Part I
Artists
Part I: Artists
The first part of the volume focuses on case studies of the canonization processes of artists, since the individual artist continues to occupy a central place in the art field, despite the significant influence of critiques by Roland Barthes (âThe Death of the Authorâ) and Michel Foucault (âWhat Is an Author?â), which advocated shifting focus from the individual author to the reader and to the âauthor functionâ respectively. The analysis offered here of the canonization of specific artists, however, focuses not merely on the individual artist but on his/her canonization within the field of artistic production, discourse, exhibition, dissemination, collecting and consumption â in other words, within the institutional, social and market contexts. The individual artistâs centrality is shown to be reinforced by mass media attention, as in the cases of two of the artists analyzed in this section whose respective artworks and media personas are intertwined in powerful ways: Jean-Michel Basquiat, who during his lifetime was a popular mass media subject, and Ai Weiwei, who has become an international celebrity.
The case studies selected in this section address a wide range of issues relevant to the present-day processes of the canonization of artists, from art-world discourses and social, ethnic and gender issues to geopolitics in an era of increased globalization in the field of art. None of the artists discussed here were part of the art canon several decades ago, and all but one are contemporary artists. Two are based outside the West (El Anatsui in Nigeria and Ai Weiwei in China), and two are women (Cahun and Hicks). Thus, the five artists discussed in this section were chosen to reflect the pluralization that has occurred in the art world. Claude Cahun, active in the first half of the 20th century and discovered posthumously after four decades of total obscurity, burst onto the contemporary scene in the mid 1990s. Tirza Latimerâs essay âClaude Cahun and Marcel Moore: Casualties of a Backfiring Canon?â argues that in Cahunâs case, the ingrained pattern of canonizing individual artists overpowered the actual reality of a team of two artists who worked collaboratively. Jordana Moore Saggeseâs âJean-Michel Basquiat and the American Art Canonâ examines the key roles of capitalism, race and the mass media in the canonization of Jean-Michel Basquiat, an American artist of Haitian and Porto Rican descent who began as a graffiti artist before developing his oeuvre of paintings and entering the American art canon.
In âSheila Hicks and the Consecration of Fiber Art,â Elissa Auther reconstructs the process of Hicksâs canonization, aligning it with the change of attitude in the art field toward the medium of fiber, which was still regarded as strictly a craft medium during the 1960s, when Hicks was setting out on her career, but was increasingly accepted as an art medium during the 1990s. Autherâs analysis also demonstrates the impact of specific art-world actors within the changed attitude to fiber and craft. Wenny Teoâs essay âThe Elephant in the Church: Ai Weiwei, the Media Circus and the Global Canonâ argues that the canonization of the dissident Chinese artist in the global art canon reflects longstanding geopolitical anxieties and prejudices. Discussing Aiâs use of social media, she questions whether his larger-than-life public persona has overpowered the social-political and critical import of his art and activism. In the final essay, âEl Anatsuiâs Abstractions: Transformations, Analogies and the New Global,â Elizabeth Harney examines the consecration of the Nigerian-based artist in the West-dominated global contemporary art canon, stating that current âcanon-talkâ in established art centers posits new modes of âuniversalism,â imagined as a cosmopolitan globalism that re-thinks the geo-temporal coordinates of the art world. She questions whether Anatsuiâs inclusion signals a significant shift in the manner in which histories of art can now be narrated or whether it simply re-inscribes governing fictions of âothernessâ into the contemporary art-world discourse.
1
Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore
Casualties of a backfiring canon?
Tirza True Latimer
Claude Cahun, rediscovered posthumously after four decades of total obscurity, burst onto the contemporary scene as a prescient harbinger of postmodernism. In 1995, the MusĂŠe dâart Moderne de la Ville de Paris organized an exhibition showcasing hundreds of Cahunâs theatrical âself-portraits.â The contemporary relevance of these photographs stunned audiences in Europe and the U.S. An exhibition catalogue essay by the French critic Elisabeth Lebovici adroitly mobilized Judith Butlerâs then newly published writings about the relationship between gender and drag to illuminate the photographs, which pictured Cahun posing in various guises.1 The images appeared to propose gender as a socially codified masquerade performance. So easily did this body of work align with the feminist, queer, and identity politics agendas of the 1990s that it attracted international attention.
Scholars of modernism, historical avant-gardes, and photography considered the ways the discovery of this oeuvre altered dominant art-historical narratives and expanded art-historical canons.2 Feminist and queer cultural historians lauded Cahun as one of the rare female surrealists practicing in France between the two world wars and a vanguard image maker who challenged the gender norms of her day. Why hadnât we heard of this remarkable artist before? Feminist scholars, from Mary Ann Caws to Laura Cottingham, attributed Cahunâs historical marginality to misogyny and homophobia.3 This is not an entirely inaccurate assessment, but the artistâs compensatory canonization a generation after her death (her photographs are now preserved in the collections of first-tier museums and sell on the art market for tens of thousands of dollars) may have done her legacy as much harm as good. Cahunâs apotheosis distorted her creative enterprise in significant ways.
First, the exhibition of Cahunâs photographs in major museum retrospectives and production of accompanying monographic catalogues (mechanisms of her canonization) framed her as a visual artist. In her own era, though, she was recognized primarily for her literary efforts. The scion of a bourgeois literary family, Cahun had, in adolescence, already published reviews and editorials in her fatherâs newspaper and his literary journal. Born Lucy RenĂŠe Mathilde Schwob, Cahun adopted a more gender-neutral pen name in her early twenties. Her father, Maurice Schwob, was a prominent Nantes publisher. Her uncle, Marcel Schwob, was a renowned symbolist author and co-founder of the prestigious literary journal Mercure de France. Cahun published in Mercure at an early age. Her work also appeared in such surrealist reviews as Minotaure. In addition to signing seventy-five articles, poems, editorials, pamphlets, manifestos, and works of short fiction between 1914 and 1936, Cahun wrote two books: Vues et visions (1919), a symbolist-inspired artist book, and Aveux non avenus (1930), a surrealist anti-autobiography. Cahunâs lifelong partner Suzanne Malherbe (nom dâartiste Marcel Moore) illustrated both books. The publications made the division of labor within the couple clear. Cahun created texts; Moore, a trained visual artist, created images.
Their first collaborative effort, Vues et visions (Views and Visions), was printed as a collectorâs edition in a run of 460 copies. The book consists of verses by Cahun embedded in symbolist-inspired visual frames penned in black ink, in the style of Aubrey Beardsley, by Moore. The title Vues et visions describes the bookâs structure. Each two-page spread features a worldly âviewâ of the present and, on the facing page, an idealized âvisionâ of the classic past. The latter incarnates ideals of art, romantic friendship, and same-sex eroticism that might inspire certain readers to imagine an equally golden future. Mooreâs graphics frame and reinforce the poetics of Cahunâs texts. Although the title page acknowledges Cahun as the bookâs author, the dedication justly acknowledges the importance of Mooreâs complicity. âI dedicate this puerile prose to you,â Cahun writes to Moore, âso that the entire book belongs to you and in this way your designs may redeem my text in our eyes.â4 The interlacing of possessive articles here, like the interlacing of text and images in the book, acknowledges collaboration as the operative creative paradigm.
The same collaborative ethos â an ethos at odds with myths of individual artistic genius â also characterizes the later and better-known publication Aveux non avenus (Disavowed Confessions). The bookâs title references and negates the conventional premise (following Jean-Jacques Rousseau) of biographical writing: the âconfessionâ or revelation. Aveux non avenus, rather than illuminating the essential facts of the authorâs life, offers only fragments. Visual collages created by Moore accompany the textual collage composed by Cahun. Here, as in the earlier publication, the bookâs textual and visual components function in tandem. These elements work together to deconstruct the very genres they cite: biography and portraiture â genres conceived to immortalize the âgreat menâ whose stories constitute world histories and artistic canons.5 Cahunâs skepticism, evident here, about great-men scenarios renders her contemporary pantheonization ironic, at the very least.
Perhaps the most consequential distortions Cahunâs work has suffered in the course of (and, indeed, as a condition of) her canonization concern the terms and contexts of the photographic oeuvreâs production. The most celebrated works, the collages illustrating Aveux non avenus and the related archive of so-called self-portraits, were not made by Cahun alone but rather by Moore and Cahun together. It is obvious that many of the now-canonical photographs â those picturing Cahun immersed in a tide pool, curled up in a wardrobe, or with her head in a bell jar, to cite just a few examples â resulted from some sort of collaboration. Cahun could not have realized these shots without assistance, even with a cable release. This observation alone suffices to compromise the word âselfâ in the generally accepted formulation âself-portrait.â Some shots, moreover, picture first Cahun and then Moore posing alternately in the same setting and, in certain photographs of Cahun, traces of Moore â a shadow or reflection â appear within the pictureâs frame. At a minimum, âselfâ should be dropped from the descriptive formulation.
Yet, in fact, these photographs are not âportraitsâ at all. They would be more accurately described as documentation of performances. Most of Cahunâs performances were staged in the privacy of the homes and gardens she and Moore shared, in Paris, in Le Croisic, on the Isle of Jersey. However, during the photographically prolific decade of the 1920s, Cahun and Moore also actively took part in the life of Parisâs avant-garde theater. They participated in the productions of the ThÊâtre EsotĂŠrique, founded by Berthe DâYd and Paul Castan, and then joined Le Plateau, a company directed by Pierre Albert-Birot. In 1929, Cahun performed in several Albert-Birot productions: as Satan (Le Diable) in an adaptation of a twelfth-century mystery play about Adam and Eve, Les Mystères dâAdam; Blue Beardâs wife (Elle) in a feminist parable, Barbe bleue; and the character Monsieur in a satire titled Banlieu. Moore documented all of these performances photographically. Describing such images of Cahun costumed for theatrical roles as âself-portraitsâ or even âportraits,â as most publications and exhibition labels do, effaces the important historical contexts of their production. Awareness of the coupleâs engagement with experimental theater, moreover, enables us to understand the t...