A new exhibition reveals what lies beneath
Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun
Until recently, Claude Cahun was little-known: an androgynous figure on the margins of surrealism, who considered herself “third gender” – neither male nor female – and whose small oeuvre consists entirely of carefully dramatised photographic selfportraits. Now, however, Cahun is considered one of the key artists of our age – despite the fact that she died in 1954 – a sort of patron saint of the Instagram era, when “everybody” is exploring their identity, gender and body image through uploaded self-portraits. Cahun paved the way for Cindy Sherman, Tracey Emin and all artists who make themselves the focus of their art – and these days, that is a lot people.
Here Cahun is paired with Turner Prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing for Behind the Mask, Another Mask, a show that plays with the idea of a selfportraiture that conceals as much as it reveals. “Under this mask, another mask,” declared Cahun. “I will never finish removing all these faces.” Confusing? Of course. But then a degree of rather delicious obfuscation is what this exhibition is all about.
Wearing, born in 1963, and one of the leading lights of the YBA generation alongside Emin and Damien Hirst, is also no stranger to the camera. Her recent work involves technically sophisticated masks, and at first sight this appears very much her show, with Cahun’s images providing context.
In the opening large-format image, Wearing appears in the role of Cahun, a doll-like figure with bee-stung lips and kiss curls, only the cut-away sections around the eyes revealing that the face is in fact a mask. In her right hand she holds an empty-eyed mask of herself. Is it a life-mask or a deathmask, or are all masks – like all photographs – in some respects memento mori?
Seen opposite this whacking image, Cahun’s tiny sepia photographs, from which it was derived, struggle to hold our attention. But as we dig deeper, the balance of interest starts to reverse itself.
Born Lucy Schwob in 1894, into an affluent Jewish family in Nantes, Cahun never felt comfortable in her female skin, and, adopting a more androgynous name, began to record her changing appearance in a series of quasifictional portraits, the majority taken by her partner Suzanne Malherbe, who changed her name to Marcel Moore. From curly-haired, dutiful Jewish daughter, Cahun becomes a boy sitting on a beach, then a young working class-man (who could pass at a glance for a skinhead) and a sexually indeterminate Nosferatu lookalike, with shaven head and beaky nose. And, at 25, she becomes the deliberately posed image of her father, a respectable businessman.
If each of these tiny but powerfully composed images feels like it has a whole novel’s worth of emotional content behind it, Wearing’s Polaroid self-portraits are remarkable in their determination to give nothing away. Indeed, she hardly needs to wear a mask. Her appearance – long dark hair and ever-so-slightly surly expression – barely changes through the hundreds of images in her series My Polaroid
Year 1988-2005. It’s as though she’s daring us to read significance into these calculatedly mundane images.
The exhibition proceeds as a kind of dialogue, in which Wearing responds to Cahun’s images – and, inevitably, it becomes something of a competition. Wearing wins the film round. Against her funny Dancing in Peckham, in which she disco-dances in a south London shopping mall – without music – Cahun can offer only enlarged contact prints of an expressionistic sun dance performed in her garden in Jersey in 1949.
Wearing’s use of masks to recreate her appearance at different stages in her life becomes increasingly complex, from the stiff and robotic Self-Portrait, 2000, to Me as an Artist in 1984, 2014, where you blink as you realise a mask is involved, before then pausing to work out what the face behind it must actually look like.
While Cahun donned masks during her surrealist period in the late Twenties, these feel like a red herring beside the mask-like personae created with her actual features. They reach
their apotheosis in the superb Selfportrait (reflected image in mirror with
chequered jacket) in which her eyes betray the satisfaction of the person who has completely transcended their given identity – and in which she appears to predict the style adopted by Boy George, Steve Strange et al over half a century later. If you didn’t know, you’d never imagine this immaculately stylish photograph was taken in 1927.
This exhibition makes fascinating play with identity and deception. Who is the real enigma here: the long-dead surrealist or the inscrutable YBA?
We assume that Cahun’s images must reflect her real life at the furthest frontiers of gender dislocation, while Wearing, the professional, we imagine assuming and discarding roles before going home to “normal life”. In fact, there’s no evidence that Cahun’s selfportraits are any less “faked”.
Wearing’s contribution climaxes with a kind of large-scale prosthetic family album, in which she uses latex masks and body extensions to become members of her family, from her brother, half-naked with sweat pants and tattoos, to her grandparents, got up as though for a wedding. In the brilliantly unsettling central image,
Self-Portrait at 17 Years Old, she appears as a kind of creepily alluring ventriloquist’s dummy of herself. But in many of the others, the illusion is so complete, and there’s so little of Wearing in the image, that you’re left wondering at the point of the exercise.
Cahun’s story hardly ended happily: she died in her final home in Jersey in 1954, having been incarcerated by the Nazis, her health damaged by attempting suicide in prison. Her companion and collaborator Moore did commit suicide. Yet the pair appear to have achieved a degree of contentment on Jersey: in her final images, the edgy, shaven-headed figure has become an only-veryslightly outré English country lady. That is, in all probability, the most brilliantly realised “mask” in the entire exhibition.
‘Who is the real enigma here: the long-dead surrealist or the inscrutable YBA?’