Tag Archives: Claude Cahun

Show Me as I Want to Be Seen: Exhibition At The Contemporary Jewish Museum

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Laurie says:

Zanele Muhol –  Bona, Charlottesville

I went to this exhibition a while ago and was very impressed. It is rare in my experience that a contexted curated exhibition like this is more than clever, and usually it is more about the curator than the artists. This was absolutely not true of Show Me as I Want to Be Seen. Curator Natasha Matteson creates a brilliant space with superb art to make you reflect freshly on portraiture, self defined identity, and their social and cultural interrelationships. The focus remains on the works. And if this sounds like an exaggeration – it isn’t.  I have also rarely seen an exhibition of diverse contemporary artists where the quality of the work and the concept was so consistently high.
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Young Joon Kwak – Hermaphrodite

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The space is large and the interrelationships of the art makes this, among other things, a very three dimensional experience. Isolating individual works, as I have here,  shows neither the way the works talk to each other nor the viewers place in the complicated conversation. My choice of works here can only give you a small taste of what’s there.

It made me think about the meanings of self representation especially personally in relation to my visual memoir Memory Landscapes project, which is fundamentally about that. I may go back one more time. I think that experiencing Show Me as I Want to Be Seen may influence some of my ideas.

And yes, I did ring the bell.

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Claude Cahun – Masks

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I wrote about Claude Cahun here as a preface to this conversation. I saw the exhibition for the first time a while ago and had planned to see it for the second time about a month ago. But I wasn’t able to so do this til this week. (It was a combination of illness and minor injury. ) The show ends on the 7th of July. If you have the opportunity, go see it!

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Gabby-Rosenburg – lights off on self-hunt
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Museum Text:
In the book of Esther, the title figure reveals her Jewish identity in a risky and successful bid to save her people. Queen Esther’s “coming out” is an archetypal Jewish story of claiming and declaring the self as one wants to be seen. The empowered gesture finds renewed expression in the work of French Surrealist artists, activists, and livelong lovers Claude Cahun (née Lucy Schwob, 1894-1954) and Marcel Moore (née Suzanne Matherbe, 1892-1972). Cahun was born into a family of Jewish intellectuals and chose her paternal grandmother’s last name, the French form of “Cohen,” as her pseudonym—a deliberately rebellious statement under the heightening anti-Semitism of Europe in the early twentieth century. The core of Cahun and Moore’s collaborative work, photographs of Cahun in wildly varying guises, gender expressions, and personas, boldly avows the self while overtly wrestling with its mutable, complex nature.

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Tschabalala Self – Greeneyed

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Show Me as I Want to Be Seen positions Cahun and Moore alongside ten contemporary artists—Nicole Eisenman, Rhonda Holberton, Hiwa K., Young Joon Kwak, Zanele Muholi, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Gabby Rosenberg, Tschabalala Self, Davina Semo, and Isabel Yellin—contending with the thorniness of representation in all its current-day complexity. Any user of social media witnesses daily the constructed, performative nature of the self that was theorized decades ago in postmodern thought and queer theory. Today, we see depictions of more different kinds of identities than ever before. Visibility is arguably necessary for liberation, but it can also be dangerous, as a straightforward “coming out” or “outing” inevitably erases nuance by confining someone to yet another categorization. To represent with integrity an expansive self, the artists in this exhibition use the powerful tools of multiplicity, fluidity, and intentional illegibility.

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Isabel Yellin – Estelle-2017

Many versions of the self exist at once. Like Cahun and Moore’s revolutionary portraits, the contemporary work presented here employs symbolism and synecdoche (the part standing in for the whole) alongside ambiguous, expressive bodies and fierce gazes. These subjects see themselves, and their self-perception and self-determination take precedence over the pleasure and comprehension of the viewer. The themes of Show Me as I Want to Be Seen also resonate with the current wave of self-determination in Judaism, animated by the Talmudic notion of svara, or moral intuition, in which people with complex identities are newly recognizing themselves in Jewish texts, rituals, and communities. Consideration of this empowered avowal of a dimensional self is an entryway to expanding our understandings of others, as they want to be seen.

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Rhonda Holberton – Still Life

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Toyin Ojih Odutola -My Country Has No Name

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Claude Cahun: Queer Surrealist Photographer

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Laurie says:

The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco has a remarkable exhibition called Show Me as I Want to Be Seen. Curator Natasha Matteson positions surrealists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore alongside ten 21st century artists — Nicole Eisenman, Rhonda Holberton, Hiwa K., Young Joon Kwak, Zanele Muholi, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Gabby Rosenberg, Tschabalala Self, Davina Semo, and Isabel Yellin — contending with the thorniness of representation in all its current-day complexity.

I’m going to be posting about the exhibition later in the week. I found it brilliant and fascinating after seeing it twice. (Once was definitely not enough.) It is, in a sense, about portraiture, and it made me consider many aspects of my Memory Landscapes project.

We studied Cahun in the Gay History Project in the 80’s, but seeing her work again in the originals made a much more profound impression on me. The original work wasn’t available then, and seeing it in the larger context of the exhibition also gives a different and far more complex perspective.

From Me, Myself and I: Exploring
 Identity Through Self Portraits by Kerry Manders:

For Cahun, identity is always a mask — necessarily strange and ambiguous; her oeuvre constructs a self that is mutable and elusive. At times, she looks directly at the camera, daring and defying the audience to return her gaze; other times, she turns and looks away, blindfolding or covering her eyes. Whether concealed or conspicuous, adorned or bare, Cahun asserts that no exposure fully reveals her.
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Born Lucy Schwob in 1894 in Nantes, France, Claude Cahun adopted her androgynous pseudonym to pursue work that, in addition to photography, included performance art and experimental writing…. Cahun’s main — not to mention her first and most significant — spectator and collaborator was her lover Suzanne Malherbe, an artist and graphic designer known professionally as Marcel Moore. They met as schoolgirls in 1909 and began a lifelong romantic and artistic partnership. Their lives became even more intimately entwined when they became stepsisters after Cahun’s father wed Moore’s mother in 1917…
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The collages employ the iconography of Surrealism. As her biographer François Leperlier notes, Cahun was “one of the rare women who actively participated in this movement in its most critical and complex years.” Cahun, with Moore, explored the irrationality of dream narratives, the limitations of realism, and the insights of the subconscious. Like photographers Florence Henri and Dora Maar, Cahun and Moore were largely erased from histories of the movement. Art historians and scholars continue to correct these omissions, analyzing them now alongside Man Ray and Pierre Molinier, and citing them as crucial precursors for Nan Goldin and Cindy Sherman, photographers who offer similarly unflinching and critical depictions of gender, sexual and representational politics. .
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“Masculine? Feminine?” she wrote in her book “Aveux non Avenus,” published in English as “Disavowals.” “It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.”

New York Times Overlooked*, June 24, 2019:

As writer and photographer, Cahun worked at upending convention. “My role,” she wrote in an essay published after her death, “was to embody my own revolt and to accept, at the proper moment, my destiny, whatever it may be.” Cahun’s writing is complex and often difficult to follow, scholars say. But it provides context for the photographs and the weave of her life.

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The photographs are by far her most compelling work. At first, scholars thought of them as self-portraits. But the gathering consensus is that Cahun choreographed and posed for the photos, and that her romantic partner, Marcel Moore, who was born Suzanne Malherbe, often pressed the button. It was a collaboration.

Cahun died on Dec. 8, 1954, at age 60, on the tiny Channel Island of Jersey off the Normandy coast of France. Hardly anyone noticed. “Disavowals,” her most heartfelt book, had not been well received. And she had never exhibited the photographs.

In the 1990s, however, she received a rush of attention as gender issues were gathering steam around the world. “Suddenly,” said Vince Aletti, a New York photography critic and curator, “she seemed incredibly of the moment.

(*Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths … went unreported in The {NY} Times. This month [they]’re adding the stories of important L.G.B.T.Q. figures.)