the contrary, it would amplify its impact and our ability to her her transformations through a different lens, without erasing her original intentions. Her powerful imagery holds its own in vast, momentous photographic portraits which contrast beautifully with the small black and white photographs of Cahun and Moore.

The way in which Cahun and Moore’s work and life intertwine over four decades are immensely relevant to the way in which queerness in the early 20th century becomes not tied to what you do in your relationships and behaviour but to who you are and how you perform this existence. Their work was intimate and autobiographical, a record of imagined personas which both placed another mask upon her and revealed only a facet of who Cahun was in these phorographs.

Gillian Wearing, Portrait as my brother Richard Wearing, © Gillian Wearing, courtesy Maureen Paley/ Interim Art, London

In contrast, Gillian Wearing focuses on “real” people which are deconstructed and made to feel “unreal” in the way in which Wearing meticulously wears their faces and adopts their postures. Wearing’s portrait as her brother is particularly arresting, as her body is transformed through cosmetics, prosthetics and posture. Similarly, her portrait as her father operates a metamorphosis in imagining a time before her own existence, through old photographs. It would be strange to call these “cross-dressing” in any way. While Cahun tries on different identities without ever revealing the face behind the mask, and confronts the heteronormative gaze with butch and andronynous power, Wearing allows herself to become absorbed by them. Somehow even more disturbing are the explorations of images of her younger self, the illusion disrupted by the gaze of the older self within the face of a child. The sight is strange and unsettling. While Cahun reveals fragments of identity through her performance, Wearing does everything she can to remain hide herself, by solely constructing her identity through the visual presence of those which “made” her who she is. Her fight to reach perfection in recreating a portrait perfectly regardless of gender, age or identity is mesmerizing. It both reveals the efforts we take in creating gendered and “solid” representations, and their flimsiness.  I loved Wearing’s sincerity and commitment to her practice, her playfulness and strength, her paradoxical vulnerability in laying herself bare while hiding her face. This vulnerability reaches full circle in the last room. The exhibition led towards Wearing sponatenously revisiting what linked her to Cahun. Here, the face is hidden. There is no representation, no appearance, and in doing so Cahun and Wearing are one and the same.

At Claude Cahun’s grave, 2015 by Gillian Wearing. Photograph: © Gillian Wearing, courtesy Maureen Paley, London

Despite its shortcomings on some of the context of Cahun and Moore’s work, this exhibition acheives the rare feat of allowing the conversation to work both ways, confronting and subverting our ideas of appearance, gender and identity. In many ways, I think that it could have amped up the volume. Cahun and Moore’s work has inspired an entire generation of artist photographers and artists, particularly women, is a staple of queer and feminist art history and discourse and has done so on feminist and confrontational grounds unseparable from their defiant queerness. Her work needs to be shown outside of the “Surrealist” context into one resonating with contemporary concerns.  To acknowledge so does not exclude the presence of other artists outside of the LGBTQ+ spectrum. However, it will introduce a structure which operates around subversion and reframing, provoking and challenging to its very core. Cahun and Moore were well ahead of their time, and fearlessly so. Let’s celebrate this defiance by giving them even more engaging and fascinating contemporary artists such as Wearing to talk with around issues of activism, gender, queerness and feminism.

Further reading:

Tirza True Latimer, Women Together/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris
Tirza True Latimer, Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions, Papers of Surrealism, Issue 8, Spring 2010

 

Loïe Fuller, Lesbian Electric Fairy of the Belle Epoque

1892. Les Folies-Bergères, Paris. The long flowing silk fabric twists and turns into mesmerizing optical illusions through elegant, dynamic movements. The dance is revolutionary, unlike anything seen before on stage. Not only the dance, but the experience in its totality, with dramatic colourful lighting subliming the way in which the dance creates a sense of weightlessness, a shifting kaleidoscope of shapes. This is Loïe Fuller, an American dancer who found her true audience in Paris at a moment during which art was increasingly looking towards a new, fresh modernity in its outlook, seeking to capture and represent the world in different ways to counter photography’s rising appeal in mirroring reality. Loïe was a pioneer in more ways than one: she is seen as one of the founders of modern dance and one of the first performance artists. A pioneer of on-stage effects developed an impressive array of theatrical lighting techniques, with a keen interest and involvement in chemistry and astronomy. Interweaved among these acheivements lies her own identity as an openly lesbian woman in turn-of-the-century America and France. Rather than a footnote, an afterthought or a detail, Loïe’s queerness pervaded her career and her artistic acheivements.

(Papinta the Flame Dancer performing Fuller’s Serpentine/”Butterfly” Dance)

The woman who was going to be nicknamed the “Electric Salome” of the Belle Epoque was born in a modest Illinois town in 1862 and started performing at the age of 12, transitioning from acting to dancing. Her early acting performances involve pantomime and crossdressing; her dancing led to the scandalous discarding of corsets and stockings, performing with sheer materials. Paradoxically this act of revealing was also one of dissimulation: the countless veils and billowing materials she’ll become famous for hide and suggest the body rather than affirming it, transforming and subliming it. Starting as a burlesque skirt dancer, she starts to experiment with the potential of the skirt dance in a more ethereal interpretation, playing with the effects of material in motion and lighting. The “Serpentine Dance” Loïe coined in New York encompassed this ethereal, flowing quality with silk and lighting experiments which Loïe would perfect into an advance technological experience over time. The main “key” was to increase the fabric of the original skirt and to devise a show of changing coloured lights reflected in the silk material, with theatrical, improvised movements.

Frederick Glasier, Portrait of Loïe Fuller, 1902

After unsuccessful stints in London and a circus in Cologue, divorcing from a hasty first marriage and moving from New York to Paris with her mother for a clean break led to a nasty shock. She had failed to have her Serpentine Dance copyrighted in New York after a long trial and her work was already being copied, so much so that she actually had to perform under one of her imitators’ name to even get an audience! The “real deal” was soon recognised, however, and Loïe Fuller’s real début at the Folies-Bergères in 1892 cemented her success and fame.

The creativity and ingenious crafting of her shows around new dances like “The Fire Dance” or “The Lily Dance” transcended boundaries: although technically a cabaret skit, and performed by Loïe herself as well as her imitators in circuses, it soon became obvious that it was far more than a gimmick: it was a total art and an all-encompassing experience. Loïe was always more than a dancer: she was an inventor and was regarded as such. Her light shows were feats of chemistry: she developed lighting below stage for more effective dramatic effects, developed lamps with gel discs to shift colours more easily and devised lantern-like projections. She experimented with phosphorescent materials for her “Radium Dance” and also developed kaleodoscopic optical illusions with special mirrors and set design. Her first performance involved up to 27 technicians to make the magic operate, but she was the master designer of her own show. (see Jody Sperling’s essay in notes for more).

 

Jules Chéret, Poster Advertising ‘Loie Fuller’ at the Folies-Bergere, 1893 (left); PAL (Jean de Paléologue), Loïe Fuller at the Folies Bergère poster

Loïe also mingled in scientific circles, meeting with the astronomer Camille Flammarion and a close friend of Marie Curie. Her encounter with Thomas Edison led to the creation of “Anabella Serpentine Dance”, one of his first hand-coloured film performed by one of Fuller’s imitators, below. (She also produced quite a lot of experimental films herself, including a very lyrical and enigmatic film called “The Lily of Life” in 1920, the only one which was partly preserved.)

The same inventiveness occured for her costume, in which wooden wands were sewn to allow her to control the hundreds of yards of silk fabric she moved around her. The waistline was done away with, making the costume a cloud of motion in which only she head and hands were visible, only adding to the ethereal, spectral illusion.

Benjamin J. Falk, Loïe Fuller in 1901

This visual and multisensorial magic she managed to weave on-stage established her as the muse of the Parisian artistic scene. The soft curves and organic nature of her act lend itself perfectly to the soft lines and inspiration drawn from nature of the Art Nouveau movement; the myriad optical illusions she shaped with her silk robes were an endless source of poetry and romanticism for Symbolic artists. Aware of her own importance within the art of the time, she founds her own “theatre-museum” in 1900 which will allow her to control and market her image through an “official” imitator of her dances and design ornaments. She also advocated for many of her friends’ works; Rodin was amongst them although he never, strangely enough, captured her dances through his own art.

Théodore Louis Auguste Rivière, Lily Dance, Loïe Fuller, 1898

François Raoul-Larche, La Danseuse Loïe Fuller, 1900, bronze (left)
Victor Prouvé, La fille fleur, glass paste

Koloman Moser, The dancer Loïe Fuller, circa 1910, watercolour

Her use of light and effects combined with motion and music grasps at what so many avant-garde modern artists are going to search for: a sense of the ultimate art experience, making music visual and making colour tangible, immortalizing motion and bringing the painting to life through movement. In her autobiography, Loïe muses:

“What is dance? It is motion. What is motion? The expression of a sensation. What is a sensation? The reaction in the human body produced by the impression or an idea perceived by the mind. A sensation is the reverberation that the body receives when an impression strikes the mind.”

Jody Sperling, the leading expert and contemporary interpreter of Fuller’s work, notes the immense resonance that this notion of sensation and motion had within 20th century visual culture: Kandinsky would experiment with the same notions of colour, music and sensation, while, as the Futurist and Cubist movements would introduce the same elements of multiple angles and captured motion as a symbol of modernity and the subjective (Giovanni Lista). Fuller was a true modernist, in her combination of art and science, colour and music.

Toulouse-Lautrec, Study of Loïe Fuller

This modernism weaves itself into her queerness, which she discovered and embraced first in Paris. Loïe’s very introduction to the city, fleeing an unhappy marriage which seems to have been no more than a failed attempt at “fitting in”, started with a first lesbian relation with the painter Louise Abbéma, who was also, allegedly, Sarah Bernhardt’s former lover. She introduced her to a buzzing sapphic socialite scene, notably the circle of friends of Nathalie Barney, American lesbian poet extraordinaire, who assembled around her a clique of queer women artists in Paris. (Allegedly, her performances ended with a shower of violets on stage – and imagining a posse of queer influencial socialites pelting the stage with the flower symbol for lesbian and bisexual women is wonderful).

Anon, Loïe Fuller (Musée d’Orsay, Paris)

Further down her career she started a relationship with  Gabrielle “Gab” Bloch, a Jewish baker who exclusively wore dapper suits. (be still, my heart). After moving in together in 1905 they remained together for 23 years, up until Loïe’s death. Fuller was at the heart of a Parisian and wider movement in which queer women were finding their voice and redefining their identity as the beating heart of modernity and feminism. This modernity and this redefinition of identity seems to be at the heart of Fuller’s own work, as well as her close sense of womanhood and community, creating an all-women’s company and school to teach her dancing (but never her technical tricks) as her eyesight began to fail her. As feminist art historian Caroline Gonnard notes on this choice:

“…she only works with women…those are choices, it’s a whole commitment at the time. A lesbian way of life is more than just sleeping with a woman. In a period in which men are everywhere, she recentres the conversation. While all men until then have been proclaiming about themselves, a woman can suddenly decide who is important.” (source, translated from French).

Samuel Josha Beckett, Loïe Fuller, c. 1898 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris)

There are many diverging opinions on the way in which Loïe’s queerness emerges in her dancing. One viewpoint would be that dissimulating and effacing the body from a traditional “male gaze” is what makes it queer in its nature, in its refusal to be pinned down or owned. For Tirza True Latimer for instance, a major scholar and art historian specialised in queer studies:

“audiences were never sure, in all the lights and swirls of fabric, exactly what her body was doing, where it was, or even exactly how many bodies were on stage.”

Records of Loïe describe her as ungainly, clumsy and unfashionably dressed off-stage, more clownish and childish than vampy or elegant. On-stage her act works because it veils her, literally and figuratively, and her veils “transform” her, their fluidily malleable into a variety of shapes, from flower to butterfly to snake, perhaps in an attempt to evade form, and evade gender itself, as the historian Julie Townsend explored as well.

Experimenting with shapes, forms, playing with dual identities and personas, in a hide-and-seek, illusionist game, it’s hard to see Loïe’s act as anything but queer in its very nature, performing her identity in a dual game of revelation and dissimulation. Being openly queer yet hiding in plain sight on stage, she had perfect control over the visual effects surrounding her performance while never crafting an actual on-stage persona, and marketed her own image skillfully while never being the object of fantasy or objectification. The point is not so much that her work was chaste and ethereal because of her lesbianism, but rather that she freed herself from a vast amount of normative constraints to develop her performances.

Loïe died a famous and successful woman in 1928 and her girlfriend continued her legacy by managing her ballet company; history, however, was not so kind in preserving her immense legacy, and her contributions to modern dance were eclipsed by Isadora Duncan. Art historians such as Giovanni Lista, interested by the intersection between performing arts and the reprsentation of motion in modern art, started writing about her since 1994. She’s now well-established in studies around late 19th/early 20th century art and culture and I’ve seen her mentioned in many art exhibitions around the year 1900. She’s trickled into the mainstream, fascinating viewers once again with what we have left of photographs and videos of her dances (even though they are performed by other dancers). As for mainstream media representation…well…You might be wondering why I have not recommended you watch the recent 2016 biopic on Fuller, “The Dancer”. Here’s why:

1. “plot”: It involves Isadora Duncan luring Loïe Fuller into some kind of promise lesbian relationship…as part of their rivalry. After some sizzling tension, Isadora kisses her, asks her to undress…then abandons her and mocks her, thus humiliating her completely. This titillating fictionalization is therefore a perfect 2-in-1: hot lesbian action ended with shameful, moralizing tragedy! Isn’t representation great?
2. #alternative facts: But what about Fuller’s positive, real-life lesbian relationship? That’s reduced to subtext (read as: lingering gazes from Gab with no explicit mention or any kind of reciprocity), while an entirely fictional boyfriend, “Louis” was invented for Loïe. Because you know, straight men in films are an endangered species.
3. the director Stephanie di Gusto defending these decisions in a Q+A session post-screening in a Lille cinema last year by arguing that she did not want to make a “Blue is the Warmest Colour film”. To add fuel to the fire, Soko then defended this viewpoint by agreeing that “the idea was not to make yet another lesbian film.” (translated from French, source )

Gal pals! They totally hold hands like really close friends! But let’s leave the kissing for our humiliating grand finale with the sexier secondary lead. It’s not like we have an actual healthy lesbian couple under our very noses. (You’ll also notice they got rid of Gab’s dapper suit-wearing. I ask for so little, why is it taken from me.)

A missed opportunity, treated in a manner that’s nothing short of petty. The upside is that it’s not that easy to erase a queerness which Fuller was so blatant about and which has made it into serious studies of her life and work. The film was not warmly received for its inaccuracies, nor for its reduction of Fuller to a tormented artistic soul rather than a successful inventor and buisnesswoman.

There is a lot to unpack concerning the willful erasure and warping of queer identities and relations on-screen and in media in general. The main issue appears to be the impression that mentioning your historical protagonist was queer will suddenly overpower the rest of their creative content and acheivements. To the question “why should we have to know a person was queer to appreciate their acheivements?” I’d answer “why do we have to erase who they were to even make these acheivements palatable to an audience in the first place?” Until that last question is not met with illogical, embarassed or exasperated noises, I’ll assume compiling the legacies of queer women artists, performers, collectors and dealers makes perfect sense. Loïe was a master of illusion, disguise and revelation but she never cast a veil upon who she was or who she loved. Let’s continue to honour her creativity, her queerness…and that of many other women throughout history.

Sources:

Rhonda K. Garelick , Electric Salome: Loie Fuller’s Performance of Modernism. 
Tirza True Latimer, ‘Loïe Fuller: Butch Femme Fatale’ (1999)
Julie Townsend, ‘Alchemic Visions and Technological Advances: Sexual Morphology in Loïe Fuller’s Dance’, Jane C. Desmond, ed., Dancing Desires: Choregraphing Sexualities On and Off the Stage (2001)
Jody Sperling, Loïe Fuller (1862-1928) – check out her website danceheritage.org  for historical documentation and contemporary interpretations of Loïe Fuller’s dances
Ann Cooper Albright, Traces of Light. Absence and Presence in the Work of Loïe Fuller, Wesleyan University Press Middletown, Connecticut, 2007.
Gabriella Daris, Cannes Review: Stéphanie di Gusto’s “The Dancer”, BlouinArtinfo.com
Aude Fonvieille, Chronicle of casual lesbophobia, Mediapart (in French)
Marc Boucher & Leonardo/Olats, Loïe Fuller timeline, 2002 (in French)