Riot on an Empty Street: Claude Cahun

Claude Cahun (b. Lucy Schwob, 1894, Nantes, France) has long been one of my favorite figures in art and its contentious history. A member of the original Breton-led French Surrealists, Cahun went unrecognized as a groundbreaking artist in her day, as did most of the women associated with Surrealism and other contemporaneous collectives dominated by men. Yet I find her work far more transgressive, more teasing, and more tense than both the men and women she worked alongside for a short while, the ones desperately attempting to transgress our norms, to tease our hair, to tighten our gaze. She maintained the chilly, dreamy distance of the others, but her ability to play with selves was unprecedented for her time. As many critics and art historians have said, Cindy Sherman and Nan Goldin owe much to Claude Cahun.

Cahun was rediscovered by academia in the 1990s, when queer theory and performativity and the latter days of postmodern identity were in vogue. She was perfectly ahead of her time; everyone around us, alive and well and making and creating and reading and performing, was now doing what Cahun had done as early as the '20s, without ever knowing her name, let alone her work. Sherman and Goldin did it earlier than these folks, but surely no one knew her--no one knows her--well.

Cahun's sexuality certainly didn't hurt the attention her work received in the '90s (she spent the majority of her life with Marcel Moore, her lover and half-sister)--it was a la mode, to say the least. Unfortunately, it has never seemed that her revolutionary politics, or the intersection of her Jewish heritage with the Resistance activity she and Moore covertly conducted for years during World War II for which they were sentenced to execution, ever made its deserved impression on the art world.

In a nutshell, Claude Cahun used her own image--a costumed, makeuped, androgynous masquerade--in early photographic mediums and methods to play with the concept of "self" itself, the construction of individual identity, the ways in which we piece together our living self-portraits with these scraps of lavish, elaborate elements, the ones we wear and speak and sing and sweat everyday. She froze those elements in cold, still images of any number of persons she imagined, or the ones we did. But it is only in retrospect, in light of the theories we have developed and destroyed and the disciplines we have created and derided, that we find ourselves able to intellectually interpret them in the way we do.

So what did Cahun mean to do in her own moments? There is a private quality that permeates her work in a way the above-mentioned artists are only able to keep personal. Cindy Sherman's Film Stills come close, but the layers of raw emotion visible in Sherman's work are unlike the distant, quiet, closed gaze of Cahun's Autoportraits. When Cahun looks directly at the camera, she doesn't look at us. Rather, her gaze is recursive. There was never an "us" to be had. No doubt, these autoportraits were also autoerotic, to such a degree that viewers now try to grasp a bit of it for themselves, the eerie, circus-freak sexiness. We want to be privy to her performances, to buy them, to own them; but quickly we realize these images have an unwavering personality, a relentless control, that belongs only to Cahun, far away and long dead. And still.

But don't leave it to me to tell you about Cahun. The brilliant Terry Castle does a far better job, in the London Review of Books no less. Find out about Cahun's reclusive decades on the isle of Jersey off the coast of Normandy, where she and her sister and life-partner Marcel Moore spent their lives collaging and photographing on the beach and in their home , conducting top-secret activity for the Resistance during the war, and spending months imprisoned, waiting to be executed.

I give you my Claude, though she can never be had.

*The majority of Claude Cahun's work belongs to the Jersey Heritage Trust, Jersey, Channel Islands.