Claude Cahun - A Sensual Politics of Photography
Claude Cahun Photo Gallery
The work of Claude Cahun (Lucy Schwob 1894-1954) raises many interesting issues, but a particularly interesting one for me, and many others in these turbulent political times, is how to make art that is both sensually arousing and attractive as well as politically committed. Cahun's work ranges from photographs (usually posed by herself in various states of dress or undress), constructed objects aligned to Surrealism, photographs of little scenes constructed from disparate objects, and more overtly political constructions and objects which are linked to her views on political art which she promoted in her short polemical book Les Paris Sont Ouverts (All Bets are Open), 1934. This publication was basically an attack on the Stalinized Communist Parties' views promoting a directly political art, rather than an art that was imaginative, seductive and suggestive and thus, ultimately, more politically engaging and involving for the spectator.
Many critics and historians, especially feminist art historians, have interpreted Cahun's works by reading backwards from the work of more recent photographers such as Cindy Sherman, and thus categorizing Cahun's self images as postmodern performances of fragmented and mutable selves. In many ways, this has neutralized Cahun's increasingly important commitment to developing a creatively political body of work. Though interested in Trotsky and his politics, she experienced some of the problems that many left-wing creative people encountered when she tried to bring together in her own person the world of working-class struggle and the contempt for bourgeois culture and politics felt by avant-garde artists and writers. However to her great credit, she and her partner Suzanne Malherbe stood by their political principles and put their lives at risk by producing anti-Nazi visual propaganda during the occupation of Jersey (where the couple lived) in World War II.
It is good to focus on "another reading" of Cahun's work, in terms of its political impact. Her work camouflaged her political message - visual manifestations of the working-class struggle and bourgeois contempt - in aesthetic, arousing, surreal photographic constructions. She used the subversive potential of sex and gender questioning to be "seductive and suggestive and thus, ultimately, more politically engaging and involving for the spectator." In this sense, her work has proved timeless and very relevant to her postmodern successors.
Cahun was not a technically adventurous photographer, and her techniques were developed to allow her to visualize her ideas, which were adventurous and the images she produced have stood the test of time. So much so, that when she was "rediscovered" in the early 1990s, she was compared to Sherman and other more recent artists such as Francesca Woodman, as she seemed so (post)modern. However the true worth of her work is her ability "to take herself seriously," literally and metaphorically. Her work may seem playful, but underlying it is a serious and principled commitment to the self in relation to the sexuality and politics.