Miriam Cahn: You Have to Show
1 Sans titre (1974). Miriam Cahn peint souvent des représentations d’elle, nue, en pied, qu’elle ne considère pas comme des autoportraits, mais plutôt comme la transcription d’états d’esprit : Spatialemoi : moipasclaire, ou Spatialemoi : moipeuravenir (les deux tableaux, 2010). 2 Kunstmuseum de Bern, Haus der Kunst de Munich, Musée d’art moderne de Varsovie, 2019.
3 Alice Schwarzer (née en 1942), journaliste politique, féministe très active en Allemagne, fondatrice du magazine Emma. 4 Helke Sander (née en 1937), réalisatrice documentariste, fondatrice du Conseil d’action pour la libération de la femme, très impliquée dans le combat pour la contraception, l’avortement et l’éducation des enfants. 5 Film de Jack Hazan (1973), inspiré du tableau de David Hockney et avec la participation de celui-ci.
Signalons deux parutions : catalogue de l’exposition, Flammarion, grand format, 192 p., 39 euros, et Écrits de colère, traduction en français d’un recueil de textes de Miriam Cahn, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 300 p., 30 euros.
De gauche à droite from left: das schöne blau, 2019 + 27.7.20. 2019-2020.
254 x 318 cm. (Ph. Heinz Pelz). hier wohne ich, 13.5. 2021. 2021.
380 x 255 cm. (Ph. Dario Lasagni : Coll. part.). Huile sur toile oil on canvas
Miriam Cahn’s first retrospective in France, which Emma Lavigne, the director of the Pinault collection, has been wanting to organise since she was the head of the Palais de Tokyo, is the event of the season ( My Serial Thought. Miriam Cahn, February 17th—May 14th, 2023, curated by Emma Lavigne and Marta Dziewańska). The artist has benefited from relatively few exhibitions in France up until now. Some 200 works (paintings and drawings of all sizes, photographs, videos and texts) have been arranged in the space by the artist herself, for an exhibition that also belongs to the realm of performance. Enough to shake up the current namby-pamby atmosphere. Few contemporary bodies of work equal her insight into human nature and her audacity to reveal it in its entirety. No other artist puts such a perfect technique at the service of the purest simplicity and spontaneity. Miriam Cahn lives alone in a corner of a narrow valley in the Swiss Alps, in a luminous cuboid studio-house. Her feelers bring her very close to the suffering of the world; she also has the beautiful laughter of a free woman.
Your father was an art dealer. I was wondering whether you had been marked by any of the works of art you saw as a child. My father was a dealer of Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquities, and at the same time he was a scientist, an archaeologist, a numismatist. He worked a lot with the Louvre. In a way you could say I was marked by everything. I was lucky enough to grow up with thousands of objects around me, with my father and also my mother telling stories about them. What was also important was the fact that he made money with it. That wasn’t a source of discomfort, even though I have known artists who condemn the fact that people make money with art.The house was open. We went to see exhibitions of what was contemporary art at the time, especially at the Kunsthalle in Basel, which had a very good programme.
Given this background, did the choice of an artistic career come naturally to you, or did you make the decision in a more deliberate way? Both. At four I was already drawing, and later on, I was never told that I couldn’t be an artist. But it was difficult for an intellectual family like mine to accept that I was bad at school, that I wanted to train as a graphic designer and work in advertising. There was no training for artists in Switzerland like there was in France or in Germany. My parents would have preferred it if I had gone to university.
You lost a sister to suicide. I seem to remember reading that this tragedy led to your decision to become an artist. No, I was already an artist, or training to be one. Of course, when my sister committed suicide—she was a junkie—it was a shock. I told myself that I had to make up my mind, that I couldn’t just settle for the occasional job here and there like she had.
She was six years younger than me. At the time, Basel was very political, with the 1968 protesters, the feminists. I was not very radical, whereas she was absolutely radical. We argued a lot. We talked about suicide. I don’t know if you know any junkies, but once the heroin gets them, they have to steal to buy it illegally and very expensively, even if they come from a well-off family. That’s why I thought, okay, I have a family that can support me for a while, so I’m really going to focus on art. Like the communists, I drew up a five-year plan: it was clear that after five years, if I wasn’t an artist—and being an artist didn’t mean having exhibitions, it meant being capable of a daily commitment that no one expects, that I alone would decide— I would have gone back to my career in design. I asked my father for money to live on for five years: five years to see whether I could be an artist or not.
DRAWING AND PERFORMANCE
In 1974, you painted a self-portrait that seems to be well academically crafted. It really is a self-portrait. (1) But in Switzerland, the kind of training I received was anything but academic. On the contrary, it was the most basic training you could follow. But you learned everything. At one point, I wanted to do photorealism, that was the spirit of the times. I looked in the mirror and I painted. I made lots of paintings this way, convinced that I had to forget what I had learned by simply painting what I saw. Over the course of my training, we did photography, typography, printing, but not oil painting because it was considered to be old-fashioned. So there was a desire for contradiction on my part. I wondered why oil painting was considered “old school.” After all, it’s just a technique. And since I’m technically very good, it worked. And then I completely gave up colour after my sister killed herself.
It was no longer possible to work as before, I had to start over with “nothing”: very small drawings, series in pencil. Trying to do as little as possible, but doing it as a performance. At the Stampa gallery in Basel, there were all these new performance artists, including lots of women, VALIE EXPORT, Ulrike Rosenbach…, and they struck me as impor
tant because they worked with their bodies. For more than twenty years, I only made drawings. And I only went back to oil painting and colour because I could no longer work on the ground. The large drawings were created on the ground, using a method I could not control. Before, with paintings like the one you mentioned, I controlled everything, more or less.Then, first with the small drawings in series, then very quickly with other larger ones, the work was done so fast, without looking, that it became a performance. I was lucky because many young artists came to Basel at that time, invited by Stampa, such as Vito Acconci. They performed, and then we went to eat and drink. There were discussions and I heard them say: you can’t draw or paint anymore, that’s history. I said that, on the contrary, that’s what I wanted to do, but I wanted to do it “like them.” It wasn’t performance in front of an audience, but it was using one’s body as they did.
I looked for pictures of you working from that time, to no avail. I don’t let that happen. I think it’s too private.
I would still like to be able to imagine you at work. Was your body inside the space of the drawing? I was working in a fairly small space with linoleum on the floor. I would put these large papers down, and work on top of them. That’s why you can sometimes see the traces of my feet or my knees. I had large blocks of chalk made. The space I worked in was covered with dust, and I got completely black. I had to take a good shower afterwards. It wasn’t great for my back, but it worked for 20 years.
It’s a method that reminds me of action painting. Of course, I like Pollock a lot, and there may be some similarities, but it wasn’t the same thing because he worked with colours and his material was very different. Besides, action painting produced abstract works, which was never my case. Let’s say I start a drawing thinking I’m going to represent a warship. Even if I am not in control, my imagination must produce a warship, with its cannons, seen from an angle on the sea, it must be recognisable.
But you do make abstract paintings… [Laughter] They’re not abstract to me!
You insist on the fact that you do not make paintings, but art. For example, you’re exhibiting reworked photographs. What are your other practices, besides drawing? I did a couple of videos, during the black and
white period. Now I do what I call slide shows, which are very important because they demonstrate “serial thinking.” I’ll show you. [Miriam Cahn scrolls through a series of black-and-white photographs of the large drawings she made at night in 1979 in the Alma Tunnel in Paris and then under an interchange in Basel.] I took these pictures with a little camera. What I do is minimal from the point of view of photography, but since I’m exhibiting older works in the exhibition at the Palais deTokyo, I thought I could present this slideshow. It doesn’t last more than ten minutes.
You showed me a series of drawings and said, “That’s two hours of work,” specifying that this is usually the length of a working session. Does the same go for the paintings? It’s the speed that counts, for both the drawings and the paintings. I’ve never liked to hear painters say, “Ah! I worked for months on this very important painting!" It’s mostly men who say that. From a feminist point of view, I find it absurd, it doesn’t correspond to everyday life.
SERIES AND ARCHAEOLOGY
Do you ever revisit these paintings? Yes, oil paint allows for several coats. For me, it’s the same as a series, except that you see the different stages of a series side by side, whereas a painting is a palimpsest; as in archaeology, the layers overlap.
Many of your images come from dreams. You also draw from newspapers, television, the internet, etc. Are you ever directly inspired by a photo, or do you always start from the memory of one or more photos? From time to time, rarely, I draw (but do not paint) from a photograph. In this case it’s always mentioned in the title: “from a photo.” More often, I have a dream or an image in my head, because I have a lot of images in my head, and I reproduce these images in my own way. For example, “Stick ‘em up” is a gesture that you see in photos and movies. It’s something you have in your head. Which I can reproduce in my own way, which I can also reproduce by sticking my own hands onto the canvas or the paper. Of course, these news photos are very important, but so are paintings, by Goya for example, or from the Renaissance.
Some of your landscapes remind me of a school of Swiss landscape artists from the early twentieth century, because of the very light colours, the yellows, the blues, without the shadow effects that can be found amongst the Impressionists. I’m
könnteichsein 2018 + 3.+10.+17.7.22. 2018-2022. Huile sur toile oil on canvas. 260 x 245 cm. (Ph. François Doury) thinking of Ferdinand Hodler... Hodler’s great. So is Cuno Amiet. But look beyond! It’s simple, even though I don’t like to make distinctions between national forms of painting. When I made chalk drawings on the ground, I asked myself: how do you see the landscape when you fly over it? Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been asking myself this question: what people see when they’re about to drop a bomb? That was before digital. Personally, I get to know the landscape both by walking and by means of the beautiful military maps which are available to hikers. Our generation learned to find our way by means of bodily perception. Nowadays, it’s different. People look on their phones, but then they forget about space.
One of your recurring images is a punch in the face. Was this image inspired by a specific event? No, it’s just a response to the idea that you have to show. #MeToo has once again raised the problem of women’s submission to the power of higher-ranking men. Obviously it’s an injustice. But #MeToo has led to other discussions I’ve been aware of since I was 18. Are women gentler than men by nature? Can women be aggressive? I find these discussions strange. These are precisely the stereotypes that allow men to keep hold of their power. I did an exhibition called Ich als Mensch (I as Human [2]) on this theme. Because I was thinking that there are women who can also throw a punch. But we don’t talk about it. I say that women must learn to be aggressive. They must learn to say “no” right away, not 20 years later. What shocked me about the #MeToo movement were these women who for years were incapable of saying that their boss had touched their knee! If you don’t like it, slap him and leave. Women have to react. You have to learn. I had to learn. They should not be like society says they should be, sweet, maternal, etc. With political correctness, another discussion has emerged which I find rather stupid, even though it’s based on a fair claim. Why can’t I, as a white artist, represent the situation of a black man pinned to the ground under a policeman’s knee? We can represent anything we want. Whether it’s racist or not depends on the context: it’s not racist per se. This is why in my paintings, there is
sometimes a white arm striking a black face, but also the opposite. And there is the woman who punches the man, and who makes it a sexual gesture, that also exists. It’s difficult to relate these kinds of things to theory. This is what I want to show, these situations that do not allow us to distinguish things clearly.
“TÊTE À TOTO”
When you represent figures, the body is often pretty well configured, whereas the head is very crudely rendered. And although you sometimes produce very singularised heads, there are also ones that look like a “tête à Toto.” [I explain what a “tête à Toto” is.] That’s right! It’s practical! [Laughter] It’s the question of the image at the moment I create it: is it necessary to make everything realistic? I can’t say yes or no. You have to be able to recognise a human body, or an animal body. But if everything is realistic, it becomes boring. And I find that Toto himself has an expression, another one that is even more direct. Do you know Milo Rau? He makes wonderful theatre and films. He tackles the question of realism. I too ask myself that question. Toto is also realistic. But I can’t tell you why, it happens as I’m doing it.
As a spectator, I can tell you that these very basic figures, Toto and the characters made up of a few lines, have a poignancy that I find very moving. They make me feel the human misery of fleeing a war, or of the sexual act, more than a traditional realistic painting depicting tortured faces, for example. Because the human beings in them are very fragile, almost nothing. Everywhere we can see pictures, movies—without looking it up on the internet, we see these bodies on the ground, like in Bucha, when we’re watching the news. Of course, it’s already been sorted and selected, but it’s pure realism. Simplified figures have a different impact. For example, I know how people run, I know how that feels. If I reduce the drawing to that single action of running with a bundle, or with a baby, because you have to flee, it adds to the mass of information we currently have access to. I still set up my exhibitions myself and I combine these realities: the little men, Toto, and the other paintings, because it allows for a broader interpretation.
TABOOS
Sometimes your images show things that the photographs don’t show: bodies sinking into the sea. There must be documents. But there are also taboos. We don’t want to see how people die two hours away from here, in the beautiful Mediterranean that we all love as tourists. In any case, there is now a taboo that prevents us from showing the dead. With the exception of Bucha, very little is shown about the deaths caused by the war in Ukraine. It is too hard in our societies, which have become bizarre in this respect.
You show other things: sexual scenes which, if not realistic in the strict sense of the term, are always explicit, and sometimes violent. But the relationship to pornography, and therefore to sexuality, is very different now than it was in the 1970s. At the time, there were discussions about pornography, especially in Germany, which were as important as the #MeToo debates nowadays. Alice Schwarzer (3) did some good work, and then she started comparing pornography to Auschwitz. In principle, though, pornography is only about showing the image of sexuality. When you have lived in a house full of archaeological objects, small Roman lamps for example, it seems normal to depict the sexual act. It all depends on how you do it. For me, it can be shown if it’s not “snuff.” When Alice Schwarzer launched her PorNO campaign, the first people to call it absurd were the prostitutes’ organisations and women filmmakers like Helke Sander. (4) Supposedly it was mostly aimed at men, but the female directors maintained that wasn’t true. When I went with friends to sex shops in Germany, it was very funny and I realised that there were women who watched and consumed porn. Later, there was the work of women like Catherine Breillat, Virginie Despentes… PorNO was also directed against prostitution, but it must be said that this stigma has made the profession more difficult these days than it was before. But there are still taboos. For example, there were no images of the clitoris until the nineteenth century, when it appeared on anatomical engravings. Then it disappeared again. Fortunately it’s now back, at the instigation of women. Many people say that I exaggerate, that I make the penises and clitorises too big. So I ask them: are you sure? I also represent childbirth, which did not exist in our tradition and shows that our societies were not functioning well. It’s exciting, we have a lot to do! We have seen the Virgin Mary with the little Jesus millions of times, which is very beautiful, but never how she gave birth.
You even represent “fist fucking.” It can be very exciting, can’t it? When it comes to fist fucking, it’s interesting to read homosexual authors. When I was young, a lot of people were interested in Joseph Beuys. I was more interested in Andy Warhol. It was not clear in his work: who was what, men and women. The films he made of his friends,
which we saw at the Basel museum, were very beautiful. I also really liked the film A Bigger Splash. (5) They showed bodies of very beautiful men and I thought to myself: finally! They’re not just showing women!
In your text, Torture Pictures in May 2004, you make a connection between the photo of the American soldier holding an Iraqi prisoner on a leash and the performance by VALIE EXPORT in which she walked Peter Weibel through the streets of Vienna in 1968. You also talk about how, after the September 11 attacks, you looked at the representations you had made of the Twin Towers beforehand. This text is remarkable in its way of explaining your reasoning and how the interpretation of images evolves according to the historical moment in which we look at them. What is also interesting is how it is written: it seems to repeat itself identically, but then we see that some passages have been modified, the text is expanded with new reflections, etc. It shows the train of thought, and this is not unrelated to the works you produce as series. Exactly. The funny thing is that I didn’t do it on purpose. In fact, I copied out the text several times because I didn’t know how to use the computer properly. That’s why it repeats itself, and I’m exhibiting all the versions as a long leporello. I like to display it in a line a little below the gaze, with a row of heads above that look at you as you’re reading.
The war in Ukraine has given rise to new images in your work. Ideologically, the war in Ukraine is the same as the war in the Balkans. Milošević wanted to destroy Sarajevo’s plurality, its modernity made up of the mingling of different cultures. It’s the same thing in Ukraine, on a larger scale. So I asked myself why this was being repeated in Europe. People said that the conflict in the Balkans was specific to their history, that there had always been divisions. Yet we must not think about history but about the moment in which it occurs. We should have taken Milošević seriously when he said that he wanted to eradicate differences. Putin is doing the same thing today.
I find it very interesting to see the reactions of artists and writers who are caught up in the war, and I wonder what I am going to do with my art, here. The fact that there will always be people who draw, paint, write or make music enables us to think about how we live. How do I live here? What would happen if the Italians decided to invade Italian-speaking Switzerland? Art is not only a luxury object, it is a way of training the imagination. That is the very function of art.
Translation: Juliet Powys
1 Sans titre (1974). Miriam Cahn often paints naked, full-length representations of herself, which she does not consider to be self-portraits, but rather the transcription of states of mind: Spatialemoi: moipasclaire, Spatialemoi: moipeuravenir (both from 2010). 2 Kunstmuseum de Bern, Haus der Kunst de Munich, Warsaw Museum of Modern Art, 2019. 3 Alice Schwarzer (born in 1942), a political journalist and feminist who was very active in Germany, the founder of Emma. 4 Helke Sander (born in 1937), a documentary director, the founder of the Action Council for the Liberation of Women, who was deeply involved in the struggle for contraception, abortion and children’s education. 5 A film by Jack Hazan (1973), inspired by a painting by David Hockney and in which the artist took part.
Two publications should be mentioned: exhibition catalogue, Flammarion, large format, 192 p., 39 euros, and Écrits de colère, translation into French of a collection of texts by Miriam Cahn, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 300 p., 30 euros.
Miriam Cahn Née à born in 1949 à in Bâle Vit et travaille à lives and works in Stampa,
canton des Grisons, Suisse Représentée à Paris par represented by
galerie Jocelyn Wolff Expositions personnelles récentes
Recent solo shows: 2022 MEINEJUDEN, Museum für
Gegenwartskunst, Siegen 2021 FREMD das fremde, Palazzo Castelmur, Stampa ; ME AS HAPPENING, galerie The Power Plant, Toronto, et and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhague 2020 NOTRE SUD, galerie Jocelyn Wolff,
Paris, Romainville 2019 DAS GENAUE HINSCHAUEN, Kunsthaus, Bregenz ; Everything Is Equally Important, Museo Nacional
Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid ; ICH ALS MENSCH, Kunstmuseum, Bern, Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej, Varsovie et and Haus der
Kunst, Munich Expositions collectives récentes
Recent group shows: 2022 R.A.W. or the sirens of Titan, Kunstmuseum, Kunsthalle, Appenzell ; Résister, encore, Musée cantonal des beaux-arts, Lausanne ; Edvard Munch. In Dialogue, Albertina Museum, Vienne; Biennale de Venise
2021 Bourse de Commerce, Paris ; Centre Pompidou-Metz ; Another Energy: Power to Continue
Challenging, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo 2020 Is Humanism Dead?, MoMA, New York ; My Perversion Is the Belief in True Love, Pori Art Museum 2018 Quel amour !?, MAC, Marseille ;
Biennale de Sidney
Cette page, de haut en bas from top: frühling 2022, 17.5.22. 2022. Huile sur bois oil on wood. 104,5 x 80 cm. liegen, 1. + 13.10.96. 1996. Huile sur toile oil on canvas. 20,5 x 25,5 cm. o.t., 8.7.22. 2022. Huile sur toile oil on canvas.
170 x 150 cm. soldat, 15.11.99. 1999. Huile sur toile oil on canvas. 66 x 66 cm.
(Coll. part.). (Ph. François Doury)