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Vie des artsvol. 38, no. 150, (Spring 1993): 20–24.CLAUDE CAHUN
French
In the mid-1980s, during the time of gender and
identity debates, Claude Cahun(Lucy Schwob), a
prominent figure of the Parisian avant-garde, was
rediscovered. Her works created photographic pro-
ductions of personal identity, in which the self-
taughtphotographerthematizedgenderandidentity
in playful engagement with masks and role-playing.
For feminist theory, which held self-representation
as a central theme, Claude Cahun became an inter-
esting case study. She seemed to anticipate the ques-
tions raised by prominent feminist author Judith
Butler about the influence of sexuality and develop-
ment on identity and the problem of the social and
sexual normalization of individuals. Accordingly,
she was routinely connected to the postmodern stra-
tegies of self-production promoted by such artists as
Cindy Sherman.
The theme of self-production followed Claude
Cahun through all her artistic works in various
media. She resisted specializing her artistic activity
and worked as a poet, essayist, literary critic, trans-
lator, actor, and political activist. The growing
reception of her works in the 1980s was concen-
trated primarily on her photography, however,
which was in addition to language the most essen-
tial medium of her artistic expression.
The central works of this French artist were self-
representations, made between 1912 and 1953, that
portrayed her in ever-changing roles. Self-enlight-
enment was not her obsession; rather, she was
interested in the production of possible identities,
the ambiguity of gender, and the desire and play
with masquerade and alienation. She assumed the
role of the dandy and dressed like a sailor and as a
weight lifter; there are also many photographs of
her as the Buddha. She displayed herself in a young
girl’s costume, with her blond hair falling in her
face, or as a little girl with knitted sweater and
close-cut hair. In the years 1917 to 1929, she most
often posed facing the camera in front of a tempor-
ary, tightly pulled sheet, and peered with a fixed
gaze back at the viewer that challenged him to
position himself opposite her. The unsettling effect
of her portraits results from the uncertainty of
identity that we try to resolve by relying on biolo-
gical gender distinctions in the photographs. In her
confusing play with these identity constructions,
Cahun demonstrates the impossibility of locating
a fixed, stable definition of self.
In her frontal portraits, she harkens back to the
statuary form of bourgeois studio portraits; she
deploys in the background a tightly pulled cloth
sheet, a citation from nineteenth-century portrait
photography. She worked with mirrors and dou-
bling effects—techniques used by the surrealists
and by the photographer Florence Henri as their
central method of self-representation. A truly radical
artist, she paid no heed to the conventions of female
beauty and the limits of her body. In Frontie`re
humaine(Human frontier), a distorted enlargement
that appeared in the surrealist journalBifur in
1930, her head mutates into a grotesque, verti-
cally stretched, anamorphic image of a skull. In
another doubling montage, she presents herself as
Siamese twins.
In her most important book,Aveux non avenus
(Unavowed Confessions 1930), autobiographical
text fragments, dream sequences, and aphorismsCADIEUX, GENEVIE`VE