Lesbian | German Modernism

Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the Mask, Another Mask

by Jean Marie Carey | 20 Oct 2017 | Art History, Re-Enactments© and MashUps

During 2013 when I lived in München Gillian Wearing had a mid-career retrospective at Museum Brandhorst and a poster of the image you see here, “Self Portrait at Seventeen Years Old” (2003) was on placards all over the city as well as a huge replica on the side of the museum.

Gillian Wearing, “Self Portrait at Seventeen Years Old,” 2003; Claude Cahun, Self-Portrait, 1928.

The capstone nature of the show at least intimated that Wearing was moving on to subjects other than herself and I remember thinking that perhaps at last we had reached “peak self portrait.” This proved not to be the case specifically or generally.

I decided to review the catalogue of this exhibition in the hopes of re-examining Wearing and also setting the record correct about one of my favorite photographers, Claude Cahun. I feared when Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the Mask, Another Mask was announced at the National Portrait Gallery in London that is would offer yet another opportunity for female erasure, which is what happened in reviews such as this one from Aindrea Emelife of the BBC shrieking: “Claude Cahun: The Trans Artists Years Ahead of Her Time.”

In fact Cahun was a woman, a lesbian woman, who was perfectly comfortable with her biological sex. She was sentenced to death during her time on Nazi-occupied Jersey for refusing to renounce her lifetime lover, Marcel Moore, so it seems especially egregious to suggest Cahun wavered in her “identity.”

One of the most distinctive aspects of Cahun’s auto-portraits is that her strong features are never obscured, she is always recognisably herself, no matter what the costume or haircut. This is something Wearing, in her response to Cahun’s oeuvre, seems also to diminish, as the series made for this exhibition find Wearing immersed in full disguises as Cahun, Robert Mapplethorpe, Dian Arbus, and others.

Claude Cahun, “Untitled (I Am in Training, Don’t Kiss Me,” 1929; Gillian Wearing, “Self Portrait as Claude Cahun,” 2015.

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Photo of the Week: “Chicken” by Catherine Opie, 1991, from the series Being and Having

by Jean Marie Carey | 15 Jan 2008 | Art History

Catherine Opie, Papa Bear, Chief, Jake, and Chicken from “Being and Having” series, 1991.

One of my goals this year is to be more intellectually open to works I find aesthetically challenging. Catherine Opie is one photographer whose portraits of others and self-portraits I just cannot appreciate, not because I take exception to her context, agenda, or stated subject matter, but because my eyes just don’t love the juxtaposition of flesh against patterned or fabric backgrounds.
The image “Chicken” (lower right) has entered a larger popular culture forum because it is used prominently in promotional materials and in the opening credits of the cable television series The L Word (one of the characters is a museum curator in California). When I first saw this photo I didn’t realize the person in the photograph was a woman but I did peg it as an Opie because the Chromagenic prints are easily identifiable and the camera available to just a few elite photographers. The intentionally forced and obviously faked identities in this series speak to our recent discussions of photography as an arbiter of “the real.”
The technology, to me, is more interesting than the image itself, and it adds a level of construction, predetermination, and staging that exceeds even Opie’s elaborate theatrics.