Inktober Day 2: Claude Cahun

I'm using "zie/hirself/hir" instead of "she/herself/her" because Claude Cahun was genderqueer, though how exactly to interpret that in modern times is an ongoing debate.* I don't like the more popular "they/them" pronouns, and while it's not remotely the hill I'm willing to die on this is my blog so I'm using the one I prefer.

When Claude Cahun met hir partner Marcel Moore it was "like a bolt of lightning." They were just 15 and 17 but they'd be together for life. Both born female, they both used assumed names; Marcel is male and Claude is neutral in French. The two would collaborate in writing, illustration, photography and photocollage; they risked their lives together fighting Nazis, they were imprisoned together, attempted suicide together, and were saved together at the last second by allied victory. 

"The autonomy of the ring finger.
For me, a miracle, terror or charm, surprise, is anything I cannot obtain from my body
or soul. For the Christ, Christ is completely normal. He didn’t even get any joy from walking
on water."  --Claude Cahun, from Disavowals.

"Cahun" is an assumed name as well, and an interesting one. Claude's father and other relatives were already well known in France for their writing and for their family publishing business, all under the last name "Schwob." Claude didn't want to attach hirself to hir father's fame, but nor did zie want to erase zir Jewish identity. In the 1910s when antisematism was steeply on the rise and many Jews were adopting non-Jewish-sounding last names to get by, Claude made a point to choose "Cahun," which is the French version of "Cohen." Openly rebelling against antisematism with Marcel (also Jewish) was a central theme of Cahun's life and writing.

"The best way to keep your god near you: crucify him. The pagans who used to collect gods
pinned Jesus to the cross like a rare butterfly."  --Claude Cahun, from Disavowals.

After attending the Sorbonne in Paris, Cahun and Moore began holding their own salons, amassing a circle of colleagues who included surrealist poets, the legendary lesbian literary duo behind Shakespeare & Co. bookstore, and the influential artist and writer André Breton. Nearly all of their work was collaborative in some way with others from these circles, from Moore's illustrations for avant-garde poets to Cahun's published reviews of other writers. Cahun's well-known face was sculpted in bronze by Chana Orloff (the subject of an upcoming Inktober profile). They were heavily involved in radical theater, which is evident in their costumed photographs, while Moore's graphic design work and fashion design business expanded their circles still. Their art was extremely community and action-oriented, and for this reason it's difficult to gauge their influence or extract them from the world around them.

"I dedicate this puerile prose to you [Marcel], so that the entire book will belong to you and in this way your designs may redeem my text in our eyes." --Claude Cahun

Among the solo work Cahun created in the 20s and 30s was a series of re-imagined modern monologues from famous women of mythology, the Bible and fairy tales, entitled Heroines, 1925. Zie also exhibited a series of objects and assemblages at a surrealist show. A request for a confessional-style (i.e. autobiographical) book from Adrienne Monnier (of Shakespeare & Co.) resulted in Cahun's "anti-confessional," a surrealist collection of poetry titled Aveux non avenus, 1930. Long considered "untranslatable," Susan de Muth published an English version in 2007 under the title Disavowals, available to read online. A central theme is the unstable struggle before God to face oneself honestly, without any sort of socially constructed pretense or mask. With its blazing honesty and thoroughly confusing subconscious-driven style, it can be a harsh and abstruse read peppered with gutter humor and pathos. 

“Make myself another vocabulary, brighten the silver of the mirror, blink an eye, swindle myself by means of a fluke muscle; cheat with my skeleton, correct my mistakes, divide myself in order to conquer, multiply myself in order to assert myself; briefly, to play with ourselves can change nothing.” --Claude Cahun, Disavowals.

Moore and Cahun's photography places them more in the context of Dadaist photocollage artists like Hannah Höch and Raul Haussmann, as well as surrealist photographers like Man Ray and Dora Maar. Some costumed and some nakedly confrontational, all looking homemade, raw and somewhat guerrilla-style, they were collaborations where Cahun was usually photographed but sometimes they took turns posing in the same tableau. Today it's what Cahun is most famous for, but oddly I don't have much to say about the photographs (though I like them a lot). Just look: 

Studies for a Keepsake c. 1925–6© Claude Cahun, (image courtesy of Jersey Heritage, via)

Part of the Keepsake series where Cahun is wearing a beaded Jewish star. (Image via)

Self-Portrait by Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1928. Marcel Moore also took a turn in front of the mirror in a similar photograph.

In costume as an angel, image by Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore.

Image of Claude Cahun with a cat.

Autoportrait by Claude Cahun, 1928. (image via)

Autoportrait by Claude Cahun, 1929. (image via)

I Am In Training, Don't Kiss Me, (title taken from the words on the chest) by Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. (image via)

Self-Portrait by Claude Cahun, 1928. (image via)

Combat de pierres by Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1931 (image via)

Que me veux tu? (What do you want from me?) by Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1929. (image via)

Self Portrait, by Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, 1920. (image via)

"E – If you see me hesitating at the edge of pleasure, come and help me: remind me that I love
you.
P – Love puts the least naive man in such a state of mind that he asks his hangman for help.
E – Handsome? Me? – Yes: as if to say a handsome syphilis."

--Claude Cahun, from Disavowals. E and P are throwaway hypothetical characters whose purpose is unclear to me.

Here are some of the photocollages that Marcel Moore made from their photos to illustrate Cahun's books:

Photocollage by Marcel Moore to illustrate Claude Cahun's book. (image via)

Photocollage by Marcel Moore to illustrate Claude Cahun's book. (image via)

“Permit me to warn reckless young women: seeing the trap doesn’t prevent you from getting caught in it and that doubles the pleasure." --Claude Cahun

As Hitler gained power in Germany Cahun and Moore's art turned increasingly political, as did their collaborative social circles. Cahun joined and helped to found a series of radical activist groups of artists and writers who opposed fascism and Stalinism. When Germany invaded France Cahun and Moore were so politically active that they were forced to flee to remote Jersey (a small island in Normandy, France, that is under British government). 

Nearly a decade after Cahun and Moore initially met, their parents married, suddenly making them technically stepsisters. The odd sisterly title actually ended up helping them to quietly cohabitate without drawing too much attention once they relocated. They reverted to their inconspicuous birth names as well (Cahun was Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob and Marcel was Suzanne Alberte Malherbe). Tucked away in Jersey, incognito, the raucaus avant-garde circles of Paris slowly began to forget about them.

“Under this mask, another mask. I will never be finished removing all these faces.” --Claude Cahun

Germany invaded Jersey in 1940 and Cahun and Moore went on the attack. Because the Nazis were using Jersey as a training ground, the island filled with vulnerable new recruits. The couple focused their efforts on sowing discord among them, sneakily bombarding recruits with allied information to try to flip their loyalties. They translated BBC radio broadcasts from English to German (because German soldiers would otherwise be exposed only to Nazi propaganda radio and be missing crucial information) and slipped these fliers discreetly into coat pockets, cigarette packs and magazines, under doors and tucked onto windshields. They stole German propaganda posters, cut them up and reassembled them into anti-Nazi propaganda, then discreetly distributed these as well. They wrote anti-Nazi propaganda fliers, both direct and in poetry. Since Marcel spoke fluent German they wrote letters pretending to be older disgruntled German soldiers, complaining and urging the new recruits not to join.

Obviously each instance of leafletting was outrageously dangerous. Yet Cahun and Moore were so prolific that Nazis actually believed Jersey was home to a massive secret cell of the Résistance. They were eventually found out and sentenced to death in 1944. They spent a year in a Nazi jail, during which they attempted together to kill themselves to control their own deaths, but were thwarted. They were saved just under the wire when the Allies won WWII and Jersey was liberated in 1945. 

A proposal of marriage:

I will take the place of variously girthed snakes. My torso will replace the ones that fill
your arms in an embrace. My thighs will obey you, well cast reptiles; [...]
Don’t concern yourself with formalities: I’ll take care of those. Heaven is short of
wings; and God no longer requires the consent of the mother land to facilitate the union of
bodies and souls.  --Claude Cahun, from Disavowals.

A look back at their anti-Nazi resistance through an artistic lens may seem frivolous, given that the main goal was of course to defeat the Nazis. But consider that it is one of the few instances when surrealism was actually weaponized. And consider, again, Moore and Cahun's fading star and rising obscurity among the art world. Thus their audience became their enemies. They may have been forgotten in Paris but they were notorious to the Nazis, looming larger than life. The pair's poetry, alter egos, graphic design and photocollage was all for Nazi eyes. What had begun in Paris as a creative rebellion for an audience of friends had reached its conclusion as a pure attack delivered straight to the enemy in a battle to the death. Of course, even their earlier years in Paris were not without physical risk: they were openly queer, female-bodied, Jewish nonconformists in a hostile society. I suspect that Moore and Cahun had determined to risk death for their ideals before the Nazies were ever in Jersey.

"We’re only allies, only comrades through opposition –
against others.
As soon as you isolate it, the species (in the concrete kingdom or the abstract
kingdom), generalisation, disintegrates; the Homeland breaks up into parishes; Paris into
arrondissements (russian doll); alone at last, the couple are flung apart, I separate from you,
the Aryan male himself renounces his solidarity with the Aryan female.
There are as many ways of being as there are stars; I wouldn’t know what more to
say…"  --Claude Cahun, from Disavowals. 

Physically, Cahun never recovered from hir treatment in the Nazi jail. The couple stayed in Jersey as hir health deteriorated and continued creating art and photography until Cahun died in 1954. 

Image of Claude Cahun holding grapes, wearing a Rococo/Edwardian wig, and lying on a leopard skin rug. (image via)

Cahun in 1945, liberated from Nazi jail and clutching a Nazi pin between hir teeth. (image via)

Le Chemin de chats. This was taken shortly before Cahun's death. Twenty years prior zie'd written to a surrealist poet friend about a dream zie'd had in which a cat led hir blindfolded; the cat represented impending death. (image via)

How unexpected, then, that Cahun's work was suddenly rediscovered in the 1980s by an art historian named François Leperlier while researching for his book on Surrealism. When Cahun had died hir estate and work was passed on to Marcel. But when Marcel killed hirself 18 years later in the 1972 their work was auctioned off (under Cahun's name). Leperlier did extraordinary work to reassemble the legacy, popularize hir in the art world and write Cahun's biography in the early 90s. The exploratory photographs of a searching identity found a rapt audience in an art world where queer theory was exploding. 

Understandably, the photographic collaborations were misinterpreted at the time as Cahun's solo self portraiture project, and as such they were compared to the work of artists like Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin and Gillian Wearing. Interestingly enough Cahun's 1920s contemporaries likely considered hir work as closer to Marcel Duchamp's dadaist antics, in that Cahun's gender-bending personas and writing echo Duchamp's female persona of Rrose Selavy which he used as a nom de plume and the cheeky self portrait photographs he took as "Rrose."  Most recently people in the music world like David Bowie and Air also dedicated efforts to organizing exhibits of Cahun's work. What an odd time-bending legacy.

Here is the portrait I drew of Claude Cahun based on hir work. I kept it relatively simple, stealing a bit of the "I Am In Training Do Not Kiss Me" makeup but keeping Cahun's own shorn hair. I stole the particular pose from part of the series of photos of Cahun dressed as an angel. 

* I spent freaking ALL NIGHT trying to figure out what to do here with pronouns, researching and reading primary sources. A genuinely good case could be made for either female-gendering Cahun or non-binary-gendering Cahun. I genuinely can't decide, and in cases where the gender is unknown it's appropriate to go with they or zie. By using these pronouns I'm not trying to declare that Cahun WASN'T a woman or female; I simply don't know. So here's a quick rundown of the case for each pronoun:

The case for nonbinary, or genderqueer, third gender, trans, or agender:

1. Most of Cahun's photography pointedly involves gender identity, where it flows between appearing conventionally masculine - feminine - neither - both.  

2. The chosen name Claude is gender-neutral in French.

3. In 1929 Cahun translated Victorian psychologist Havelock Ellis' theories on the third gender, part of his progressive and open-minded studies of sexuality; the issue was clearly important to Cahun.

4. Cahun constantly wrote about masks and feeling ill at ease with hir body.

5. In zir autobiography Cahun wrote, “Shuffle the cards. Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.”

The case for feminine/her pronouns:

1. I read that Cahun frequently referred to hirself as "she/her" in letters, especially through the 1920s. I didn't do further research to find those letters to confirm; that's a helluva lot of research. 

2. Most academic writing refers to Cahun as she/her. These folks actually have pored through all the letters, writing and primary sources and arrived at that conclusion. I assume they mostly have good reasons. I tried to find out more about that, but was unable to. 

3. It's a struggle to know what Cahun would've preferred, if offered modern concepts and language surrounding gender. Given that it's all guesswork, many writers are uncomfortable choosing Cahun's pronouns and instead default to the pronouns of Cahun's time that zie was at least familiar with. 

4. That excerpt from the autobiography I just quoted above and repeated so often out of context? It's not so much an autobiography as a self-described "anti-realist surrealist anti-confessional," in which Cahun explicitly writes that nothing in it should be taken realistically, factually or at face value. It's written as a collection of difficult-to-decipher poetry fragments. Though I'm admittedly not a poetry person, I took a stab at reading it and found it to be beyond convoluted and interminably lengthy given the cerebral style-- though if you bite off little chunks here and there it's actually very interesting, painfully honest and at times lyrical and funny. Most of it is about God and exploring truth through conversations and conversational "exercises" among various characters who may or may not represent fragments of Cahun. "Cards" frequently are used as an extended metaphor of playing a strategic game with/against God. "Female" and "male" thoughts are explored a bit prior as allegorical characters that interact with each other in very unclear ways. The quote may or not be part of an extended metaphor-- again, I cannot emphasize enough just how unclear Cahun's book is. But from my tenuous grasp on the passage, the choice between masculine/feminine appears to be part of an appeal for absolution from God, and choosing in which gender to present hirself to God will retroactively affect that decision; in the next line Cahun declares that choosing the neuter gender will make hir "a good little worker bee." Though the quote seems, on the surface, to be a straightforward reason to gender Cahun as "zie/they," I find it unlikely that Cahun would've written an entire book that is this abstruse-- only to stop briefly in the middle and deliver clear, realistic instructions about gendering hir that are meant to be taken literally in the real world.

5. Besides that autobiographical excerpt there's apparently not much that Cahun wrote that reveals an explicit pronoun preference. I've read this assertion several times from "big-name" art sites that have an actual professional staff, but I haven't followed up to confirm it myself.

From this debate the question naturally arises: is it even appropriate to include a nonbinary person in this series of women artists? Yeah, I say it is. This series isn't about celebrating vaginas or goddess-essences or inherent femininity. It's about bringing attention to artists who were overlooked by the fame-machine because the world saw them as women, and it's about showing that despite the overwhelming obstacles placed before certain artists because the world saw them as women, an overwhelming amount of them became successful anyway. I want to combat the notion that only men worked outside the home and that only men were artists except the Big Three (Frida, Georgia, Artemisia). I also want to combat the practice of discussing women artist's work as out of context with their contemporaries, as not influencing those around them and unconnected to society. I'd like to avoid forcing these artists into "hero/role-model" jobs that they never asked for and to avoid forcing the common narrative that all of their work is about being a woman and that you can visually discern their indelible womanness in their very brushstrokes. 

Cahun fits right into this series on all those criteria. The only alternative would be to include only artists who identified as women in a series of women artists, but wow does that present a lot of problems. First, the vast majority of pre-20th century women had no choice about how they identified or presented, so you just have to assume that if a woman looked... conventionally female from the outside (wearing female clothes, married to a man, not "acting masculine") then she identified as female. That's a bad assumption. Then there are the unconventional women. They didn't have the language or even the concepts we have today and they largely couldn't be open about it, so what we have to go on is murky. 

What does it mean that a Victorian woman wore pants and lived with another woman? Is she a cis lesbian? Trans? Cis, straight, and just trying to be comfortable among friends? A straight cis woman who objected to marriage and gender oppression? There are an extremely high number of these hard-to-call cases since nonconformists and queer people seem always to have been drawn to the arts. Then consider that being an artist itself WAS unconventionally feminine behavior which frequently sparked rumors. To complicate matters more, a Victorian artist trying to express butch lesbian identity with no social concepts to grab onto could easily have reached for the masculine expressions that we would today interpret as trans, and vice versa (though I don't think this is the case with Cahun). The only way to play it safe and to only include self-identified women, would be to exclude all of the possibly queer people. Even then you're just assuming that all the non-queer-presenting women were on board. 

Including every artist pre-mid-20th century who wasn't a man, under "women artists" is a very flawed solution. It just beats the alternative. Maybe someone will eventually come up with something better. 

This post is part of a series of posts from Inktober 2020 about women artists of the 17-early 1900s who each had some significant connection to Paris, France. Each post focuses on the art-historical context of the artist among her colleagues and ends with a portrait I did in ink of the artist in their style (roughly). Other posts in the series: 

 

Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun

Cecilia Beaux

Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller

Bessie MacNicol

Sonia Delaunay

Rosa Bonheur

 

Untitled by Ciana Pullen

Untitled, by Ciana Pullen, 2013. Acrylic on paper.

This is from a series where I identified subtle visual ways in which the media portrays people by race and gender (limited to Black and White, male and female), and then "swapped" them for the race and gender of the imaginary subject. For instance, common poses, lighting, background colors, angles, and mood.

Artist Is Shocked To Discover Postmodern Theory May Be Relevant To Real Life

I recommend Joshua Alston's thoughtful piece in The Feminist Wire, "Confessions Of A Black Morrissey Fan." I had some immediate thoughts about it but ultimately decided to leave Alston's comment section free of abstruse reflections from this particular long-winded White person. So I'm writing them here instead.

Alston brings up that classic predicament of enjoying art by an artist who personally is odious in some way, whether they violate one's core principles or they are bad, bad people. (I've written about this issue before). Though Alston doesn't mention it many such articles weigh the guilt of giving money and support to the odious artist through CD purchases and the like with the enjoyment the listener or viewer gets from the art. Many also point out that there are many other, better artists out there to whom one could devote time and money, people who could use the money and publicity. So there are typically three considerations for consuming art by odious artists:

1. The effect on the artist,
2. The effect on the viewer, and
3. The effect on (and existence of) the cultural climate in which the art exists and is consumed (i.e. the other artists, what the act of consumption means to the outside world, and even the cultural context in which one may try to judge how relevant the particular act of odiousness is).

For Alston, though, there is the added predicament of not only disapproving of the artist, but also being the object of the artist's aggression because he belongs to a class of people who are made out to be "The Other" by the artist's actions (Morrissey is "probably" racist according to Alston's analysis*, and Alston is a fan who is Black).

When I (a woman) consider the experience of consuming art made by egregious misogynists, of being The Other while involving myself with the artwork, it is different than, say, reflecting on Caravaggio's murderous personal life and thinking, "What an asshole. But this painting is nice." Because Caravaggio's crimes had nothing to do with me it is easy to assume the role of Any Given Viewer of his paintings. He intended his paintings to be seen by viewers, and I'm a viewer.

But when the odiousness is misogyny I am not Any Given Viewer. I am The Other and the object of alienation. And yet there I am, seeing and judging the artist's work as if I belonged in their very closest circle. It is akin to being accidentally invited inside someone's home when one knows one is not ordinarily welcome. As a viewer that can put one in a position of unexpected power, or it could feel eerie or gross. Even when the viewer puts aside their personal involvement and adopts a clinical interest it is impossible to have that no-questions-asked feeling of invitation into the direct experience of the art.

To put it another way, I said "[Caravaggio] intended his paintings to be seen by viewers, and I'm a viewer." However when an artist's othering mindset is shared by their culture, and often by the viewer's culture as well, they probably think of a generic "viewer" as automatically not inclusive of that Other. It's a type of attitude which many people are unaware of having in which they categorically speak of "people" and the Other as two separate groups. For instance, "All these immigrants are making it really hard for people to find jobs," ("people" isn't inclusive if "immigrant") or "What nobody understands is that when women say one thing they really mean another," ("nobody" means "no man").

So when the misogynist artist makes art for a "viewer," they don't mean me, and why would they?

It's also an attitude that precipitates the tendency of TV producers to cater to a generic "audience" of imaginary middle class white men, although that is beginning to change. Yet Others in the audience experience this alienation (often as skepticism) at the same time that they get swept along in the emotions and narratives that the artists intend to create, which ultimately distances the Other from the direct experience of getting swept up. The Other instead experiences "getting swept up" as relative to his or her feelings of alienation, and relative to his or her relationship to the artists within society.

A rare flipping of the "audience is automatically male" script: famous "sweater girl" Jane Russell enjoys the other side of the sexually objectifying gaze in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The scene is unusual in that, I assume, it was written for the benefit of women in the audience at the expense of male audience discomfort. [Image: A sporty white woman holding a tennis racket frolics through an array of muscled white men wearing tiny skin-colored swimsuits and sticking their butts up at her. In the background more Adonises in tiny swimsuits strike showy poses while "working out" on gym equipment.]

***

Which brings me, as always, to postmodern theory.

Artistic Process and Scotch Tape: An Epic

I.

Though my guilt-fear, rendered humdrum through bad habits,
dictates this day I'll purge from My Big Binge,
I am on strike for a barrier that prohibits
time from slipping through my stumpy digits.
The moral stand-off lapsed in early hours
per a dentist and hygienist with a syringe,
who, as scheduled, drilled and filled my chompers
and in doing freed my overburdened arbiters.

Still rolling on catharsis-high, though illusory
yet lucid too and fighting nagging voices
and numbed so thick my jaw denied its misery
I floated down the road for retail therapy
at a thrift store where I like to search
pragmatically among the picked-through pieces.
I tongued my fillings, my jaw began to pinch
so I headed home for lunch.

The soreness and sick feeling of responsibility
both came flooding back at the same time.
I packed a beer and am headed over shortly
to my studio where if I'm good I'll possibly
do some shit and maybe even cross from my list
the real shit from my clients who I treated like slime
who have waited much too long and now are pissed;
in my churning mental mill, they are the grist.

II.

It's night now and I've left and come back
from my friend's house where I rent his spare bedroom
to fill with a big easel, empty frames, canvases, a storage rack
and chopped up women's magazines in a slippery stack,
a china vase sprouting rolled-up art-school projects
still unfinished, manilla folders in the corner of the room
packed with collage material: a ziplock baggie that protects
several thousand one-inch cut-out squares of pictures of skin; each connects
via a wrinkle, they're scotch taped into abstract collage components
that I someday plan to link together and meld to vinyl backing.
But that'll take a while so they're mostly still in quadrants
on top of four other folders filled with remnants
of my research, accomplished esoteric acumen
from another project sitting halfway in the making
labeled, "Black women," "black men," "white women, and "white men,"
for a painting series about media tropes that are usually hidden.

Tonight I re-shot some photos of a tiny cut-out lady
standing duck-faced over a nest of bridal tulle
from which a strand of pearls spilled, held steady
with hidden cardboard anchored with a penny.
She stands on the keyboard of my Macbook, which I've transformed
with a picture of a hardwood floor from Elle
in front of the screen, which shows Holbein's Henry VIII, adorned 
with a "curtain," a scarf that's brightly zigzag patterned.
Henry cuts a commanding figure: at his feet a pile of gold
made from candy-bar wrappers; at his groin, through illusion,
the woman's head. The photo is less pedantic, less ribald
that what I've described; the starkness is anulled
by the sensual chiaroscuro effect of the warm side lighting,
the cutesy diorama offset by academic allusion
and a slickness that allows for different materials mixing
without a "crafty" look-- at least that's what I'm hoping.

These folks belong to an ever-growing series
of photos that explore the messages sent
in media and ads about gender: cool clothes, hot bodies,
why they're desirable, the interwoven histories
of sexual domination, capitalism, colonialism,
and how those power struggles inform our present
how the old recognizable symbols of misogyny, racism
have shifted shape, surviving to postmodernism.

I wasn't sure at first what I could possibly say
about a society in which one's benefits obscure struggle
of others, concerns which my blinders keep at bay,
something I'll never fully un-learn, but may
through empathy comprehend as I am able
based on my own experiences of trying to label
what I'm not supposed to, with no words to assemble
because others claim the rights to language. So I settle
on removing what They say from any context that justifies
degradation, objectification, toxic role play drivel
such as beauty mags, pop videos, what-to-buy's,
that cut insidious paths into our personal lives.

III.

I'm hoping the juxtaposition of Henry and Tiny Lady
and the various materials will create new contexts for each other:
the king with gold, the woman with the reproductive situation, maybe
horrified or chickenheaded, the curtain hinting at a British colony
all together in an uneasy coexistence. The secondary associations,
of Henry's wives, slavery, wealth, sexual shame, controlling one another,
are meant to be stirred up and left to stew. But in previous iterations
I used gray pearls, so I'm re-shooting with white for clearer implications.

But the freshwater necklace isn't large enough to cover the cardboard
that holds her upright, so I made the impromptu pink nest
which I rather like. But she keeps tipping forward
which turns her face into a reflection on Henry's scabbard.
I like the light in front so the gold glitters,
but that casts a coldish glare on all the rest
and when I move it to the side the shadow renders
the foil dull but it's her face that matters.

More Scotch tape. Low light f-stop, trouble focusing, she's indiscernible;
Henry'll have to be blurred; we all know what he looks like.
The curtain slips, I add binder clips, fluff it; now my Macbook is visible
I move the light-- perfect!-- the gold wrappers topple.
I'm squatting on the floor so I lay on my stomach,
Because the composition begins to look trite.
I prop up on my boobs so my arms have free movement,
and shoot different angles, keeping the head-crotch alignment.

I take a break and crack open the beer. Something's wrong,
it's too busy, too flat, I'm not taking advantage
of the Henry the VIII in lit pixel effect, the curtain is hung
at a really weird angle, so I have to crop out where the pearls are too long.
I watch some TV, Dr. Phil is just ending.
A woman is listening to experts on stage.
I'm tired and ready to go, but I'm buzzed
so I cannot drive anywhere for the time being.

I go back to the camera and it falls into place:
A strong composition if I scoot her upstage
It's the contrast by shining less light on her face
with the glowing groin, echoed in white in the necklace.
Re-arrange the pearls into a nice pleasing "J,"
snap some pictures, then I note with outrage
that my battery power is fading away.
It expires, and I am done for the day.

A detail from the photo with gray pearls that didn't make the cut. [Image: to the right a young white woman in a high fashion floral jumpsuit and Bridget Bardot hair and makeup leans over a strand of pearls. Brightly colored chevron fabric hangs on the left in partial shadow. A screen showing Henry VIII is visible in the background, but only his leg, hands and torso. The woman leans over childishly and grasps her cheeks in possible surprise, worry or horror.

Should Female Nudes Be Prettier? (Ha!)

I very much enjoyed this post (scroll down till you see the headline, "Female Nudes Should Be Prettier") on Echidne of the Snakes. Yes, this really exists, or it did as of 2003: a league of "gentlemen" is advocating the production and inclusion of more "pretty" female nudes to counter all the "ugly" ones in modern & contemporary art.

A poster for feminist activist group The Guerrilla Girls, showing Ingres' famous reclining nude, but with her head replaced by a the group's signature gorilla mask. Text reads, "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female."

I've sometimes heard-- from female artists, no less!-- that female nudes are more rewarding to draw because women are "made of shapes." Yeeeaaahhh.... Or that "no one" wants to look at nude men (I guess women and gay/bi men are "no one?") I would point out to these people that if women throughout history were not enjoying nude men and making active use of their shapes, there would be no babies.

Critique

"OMG you are such... a good... drawler."
"Omg no, are you kidding me? Yours is so... much... better than mine."
"What? No! Seriously, yours looks really real."
"What-EVER. Mine looks like crap."
"No, MINE looks like crap."
"Mine looks like vomit."


That was my high school art class. At my all-girl's school, that was basically the only way to take and receive a compliment about your art. Trust me: nothing makes me more uncomfortable than these sorts of exchanges, so eventually I simply tried saying, "Thanks!" Wow, the looks I got. It's like I'd grabbed the complimenter by her collar, shaken her and screamed, "THAT'S RIGHT BITCH! TAKE THAT!!!!!!!!"

So I stuck to the script-- even when the other person's was not always so much better than mine. Or I came off as obligingly fake-modest, even when I was frustrated that mine really looked like crap. Or when I just wanted to be left the hell alone so I could draw. This was in the South, by the way-- there is no "being left alone," or opting out of the compliment competition. There is also no being straightforward and no rocking the boat.


Imagine, then, when my teacher decided to hold a critique. Get in a group, put the drawing up on the bulletin board, go around and say one good thing about it and make one "constructive criticism." No one vocalized anything, there was certainly no formalized plan; but there was an innate understanding, unanimous agreement. The first drawing went up on the board; it belonged to one of the bow-heads (if you're unfamiliar with this classic clique, they are not the Mean Girls, the uber-popular elite; they're not the nerds, either. They are well-liked, reasonably book-smart, well-adjusted, often religious, and they play team sports and volunteer with underprivileged kids after school. Typically wear pastel colored clothes and ponytails with ribbons tied in a bow around them.) The teacher could have selected an unpopular girl's piece and maybe someone would have come up with a criticism. Or maybe a popular mean queen's piece; people might have been ready to bring her down a notch. But she didn't.

"Bow-heads" volunteering in a team. My friend also named this clique, "Pastel People." I know it seems like I'm making fun of them but they were pretty cool-- I just couldn't relate to them at the time.

The first girl called upon started with the good: "It's really... pretty."
"Ok, good! It's pretty! Ok. So do you have any constructive criticism?"
Long silence. Finally,
"I can't."
"Oh, come on, you can think of something!"
"No I can't."
"It's perfect?"
Sigh. Eye roll. "I can't think of anything." The teacher takes a deep breath.
"Ok, let's go to someone else. Katie? Something good?"
"I agree it's pretty."
"Pretty how?"
"Like... I don't know."
"Come on."
"It's got like... nice colors."
"Ok! Nice colors! Yes! And what is your constructive criticism?"
Stony silence.
"Katie?"
Silence.
"Katie. Something."
Stonier silence.
"Anything."
"I can't."
"Katie--"
"I can't."

At this point I should mention that, while the drawing was fine-- I vaguely recall it being a landscape-- there was clearly room for improvement. We were high schoolers, not pros.


"Ok. Ladies. We are talking about constructive criticism here. Not a personal attack. Somebody needs to come up with one item of constructive criticism before this class is over." She surveyed the room and landed on another Katie, a teacher's pet.


Katie, like many sixteen-year-old Southern girls, aimed to please (and appease). She must have been genuinely torn between teacherly noncompliance and saying something bad about another girl. I probably would have been, too, as I was a goody-two-shoes, but thankfully she hadn't called on me.


Katie was silent. Her eyes darted back and forth, searching for help from the other girls. Everyone looked down.


"Katie!"

Publicity shot for the movie, "Mean Girls." [Image: the three main popular girls. The one on the right smiles at the camera, one stands slightly behind the middle girl making a smirking face, and the middle girl glances sideways at the smirking girl she cannot see, looking extremely uncomfortable.]

Katie took a deep breath and maintained her silence. She was the weak link but her decision to remain silent set the tone. By this point no one would speak, good or bad. There was literally nothing the teacher could do. She was powerless in the face of social pressure. She could have failed us all, but it was understood: you cannot say outright negative things about other girls in public to their faces.



Ten to fifteen minutes later the bell rang. The classroom was vacated in under thirty seconds.


Writing about art criticism reminded me of this incident. I've also been thinking recently about hosting a group critique, inviting some artists I like, since critiques were a favorite part of art school for me and I miss them like crazy. But then there is the memory of that one critique from high school (the teacher never tried to make us do this again). What if it devolves into girl-compliments and critique-fear? It would be absolute hell. But I'm still thinking about it....

Re-Nude: Part 3 (collages n stuff)

These may look like drippy paintings but they are collages by Conrad Guevara. The top one is called, "Rear Action," and the one on bottom is "Make It Rain." The fact that I don't get excited about exploring the History and Meaning of Painting through art that fetishizes painting makes me a really bad postmodernist (or a great post-post-modernist?) But where I fail Guevara steps up, and he seems to pose an intriguing question:

Lichtenstein famously made a gigantic steel sculpture that represented an Abstract Expressionist brushstroke, presented in Lichtenstein's famous cartoon-dot-and-outline style. It was a sculpture of a cartoon of the ideal painterly expression, oh-so-ironic. What if he had conceived of that piece today, informed by punk graphic art, Tokyo pop art, the Etsy marketplace, and feminist art?

While Lichtenstein was making art for galleries, public squares and modern mansions, many artists today are designing artwork for ease of shipping, for digital sharing, and for a young, middle-class, apartment-dwelling crowd. The contrast is similar to the difference between Northern (German/Dutch) and Southern (Italian) Renaissance painting. While Michelangelo and da Vinci were making theatrical, larger-than-life murals and sculpture for the tombs of royalty and to decorate the Church and the villas of great families, in the North painters like Durer, Vermeer and van Eyck were supplying the newly-created middle class with art. Their paintings were much smaller, often of domestic themes that ordinary people could relate to, and more affordable. They were more contemplative as well. Durer even had great success as a print-maker because because he could make simple artwork that was even more affordable to the middle-class.

To answer the question, Lichtenstein's commentary on the state of painting today may have looked more like these collages. The materials are (I think) colored paper and magazine pages on an acrylic background, affixed to a canvas (as in "Make It Rain") or framed ("Rear Action"). The size is appropriate for a small house or apartment, and the materials (photographic magazine pages) are familiar to an audience of ordinary people, as are the pretty candy colors and references (banal pornography and now-familiar drippy Abstract Expressionist art like that of Jackson Pollock).

The use of materials is very witty, too: printed magazines and photography have largely replaced painting and hand-made or -printed illustrations as a mode of mass artistic expression. Using a magazine to mimic paint is balls-to-the-wall ironic. But my favorite critique of "The Brushstroke" is the comparison to a spray of semen. My mind immediately went there with the "drips" covering the face of the model in "Rear Action." It is SUCH an accurate way to describe the macho post-war culture of Abstract Expressionism. I always wondered why critics like Lichtenstein stopped so short of the obvious: the Big Ideal Painterly Expression championed by Clement Greenburg and New York AbEx collectors was a sublimation of male orgasm, full stop.

And that's as far as I'm willing to go down the "Is Painting Dead?" rabbit hole.

Here's another collage. It's called, " I Love You, I Know," by Angela Chvarak. The title immediately reminded me of the scene in The Empire Strikes Back with Han Solo and Leia right before he gets frozen. Then the hands in the collage reminded me of Luke's hand that gets severed, since my mind had already gone down that road. But I re-grouped and took another look.

It bears an uncanny resemblance to a piece I did in art school:

We were supposed to work along the theme, "God or Goddess," if I recall. That may be Mila Kunis' head, but I didn't know that at the time so ignore that and don't think of Meg Griffin or Black Swan.

Anyhow, Chvarak's piece looks like a flower in full bloom with arms for stamens, with a background of collage and graffiti-like paint radiating outward from the flower. In this context, "I Love You, I Know," makes sense because flowers can pollinate themselves. The piece could be a metaphor, then, for loving one's self (or, more literally, masturbation, since we cannot impregnate ourselves). It seems like more of a female construction of masturbation or sexytimes not only because flowers are symbolic of women but because women's "alone time" is often portrayed as special, sensual, an indulgent retreat from the world complete with lit candles and a bubble-bath; whereas men's "alone time" is usually portrayed as a gross, thoughtless indulgence, the way you might eat your way through an entire bag of chips out of boredom.

I don't have much to say about Chvarak's piece but it is one of my favorites. It's very fun to look at.

*If you enjoyed this work you might also like Wangechi Mutu, Robert Rauschenberg