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

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

by | 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

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

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The Modern University Experience

by | 18 May 2010 | Art History

“The Professors of cognate subjects require also (at Oxford) to be grouped together into Boards, which should have the regulation of their respective studies, along with the Examiners of their school, and subject perhaps to some sort of veto at the hands of the Vice-Chancellor or the University. This would go some ways toward raising the position of the Professors and encouraging the formation of the ‘learned class,’ which the English are told they do not possess. To possess it in the German-University sense is, of course, on the principles already laid down, impossible. Professors are, in England, part of the teaching body. It it best they should remain so. A portion of them will, no doubt, advance the cause of learning by publishing lectures and writing books, over and above their regular work; but the modern University experience of ‘learned leisure’ is not encouraging.”

— John Taylor Coleridge, The Quarterly Review, (London: John Murray, 1809), 413.