On Henri Maccheroni’s “2000 Photos du Sexe d'une Femme”

(2000 Photos of the Sex of a Woman)

By Joseph Nechvatal

Published here
http://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/2000-photos-sex-a-woman/3099

The BREYER P-ORRIDGE & Pierre Molinier erotic art show at Invisible-
Exports Gallery got me thinking and remembering an extraordinary art show
I saw in the spring of 1996 in Paris: Henri Maccheroni’s photographic series
called “2000 Photos du Sexe d'une Femme” (2000 Photos of the Sex of a
Woman) (1969-1974) at Galerie A l'Enseigne des Oudin (where I had
discovered Pierre Molinier the same year).

Photographs of one woman’s vagina were taken in two stages, from 1969 to
1971 and from 1972 to 1974, at the rate of one or two sessions per week. An
unusual (and unnamed) bold woman obviously volunteered for the regular
studio sittings in various states, shaved or hairy. I imagine her task of
exposure must have been exhausting. My dream was to find her and interview
her, but alas…. I was not able to even contact Maccheroni.

Depending on one’s sexual orientation and taste in decency, 2000 close-up

photographs of a woman’s vagina, even in arty black and white, can be quite
daunting. But then I was informed that the 2000 photographs on view had
been edited down from 6000, the number which makes up the complete series
called “Photos du Sexe d'une Femme” (1969-1974), but that 6000 were too
many to mount in the gallery at one time (the walls were covered). This
excess information added greatly to my already feelings of overpowering
stupefaction. I have never forgotten the power of this work or the way it has
influenced mime.

I cannot however dismiss a hint of cold brutality in these visions of intimacy.

I don’t know why, exactly. Are they cold because the pictures are quite
factual? Are they cold because of the number of them - the determined
repetition evident here? Are they cold because of the severe cropping by the
camera that depersonalizes the image? I don’t think so, as I don’t have the
same feeling with similarly constructed works, like Yoko Ono’s film “Four
(Bottoms)” (1966), a five-and-a-half-minute film consisting of a series of
close-ups of human buttocks, as the subjects walk on a treadmill.

And are they really too factual? No. In fact they are not all that realistic, as
the artist chose to work in black-and-white film, yet these tightly cropped
close-ups of a sometimes bushy vagina made me and my straight female
companion squirm, for some reason. It was not that I found them indecent,
even as I was astonished they could be exhibited in broad daylight in public
(even in Paris). No. That the exhibit undermined any simple standards of
temperament and decency was made evident by the fact that my man-friendly
lesbian friend, who saw the show on my suggestion, was quite offended with
it (and hence me). Was it because I did not tell her in advance that the photos
had been taken by a man? Or was it because of the fact that these photographs
were not all particularly lovely visions? In fact they were something of a
difficult task to visually take in. Even if there were only 2000 of them!

I am still a bit mystified at this exceptional work and it’s passing into
oblivion. Yet I still hold that one aspect of good art is forever going to be
libertine, in someway, even if tempered by our understanding that gender is
socially (and not naturally) constructed. Granted that the dominance of the
western male posture is no longer unquestioned - and that identity and gender
are now recognized as fluid concepts that defy easy definition.
Forty years ago there was yet to be in art the unspoken contemporary veto of
the straight masculine libido. The late-surrealist panache (I am thinking of
Hans Bellmer - specifically his photo of a spread vagina and a plate of milk,
“Untitled” (1946)) that permitted and sanctioned the creation of this body of
work is intensely foreign to today’s, rather puritanical, PC standards.

Now we see many woman artists working on the subject of heterosexual sex,
and queer art, but we don’t see many men working on the perplexing vagina,
as we once famously saw with Leonardo da Vinci, “The Female Sexual
Organs” (circa 1510), Gustave Courbet, “L’Origine du monde” (1866) and
Marcel Duchamp “Étant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage
(Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas)” (1946–1966).
Contemporary women artists like Louise Bourgeois and Kiki Smith (among
others) have been industriously working on the subject of the body and sex,
perhaps starting back with Carolee Schneemann’s Parisian performance of
“Meat Joy” (1964). Art focused explicitly on the vulva with Valie Export’s
“Action Pants: Genital Panic” (1969) and the broad-spectrum vulva work of
Hannah Wilke, for example with her piece “Corcoran Art Gallery” (1976).
Subsequently Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party” (1979) took the theme
front-and-center, followed by Kembra Pfahler’s “Wall of Vagina” (2011) and
Betty Tompkins’s “Cunt Painting” (2011) and probably others. Judith
Bernstein’s “Birth of the Universe” paintings (2013) depicted gigantic manic
vaginas just last year.

They all make no bones about taking the vagina head-on (so to speak). I
wonder if today there is someplace willing to take-on Henri Maccheroni’s
“2000 Photos du Sexe d'une Femme” and show it in a new light? I would be
curious to see how it would be received.
In 1974, Maccheroni (post-surrealist painter, photographer, printmaker and
poet influenced by Duchamp and Surrealism) concluded his monumental
work on the subject of one particular vagina. Forty years later, I am
wondering if this is not the time to remember Maccheroni (born 1932 in
Nice), a complex artist all but forgotten today. He has collaborated with
many famous writers, poets and philosophers such as Michel Butor, Jean-
François Lyotard, Béatrice Bonhomme, Bernard Noël, Jean-Pierre Faye, Jean
Raymond, Alain Borer, Pierre Bourgeade and Claude Louis-Combet. In
addition, Maccheroni co-founded in 1982 the National Center of
Contemporary Art Villa Arson, where he was president until 1985. He also
contributed to several important journals, including International Opus
(founded in 1967 and vanished in 1995) and Oblique, a French literary
magazine from 1971 to 1981 that was founded by writer and editor Roger
Borderie and the director Henri Ronse.

Given Maccheroni’s combination of verve, stature and current invisibility, I

thought that it might be interesting to re-look at his obsessive work on the
vagina, now that talented artists of both sexes are capable of unscrambling
sexiness from sexism. I think it might be time to reconsider his “2000 Photos
du Sexe d'une Femme” now that feminism has happily challenged the given
of the privileged male in relationship to the female model and forced a re-
evaluation of a visual culture that viewed the world from a white heterosexual
male perspective.

Needless to say, nothing is less certain than desire. But after seeing “2000
Photos du Sexe d'une Femme” I could never again understand why for the
most part, images of the vagina have been left to pornographers. Of course
female genitalia has long been a resource for occasional artistic curiosity,
celebration, controversy and/or confusion, as cited above. Understandably,
some might find the specific details of female genitalia effrayable (frightful).
Some of my male gay friends certainly do. But it is a subject at the very heart
of life. Not to be shied away from.

This series has been documented in the rare French book La Légende du Sexe
Feminin 2000 Photos du Sexe d'une Femme l'Intégrale Volume 1.