Death of the Artist

Art World Dissidents and Their Alternative Identities

Nicola McCartney

• Editorial: I.B. Tauris
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786724724
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Art
• Categoría: History of Contemporary Art

There exists a series of contemporary artists who continually defy the traditional role of the artist/author, including Art & Language, Guerrilla Girls, Bob and Roberta Smith, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd and Lucky PDF. In Death of the Artist, Nicola McCartney explores their work and uses previously unpublished interviews to provoke a vital and nuanced discussion about contemporary artistic authorship. How do emerging artists navigate intellectual property or work collectively and share the recognition? How might a pseudonym aid 'artivism'? Most strikingly, she demonstrates how an alternative identity can challenge the art market and is symptomatic of greater cultural and political rebellion. As such, this book exposes the art world's financially incentivised infrastructures, but also examines how they might be reshaped from within. In an age of cuts to arts funding and forced self-promotion, this offers an important analysis of the pressing need for the artistic community to construct new ways to reinvent itself and incite fresh responses to its work.

1

Parodies of the Self

Surrealism and Ambivalent Authorship in ‘Rrose Sélavy’ and ‘Claude Cahun’

Even before post-modernism, issues of the artist-author’s autonomy, authenticity and identity were explored in the work of two artistic partnerships associated with the early twentieth-century Dada and Surrealist movements. This was achieved through performance photography, gender play, collaboration and the use of pseudonyms. One partnership was Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) and Man Ray (1890–1976) who formed the visualised female character Rrose Sélavy, played by Duchamp. The other comprised Lucy Schwob (1894–1954) and Suzanne Malherbe (1892–1972), who worked under the gender-neutral pseudonyms Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore respectively, and are best known for their intimate and playful photographs of Schwob as ‘Claude Cahun’.

Because each partnership worked on the margins of the artistic avant-garde, either refusing publicity, like Duchamp, or in the case of Cahun and Moore, latterly living in exile on Jersey, their works were only acclaimed or discovered relatively recently. This raises interesting questions of historiography and how these creative partnerships have subsequently been treated and re-framed as part of a post-modern or queer discourse. However, it is important to remember the time in which they worked in order to truly value their progressive authorial dissidence.

Because each practice also involves gender play, their subversive masquerades aid the destabilisation of gender stereotypes and, in particular, that of the white male author and his traditional dominant gaze. Both partnerships also produced text works that demonstrate their ambivalence towards notions of a stable self, gender-norms and, ultimately, their own authorships.

However, despite Duchamp and Cahun recognising the co-authorship of Man Ray and Moore, respectively, it seems that their partners have not been given the same credit in the construction of Rrose Sélavy and Cahun’s visual self. History has therefore somewhat failed to acknowledge how these partnerships did indeed complicate authorship. I would like to suggest, instead, that they might be considered a historical reference point for ‘The Death of the Artist’.

In 1915, Marcel Duchamp left France to visit New York’s ‘art scene’. There he was introduced to Emmanuel Radnitzky, also known as Man Ray. The pair struck up a friendship and mutual respect that was to last a lifetime and resulted in several collaborations. Throughout his artistic career, Duchamp adopted many pseudonyms. However, it is the pseudonym, character, alter ego and author Rrose Sélavy that I am particularly concerned with because, although Man Ray’s contribution is often underplayed, I believe ‘her’ creation to be that of a collaborative effort between both Duchamp and Man Ray. Without acknowledgement of this we fail to recognise the full potential of an ‘author-function’ disrupted, not just by the double identity of Duchamp and Man Ray or Duchamp and Rrose, but by a three-way ‘author-function’ of Duchamp, Man Ray and Rrose.

The name Rose Sélavy (later Rrose) is a play on the French phrase ‘Eros, c’est la vie’, meaning ‘Love, that’s life!’. Rrose first appeared in Duchamp’s work the Fresh Widow (1920), where she authored the piece with her signature. However, it wasn’t until Man Ray photographed Duchamp in drag in 1921 that Rrose gained a visual identity beyond her signature.

Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe met in 1909 as teenagers when Schwob’s father began a relationship with Malherbe’s mother, and they later became stepsisters. The two girls struck up an intimate friendship that later developed into a sexual relationship. They were to be lifelong partners and collaborators in several striking photographic portraits, in most of which Schwob, her head and shoulders in particular, is the subject. In 1917 Schwob and Malherbe adopted the pseudonyms by which they are better known, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, and it was under these names that they produced their collaborative portraits and photomontages. Although the new forenames are ambiguously gendered, unlike Duchamp’s (and Man Ray’s) Rrose, the surnames are from their respective paternal lineages.

Though Cahun independently exhibited sculptural pieces with the other Surrealists and Moore was a successfully published fashion illustrator, I will concentrate on their work explicitly made together. This is because I believe their collaboration is key to understanding the portraits of Cahun. In this context, their intimate relationship and Moore’s gaze should be acknowledged when considering how the couple ruptured the author-reader relationship.

Like the photographs of Rrose Sélavy, where Duchamp is the main figure and seemingly obliterates Man Ray, Cahun has been celebrated as the sole author of her ‘auto-portraits’. There are a few exceptions to this, and hopefully more will appear as Cahun and Moore’s work gains popularity and more historians research Cahun’s enigmatic ‘help mate’.¹

Art historians have long struggled over the works and biographies of Duchamp and Cahun, attempting to deconstruct and reconstruct their complex authorial identities. Duchamp and Cahun have recently been compared to contemporary artists such as Sherie Levine and Cindy Sherman, resulting in both the former being almost decontextualised by post-modern feminist theorists reclaiming them as part of an ongoing project.² There is also a danger that, in celebrating Cahun as part of the lesbian canon or Rrose among queer theory, the ingenuity of their gender-variant or ambiguous subjects (those performed and portrayed) is overlooked. This would be a shame as both partnerships created artworks that signify a transgression of established gender boundaries before concepts of sexuality and gender identity were separated into identity positions.³ Moreover, this gender deviance is related to notions of self and identity inherent in the author predicament that is similarly overlooked with such a viewpoint. While it is impossible not to consider their work retrospectively, we must try to situate them within their own cultural milieu as much as possible.

The very concept of the self was under intense scrutiny in the early twentieth century. Exploring one’s inner exile and the unconscious offered artists a coping mechanism from the traumatic events of war. Influenced by the poet Arthur Rimbaud’s (1854–91) famous line ‘I is another’, the Dadaists began to break with tradition and made work under false names.⁴ For example, Marcel Duchamp famously signed his readymade urinal ‘R. Mutt’. The Surrealists also embarked on the task of ‘auto-writing’ and drawing that was supposed to lead to uncovering their subconscious creativity or other ‘selves’. Automatism decentres the authorial subject, relieving the artist of ultimate responsibility.

Freud had also introduced the new field of psychoanalysis. He was working in Paris in the late 1800s and his Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1900. André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, was highly influenced by Freud’s theory of dreams. These were largely sexual and there is no doubt that this new enquiry into sexuality and desire informed art theory and practice of the time. It is well documented that the Surrealists were dominated by male artists whose subject almost wholly constituted the fetishised female form, or femme enfant, while their associated women artists gained little attention at the time, other than by reference as muses or partners.⁵

However, it would only be natural that artists would also resist this sexism, in keeping with the wider struggle for women’s emancipation at the time. The early twentieth century was an important era for ‘Woman’ throughout Europe, America and beyond. Prior to World War I, women had little involvement in public life. However, with the loss of men in battle, women began to thrive in numerous professions in support of the war effort. The newfound social purpose embraced by these women resulted in a stretching of conventional gender boundaries. Women had begun explicitly fighting for their social and sexual liberation.

Thus, Schwob’s pose as the androgynous Claude Cahun photographed by Suzanne Malherbe, and Duchamp’s pose as Rrose Sélavy in Man Ray’s two sets of photographs of 1921 and 1924, were probably also, as the art historian Gavin Parkinson argues:

determined by a society in which women’s emancipation was becoming a reality, and permitted by the increasing understanding and tolerance of the fluidity between genders, as well as the greater freedom around sex and sexuality in Europe and America during the period.⁶

A cultural enquiry into female subjectivity began that has since been claimed as proto-feminist: Frida Kahlo (1907–54) painted self-portraits with more facial hair than she actually had and is photographed with her family dressed in drag. Artist Baroness Elsa Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927) was famous for her eccentric lifestyle, which consisted of open relationships, a public infatuation with Duchamp through her published poetry and anecdotes of her androgynous appearance and carrying on her person a plaster-cast penis.⁷ Hannah Gluck (1885–1978) has recently attracted a great deal of scholarship; now recognised as a trailblazer of gender fluidity, she is known for wearing men’s clothing and insisting on using only Gluck, with no prefix or suffix to indicate gender. Claude Cahun has more recently been compared to the British sculptor Marjorie Moss (1889–1958), who is better known as Marlow Moss, because she too took on a male pseudonym in the 1920s.⁸

In his essay ‘Marcel Duchamp and Transgender Coupling’, art historian Dickran Tashjian argues that cross-dressing was a form of rebellion; a challenge to the Surrealist’s patriarchy and portrayal of women:

Despite Breton’s patriarchal pressures, this anarchic Surrealist zone presented an opportunity for rebellion or subversion among women associated with Surrealism. The inclination of Breton and others to claim the unconscious as feminine challenged the Surrealist women to defy the ideal Woman, the femme-enfant, by portraying themselves as embodied, active subjects living through their mortal existence.⁹

But subverting gender norms was not just undertaken by women. Duchamp dressed in drag and later Joseph Cornell (1903–72) would also direct photographs of himself as androgynous. It could be argued that Cornell was influenced by his belief in Christian Science, which asserts that God is both man and woman, while Duchamp performs his drag in a milieu of the increasingly popular Comédie Française. Even Hollywood was embracing cross-dressing; in 1915 Charlie Chaplin starred in A Woman in drag.

What is important to note here is that these artists lived and worked on the margins of society and even on the margins of the avant-garde in some cases. In contrast to Breton, Duchamp kept his distance from Dada and Surrealism, often refuting the identity of an artist entirely. Cornell was self-taught and lived in Queens, on the outskirts of the New York avant-garde, while the Baroness often took up casual labour and would retire due to poor mental health for long periods of time. Frida Kahlo exhibited with the Surrealists but was based in Mexico and has only posthumously been acclaimed and now considered on par with, if not a better artist than her husband. In the UK, ‘Marlow Moss’ has become a footnote in art history and her oeuvre only recently celebrated. Cahun moved to the relatively quiet island of Jersey in 1937 with Moore and both were imprisoned towards the end of the German occupation because of their espionage activities. The artists who worked or lived in what might be the first era of open gender fluidity, embodied their ‘performances’ or guises as part of their real lives, which often came with a heavy price. Thus their work is not purely aesthetic and cannot so easily be inserted into a geographical artistic ‘movement’, or the trajectory of queer theory or post-feminism.

The works made by these ‘fringe’ artists were perceived as equally as ambiguous – in terms of classification – as the artists’ sex and sexuality at the time. Portrait photography, in the case of Cahun and Moore, for example, no longer served the traditional functions of commemoration or identification. Was the work naïve, theatrical, portraiture or mere play? The answer is that it was all of these, and more. Tirza True Latimer describes this ‘theatrical pursuit’ of photography as having pertinently ‘provided an arena of experimentation – akin to theatre – within which the photographer and the subject could improvise alternate scenarios of social, sexual and artistic practice’.¹⁰ It seems apt then to conceive of Cahun and Moore’s work as theatrical or performative; Cahun was part of the experimental Théâtre Esotérique in Paris during the 1920s, while Moore helped make their sets and costumes. In the late 1920s Cahun also held a position for a short time in the theatre company Le Plateau, which Moore also documented. Indeed, theatrical devices prove to be significant aids in destabilising notions of authorship throughout this book. Elements of set, staging, masquerade and props carry through to Cahun and Moore’s work and help destabilise notions of gender and other categories altogether, such as genre and the self.

Duchamp and Cahun’s celebrity status is, in part, due to the work of recent scholars who have (re)discovered their works and thus (re)invented both artists as harbingers of post-modernity. As a by-product, the photographer in each case seems to have been somewhat obscured. Perhaps...