The Indeterminacy of Claude Cahun

Sarah Cliff MFA Dissertation 2017
Sarah Cliff
MFA Year 2
The Indeterminacy of Claude Cahun
Cahun, C., (1927) Self-Portrait (Aviator with swimming goggles)
January 2017
Word count: 9,523
1
The Indeterminacy of Claude Cahun
Described by André Breton, the founder of Surrealism as "one of the most curious spirits of
our time", any attempt to neatly structure an analysis of the work of Claude Cahun is fraught
with difficulty. 1 As an artist at the forefront of the inter-war avant-garde, her work is
conceptually sophisticated, aesthetically challenging, ethically and politically provocative,
indifferent to criticism and resistant to ideological dogma. Through a challenging discourse
with the audience and herself, Cahun calls into question the role of author and artist and the
political, aesthetic and psychological context of her time and beyond. Through constant self-
mockery and play-acting, Cahun as androgynous, quasi-mirrored, devil and angel, confuses
the viewer's senses, challenges cultural expectations and deliberately refuses to provide
precise and absolute meaning.
Cahun, C., 1930, Disavowals, Chapter 3
Cahun's refusal to be defined is consistently present through argument and counter-argument,

assertion and denial, across a broad spectrum of visual and literary works. This indeterminacy
1
Elkin, L., (2016) "Reading Claude Cahun", http://quarterlyconversation.com/claude-cahun-disavowals,
(accessed July 2016). This quotation from Breton is widely cited by reliable academic sources but rarely
directly attributed. It may have been in a letter from Breton responding to the publication of Cahun's Disavowals
which both impressed and unsettled the reportedly homophobic Breton.
2
makes any attempt to categorise Cahun's practice at risk of presenting an over-simplified

distillation which she vehemently resists:
Before the cock crows I will deny myself without counting.2
It is this indeterminism, her refusal to be pinned down, her self-confessed assertion that
absolutes are not viable, which deserves critical attention. In order to track it down, there is a
need to take into account the influences of the early twentieth century avant-garde,
particularly Surrealism, in the context of the conservative culture and politics of inter-war
Europe against which she proposed radical alternatives. Yet to fully appreciate how she
successfully encapsulates this indeterminism also requires an analysis of Cahun's imaginative
interpretation of subject-matter, engagement with materials and tools, her practice of
appropriation, her vanguard approach to the self, and her black, ludic humour.
Claude Cahun, née Lucy Schwob, was born into a prominent intellectual family of Jewish
heritage in Nantes in 1894. Her great-uncle Léon Cahun was a famous explorer and
Orientalist; her father, Maurice Schwob, was the proprietor of the largest newspaper in
Western France, Le Phare de la Loire; and her uncle, the Symbolist writer, Marcel Schwob,
friend of Oscar Wilde, was co-founder of the Mercure de France, which published Cahun's
early work. However, in the absence of her mother, who spent long periods in a mental
institution, it was her maternal grandmother, Mathilde Cahun, who immersed her in ancient
mythology, literature, philosophy and art.3
Cahun, C., 1914, Self-portrait (Medusa)
2
Cahun, C., (1930), Disavowals, trans. de Muth, S. Tate Publishing, London, UK, 2007, p.176
3
Doy, G., (2007), A Sensual Politics of Photography, IB Taurus, London, UK, pp.1-13
3
It was from Mathilde Cahun that she constructed the gender-neutral name of Claude Cahun,
before moving to Paris in 1922. This was the point at which she severed her links with the
family. It represents a three year break in her published writings as she absolved herself from
the influence of Symbolism. However, it was with her half-sister and long-term partner,
Suzanne Malherbe, a theatre designer and photographer who also assumed a gender-neutral
name, Marcel Moore, that she enjoyed a lasting emotional, physical and practice-based
collaboration of forty years.4
Public exposure of Cahun's work during her lifetime was scant. While she enjoyed limited
publication as a writer, apart from one self-portrait photograph, a few heliogravures which
formed part of her manifesto, Disavowals, (1930)5, and a number of assemblages, her visual
works were not publicly available until the late 20th century. Given that she had access to the
avant-garde circles of the Symbolists and Surrealists; was well-acquainted with the
intellectual and writer, Georges Bataille; the psychologist and philosopher Jacques Lacan,
and was close friends with the writer, Robert Desnos and the writer and artist, Henry
Michaux, invites the question whether she was reticent to promote herself or the object of
discrimination. As well as writing under various male pseudonyms, possibly to avoid
discrimination and exclusion, she may have exhibited anonymously which might have been
to protect herself from any backlash to her radical assertions on gender, aesthetics and
politics. 6
Although Cahun came of age in the 1920's, an epoch of relative emancipation, her Jewish
background, lesbianism, ambiguous views on gender and anti-bourgeois, anti-colonial
political stance meant that she occupied a far from conventional place in society. She did not
fit Breton's ideal of the woman as muse and object of (male) desire, preferring to play the
leading man herself. While she may have been marginalised by Breton's reported aversion to
the "moral and mental deficiency" of homosexuality as well as the reputation of chauvinism
within Surrealist circles, this marginalisation allowed her to sidestep dogma and Breton's
mercurial demands for loyalty while continuing to share certain political and aesthetic aims.7
Her critical view of the normative assumptions of Freudian theory and her interest in theatre
and ballet could be pursued without scrutiny, since Breton dismissed theatre and music and
belittled those, such as Cahun's friend, Antonin Artaud, who earned a living from the theatre.
It was therefore unlikely that Cahun would ever have been fully accepted in Breton's inner-
circle without considerable compromises which neither were prepared to contemplate.
In 1929, Cahun translated Havelock Ellis's, The Woman in Society, for publication in French.8
Ellis's controversial Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 1910-1928, opened with Sexual
4
Although Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore also operated under their birth names of Lucy Schwob and
Suzanne Malherbe, particularly when they moved to Jersey, to avoid confusion, this paper uses the names of
Cahun and Moore throughout.
5
opcit, Cahun, C., (1930)
6
ADES, D. (1978) Dada & Surrealism reviewed. Arts Council, London, UK, n.p. Cahun's Objet, exhibited at
the 1936, Exhibition of Surrealist Objects at the Charles Ratton Gallery, Paris, is recorded as "Anonymous".
7
Thirion, A., (1975) Revolutionaries Without Revolution, Cassell, London, UK, n.p.
8
Ellis, H., (1929), 'La Femme dans la societe,1:L'hygiene social, Etudes de psychologie social', trans. Lucie
Schwob, Mercure de France, 1929, Paris, France
4
Inversion, the first serious study of homosexuality published in Britain. The influence on
Cahun of his revolutionary definition of a third sex or 'invert' and his revolutionary theories
on the construction of sexual identity are made clear in the inscription in the early edition of
her Disavowals given to Ellis by Cahun:
To Havelock Ellis who has been a warm light on my desolate path, to the master I admire
and love, to the friend who never failed me.9
In post-World War I France, women wore trousers, cropped their hair, drove, smoked and
enjoyed relative freedom. However, after the heavy losses from the war, fears of
depopulation drove the rappel d’ordre, a campaign for pro-natalism and traditional roles for
women. While not endorsing such conservatism, a Surrealist tendency to idealise women as
the inspiration for the lone male artist, rather than as artists in their own right, was a form of
exclusion. This is exemplified by René Magritte's well-ordered photomontage featuring his
wife as an allegory of love in the pose of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, surrounded by
dreaming, Surrealist men which was used to illustrate an enquiry into love published in La
Revolution Surrealiste .10
Magritte, R., 1929, Je ne vois pas la femme
9
Cahun,C., (1930), Aveux Non Avenus, (Disavowals). Éditions du Carrefour, Paris, France, Provenance: Claude
Cahun (presentation inscription to:) -- Havelock Ellis (1859-1939, writer and sexologist), one of 25 printed for
review, http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/cahun-claude-aveux-non-avenus-paris-editions-5626098-
details.aspx, November Fine Printed Books and Manuscripts,27 November 2012, Christies London. (accessed
November ,2016).
10
Magritte, R., (1929), Je ne vois pas la femme, published in La Revolution Surrealiste, no 12, 1929, Paris
5
In contrast, the fragmented heliogravure collages in Cahun's manifesto, Disavowals are a

parody of decoupage, a predominantly female craft of cutting and sticking decorative
pictures onto domestic objects, established as an 18th century pastime of ladies of the court.
The heliogravures not only question the idealisation of woman as muse, wife and mother but
propose radical and ambiguous alternatives. Both in the text and the heliogravures, Cahun
montages herself in stereotypical images of child, devil, wooden, sexless woman, alongside
homosexual men such as Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde's lover, Marcel Schwob, and a
tattooed image of the homosexual icon, Michelangelo's David. In doing so she is challenging
the traditional, hegemonic idea of heterosexual love and the masquerades of social
acceptability that she asserts are imposed by society in early in life.
…from the age of seven, without realising it, I was already searching for romantic
adventure.11
Art historian, Jennifer Shaw asserts that a phonetic reading of Aveux non avenus, (the French
title of Disavowals), is "Veux non a Venus" or "Wish no to Venus" which expresses Cahun's
rejection of idealisation as a form of aesthetic, social, psychological and sexual repression. 12
11
opcit , Cahun, C., (1930), Chapter 1, Epigraph
12
Shaw, J., (2013), Reading Claude Cahun's Disavowals, Ashgate Publishing, Farnham, UK, p.105
6
The physical construction of the Chapter One heliogravure in Disavowals, presented

alongside the fragmented text of arguments and counter arguments, contributes to its critical
function. There is no attempt at classical perspective, scale or common plane. It is an
obvious montage. The black space is deliberate, the edges of each fragment are clear, the
juxtaposition of one fragment against another is apparent: similarly to the rough-edged work
of Hannah Höch, there is no attempt to deploy Max Ernst's clever morphing and merging of
collaged images into a seamless optical illusion.
Hoch, H., 1930, Indian Dancer Ernst, M., 1933, The Court of the Dragon
Unlike John Heartfield’s use of realistic mass media

images collaged together to overtly critique the rise of
Fascism, uniquely at this time, Cahun juxtaposes slices of
her own image, in various disparate guises that are not
directly connected to the accompanying text and have no
fixed meaning. Each superimposed fragment disrupts the
context in which it is inserted but never entirely suppresses
the alterity of the other images.
Heartfield, J., 1932, Adolf, the Superman, Swallows Gold and Spouts Tin
7
In discussing montage, Jacques Derrida describes it as "one of the most effective strategies in
putting into question of all the illusions of representation": the signified and the signifiers are
constantly breaking apart and recombining differently.13 In both the heliogravure and her
fragmented writing, this effect reinforces Cahun's ambivalence to the binary, hegemonic,
cultural expectations of gender, sex, love, and desire. Derrida goes further, asserting that the
very act of cutting out involved in montage is associated with castration, and therefore the act
of reframing such cuttings in a new frame is associated with "invagination" or the folding
inside out.14 Derrida positions montage as a form of "bisexual writing"15, a definition that
would have amused Cahun since she denied the relevance of any such categorisation of
sexuality preferring instead to question such absolutes and asserting that sexuality is
indeterminate:
Surely you are not claiming to be more homosexual than I?16
Politics and Aesthetics

At the core of Cahun's indeterminacy were her political and aesthetic positions within the
French cultural climate of the time. Up to 1934, the French Communist Party (PCF) and the
Surrealists were united in vilifying the French social democratic political parties as
imperialist, nationalistic and bourgeois. While centre political parties were intent on uniting
all classes against fascism, many in the Surrealist movement, including Cahun, believed that
this diluted proletariat opposition to the dominant position of the bourgeoisie. However, as
international fascism increased its power base, the PCF abandoned its intent to negate the
bourgeoisie and its support for a culture of proletarian self-expression, when it formed an
alliance with socialist and anti-fascist parties. Ultimately, this delivered the 1936 election
victory for the Popular Front alliance. At the same time the PCF positioned dissenters on the
left as fascist collaborators.
For the Surrealists, it was a time of disagreement and fragmentation. The Popular Front
supported an evolutionary view that culture should be extended to all classes through formal
training and education in order to defend French culture against fascism. In 1935, Cahun
joined Breton and Bataille in Contre-Attaque, a breakaway group committed to the
revolutionary transformation of society and an assertive response to fascism, through indirect
action and interpretation, not propaganda. However, key Surrealist figures, most notably the
writer, Louis Aragon, who earlier had lauded the challenge that collage represented to
traditional painting, abandoned the destabilising influence of Surrealism. Instead, he
committed to the mainstream communist emphasis on professionalising proletarian artists by
schooling them in traditional metiers, social realism, national folklore and regional culture, in
13
Derrida, J., (1972), Positions, trans. Bass, A., University of Chicago, USA, 1981, p.26
14
Derrida, J., (1978), La Verite eu Peinture, Flammarion, Paris, pp. 5-18
15
ibid
16
opcit, Cahun, C., (1930), p.35
8
order to "throw light on the darkness of fascism".17 This was a rejection of Surrealism and an
endorsement of a return to classical art and the training of artists as agents of propaganda.
Cahun's position on the shift towards traditional art had already been expressed in a
pamphlet, Les Paris sont ouvert18, a colloquial phrase meaning, "All Bets are Off." Written
in defence of Surrealism's claim that poetic art, from the imagination, made by all is the
source of social transformation. It rigorously opposed the use of art for the purposes of
nationalistic propaganda. Echoing Breton's 'Second Manifesto of Surrealism',19 Cahun cites
Max Ernst's frottages, spontaneous, unexpected images that emerge from the marks made by
taking rubbings from everyday surfaces, as an example of automatism. This was a Surrealist
practice based on chance which, freed the artist from formal training, allowed repressed
desires to emerge and enabled greater creativity because the artist's conscious activities were
less in play.
Ernst, M., 1926, The Fugitive, Natural History
The way in which Ernst structures these random marks into delineated, seemingly precise,
detailed representations of pseudo-biological and pseudo-mechanical forms, creates a
fictitious language of things which, together with the ambivalent titles of the works, such as
The Fugitive, Natural History, implying both a character on the move and a biological
specimen, sets up a process of what the critic, Werner Spies, describes as "constant
mockery"20. This process of negation, by which the work seems to assert a position that is
understood by the viewer only to immediately contradict or argue against itself, aligns with
Cahun's own practice of indeterminacy. The frottage also encapsulates both the necessary
17
Harris, S., (2004), Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s, Art, Politics and the Psyche, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, UK. p.139
18
Cahun, C. 1934,'Les Paris sont ouvert', Jose Corti, Paris, France
19
Breton, A., (1929) 'Second Manifesto of Surrealism' from Manifestoes of Surrealism (USA spelling) trans.
Seaver, R and Lane, H, 1969, University of Michigan, USA (2010) p.275
20
Spies, W., (1986), Max Ernst Frottages, Thames and Hudson, London, UK, p.11
9
poles of Surrealist practice which Cahun endorsed: revolutionary opposition, politically and
aesthetically, and the poetics of dreams and the mind. At a time when it was unclear where
Surrealism might make an impact, Cahun's pamphlet explores a direction that paved the way
by the mid-1930s for the emergence of the Surrealist object.
The Uncanny Object and De-sublimation

As early as 1924, Breton gave the example of a book he found in a flea market, with a cover
made from a bearded, wooden gnome and pages of heavy black cloth. When he tried to buy
the book he awoke to find it all a dream. 21 The book, which in normal circumstances provides
a narrative function, is negated by dark cloth pages without words. This non-book is fused
with a gnome, an imaginary construct, yet the gnome is constructed from wood, making it a
concrete object. The object is found in a flea market which is significant: it has been
discarded and has now come to light again. It is given new value by Breton's desire to acquire
it, yet it is a dream object so it is impossible to introduce it to conventional systems of
exchange.
Cahun, C., 1930, Untitled (petrol pumps)
The Surrealist object makes concrete the act of dreaming and thereby acts as a destabilising
force operating between dreaming and the external world. Breton's interpretation was heavily
influenced by Freud's two definitions of the uncanny as something repressed that resurfaces
or recurs and where there is uncertainty between the real and the imagined and that evokes
infantile fears such as fear of losing eyes, dolls coming to life, doubling, mirroring or
repeating figures, death, madness, loneliness.22 It is this uncertainty or negation of reality and
particularly the use of mirroring, doubling and the image of the eye that features strongly in
Cahun's work and, as agents of the uncanny, creates indeterminacy.
21
opcit, Breton, A. (1924), p.26
22
Freud, S., (1919), 'The Uncanny', in Studies in Parapsychology, ed. Philip Rieff New York, 1963, n.p.
10
Surrealist objects could take almost any form and were frequently found in junk markets.
They had an indeterminate function and uncanny presence. Some were natural or
manufactured objects deformed by external processes such as a volcano. Two juxtaposed
objects causing each to be newly interpreted, or recognisable objects that appeared as sentient
figures, such as Cahun's photograph of petrol pumps (which also exploits the uncanny of
doubling), or erotic objects laden with desire, were also included. 23 From a practical point of
view, the objects were often photographed rather than collected, a practice that reinforced
their fleeting existence and lack of monetary value.
Cahun's 1936 article, Beware Domestic Objects24, was published in the edition of Cahiers
d'Art focused on The Object, in the same year as she exhibited at the Exhibition of Surrealist
Objects at the Charles Ratton Gallery, Paris. The article offers the transformed everyday
object estranged from its normal use as a destabilising counter to the sensual and rational
aesthetics of the classical collector's object or the decorative art object. Cahun rejects the
nursing of vain ornamentations. She provokes the reader to take low-cost, easy to find,
manufactured or organic objects and, as non-professional artists, to casually transform them
through play and experiment into ludic, disturbing, fragile, unfinished, temporary,
indeterminate objects.25
Cahun's collaboration with Lise Deharme on The Woodpecker's Heart, (1937),26 provides an
example. A photograph of an assemblage gives the illusion of a hillock of fragile feathers
supporting a tree made from twigs and pen
nibs. The assemblage must have been laid
flat to sustain the shape of the feathers
before being photographed from above, but
the imagination and knowledge of reality
work together to shift the horizontal plane
to vertical and sustain the illusion of an
upright tree. The image is further
destabilised by the impermanent, soft
feathers juxtaposed against the sharp metal
nibs, which lends itself to an interpretation
of the strange evolution of writing devices.
The orientation, image, temporary nature
and interpretation all contribute to the
indeterminacy of both the photograph and
its subject.
Cahun, C. 1937, From The Woodpecker's Heart
23
Gooding, M., (1995), Surrealist Games, Shambala Publications, USA, p107-110. Mel Gooding's fully defined
list of sources for the Surrealist object is a useful reference in understanding the typical and varied inspirations
for Surrealist objects.
24
Cahun, C., (1936) 'Beware Domestic Objects, L'Objet', Cahier d'art I-II, trans. Ducornet G., in Rosemont, P.,
(1998) Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, Athlone Press, London, UK, p.59
25
ibid, Cahun, C., (1936) p.60
26
Deharme, L. with Cahun, C., (1927),Le Couer de Pic trans. The Woodpecker's Heart, MeMo, France, 2004
11
The assemblages exhibited by Cahun in the 1936, Exhibition of Surrealist Objects, are an
endorsement of Cahun's strategy of indirect political action through the de-sublimation of art
and a negation of her place as an artist in society.
Cahun, C., 1936, Poupée
Poupée, (1936), consists of a military figure constructed from the French communist
newspaper, L'Humanitié, with a pointed wooden stick and a pair of false teeth. The figure
stands on delicate flowers. The false teeth are open and disproportionately large compared to
the dimensions of the head. The word 'misery' emerges from the mouth. The figure is made
from loosely rolled pages. The overall effect is one of a small, insidious, shouting
authoritarian figure, trampling over fragile flowers like a naughty, bullying child which is
then negated by its insignificant, flimsy paper construction. Interpreting Poupée as a
personification of authoritarianism trampling on culture seems obvious. However, the curator
and writer, Kristine van Oehsen, reaches a more specific conclusion that the false teeth and
the reference to teeth in the word 'dents' (trans. 'teeth') on the foot of the figure, alongside
12
references to the Spanish Civil War on the arms, is a comment by Cahun on the lack of 'bite'
or action of the communists in the fight against fascism in Spain. 27
Bellmer, H., 1934, Poupée
The title, Poupée, (meaning doll), makes a direct link to Freud's definition of the uncanny and
references other objects in the same idiom made at this time, notably by Hans Bellmer.
In a similar Surrealist vein, Bellmer's dolls make an indirect political attack on Fascism and
its focus on the classical ideal of art and shatter any ideals of Nazi male identity and female
beauty. However, unlike Cahun's joke-like, status-lowering doll, Bellmer's dolls are
transgressively erotic and aggressively degenerate. They oscillate between sadistic
destruction and masochistic self-destruction, as in some photographs, Bellmer layers his own
image onto the dolls in what the critic, Hal Foster, describes as an attempt to confront his
own masculine fear of disintegration.28
27
van Oehsen, K., (2011), 'Surreal Objects', Exhibition Publication, Hatje Cantz, Hamburg, p.222
28
Foster, H., (1993), Compulsive Beauty, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, p.109-122
13
Breker, A.,1940-41, Berufung
The dolls can be read as Bellmer's challenge to the superficiality of the male body image
epitomised in Nazi culture by the neo-classical sculpture of Arno Breker. The dolls
unashamedly exhibit their genitals, broken and
distorted, shattering the woman-as-mother ideal
and threatening to corrupt, leaving the
constructed fascist male no choice but to assert
his masculinity and authority. However, as
Foster concedes, while critical of fascist
ideology, these dolls can also be interpreted as
undeniable projections of sexism and
misogyny. 29 Bate counters this argument by
asserting that, while the dismantling and
reassembling of mannequins into Bellmer's
dolls looks disturbingly realistic, it is precisely
because they are mannequins, not real, and they
are, in addition, re-worked into quite different
forms, deconstructive, that they are doubly
removed from reality and objections to them as
misrepresenting women are unjustified.30
Krauss concurs, stating that dolls are signifiers
rather than the signified and operate in a way
that blurs meaning, or create meaning that is
blurred, rather than a perverse representation of
Bellmer, H., 1936, Plate from La Poupée women. 31
To take this further, since many of the dolls were photographed and printed in books, rather
than exhibited as objects, there is an effect of further blurring and distancing from reality by
the intervention of the lens and the printed page. In light of the common reality of women as
29
ibid , Foster, H., (1993)
30
Bate, D., (2004 ) Photography and Surrealism, I.B. Taurus, London, UK, p.243
31
Krauss, R., (1999) Bachelors, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, p.155
14
victims of male violence and sexual transgression, the debate would not be so vociferous, it
could be argued, if Bellmer had produced male counterparts to his female dolls. However, in
his defence, it is perhaps the very onslaught of this feminised polymorphism that would have
been so repugnant and threatening to the fascist male psyche.
Given Cahun's practice of appropriation and ambivalence, it is likely that Bellmer's dolls did
not go unnoticed. It could be asserted that Cahun's Poupée, while echoing Bellmer's anti-
fascist sentiments, is also, in all its impermanence, a wry sideways swipe at Bellmer's
indigestible male violence against the, albeit mannequin, representation of the feminine.
Instead, Cahun's Poupée offers black humour and ridicule as an alternative to the death-
driven eroticism of Bellmer. Making a joke of a brutal ideology and its adherents, is arguably
not only a more effective challenge to circumstances over which one has little control, in this
case the march of totalitarianism, but it also increases the indeterminacy of the work. The
opacity of the humour is confusing and challenges the viewer to interpret from more than one
point of view in order to reach an interpretation which is never confirmed. This is a
technique to which Cahun often resorts.32
Through Poupée, Cahun ambivalently enters a debate that raged between Bataille and
Breton. Bataille espoused base de-sublimation in art to the point of no limits, no barriers,
even perversion. On the other hand, Breton, whilst drawn toward the loosening of barriers
and regression, ultimately believed that there is a point where reconciliation of opposing
forces can be achieved, that is, sublimation. He rejected base eroticism, without ambivalence,
whilst exalting the female form as the ultimate object of desire. Cahun chooses to mock both
the de-sublimation of Bellmer's dolls and, by association, Bataille, and at the same time pays
no service to Breton's exaltations on beauty with her ugly little male doll. Further, Cahun
increases the indeterminacy of her position by adding further layers of argument and counter
argument. By overtly positioning the doll as an impotent agent of the state, Cahun plays out
Contre-Attaque's adoption of indirect action against authoritarianism. She critiques the idea
of the artist as the agent of propaganda, yet contradictorily, delivers a number of political
message of her own.
Buñuel, L., 1929, Stills from Le Chien d'Andalou
32
opcit, Harris, S., 2004, p.134
15
A similar political and erotic debate is inherent in Cahun's Object, (1936), also exhibited at
the Exhibition of Surrealist Objects. Object is an unapologetically handmade, comical
appropriation of the opening scene of Dali and Buñuel's film, Le Chien d'Andalou,1929, in
which a cloud bisects the moon and the eye of a woman, or rather, the substituted eye of a
cow masquerading as a woman, is slit open. Subsequently, the main character appears cross-
dressed, and a severed hand crawling with ants is poked with a stick by an androgynous
character.33
Cahun's Object also references Bataille's 1928 novella, Story of the Eye, in which a woman
strangles a priest during sexual intercourse, plucks out his eye and inserts it in her vagina
where it stares out through pubic hair, matted with bodily fluids. 34
Object makes a further visual appropriation of Man Ray's photograph of Still Life, (1933), the
frontispiece to Minotaure, nos. 3-4, which features a woman's hand bisecting a photograph of
a woman's crying eyes, casting a shadow over a bust of Man Ray and a cup and ball.
Cahun, C., 1936, Object
33
Buñuel, L., and Dali, S., Un Chien d'Andalou, 1929, Silent, Black and White Film, France
34
Bataille, G., (1928), Histoire de l'oeil, trans. Joachim Neugroschal,
http://ps28.squat.net/bataille_story_of_eye.pdf, ( accessed November, 2016)
16
Castration and sexual difference are manifest in each of these works. The eye, a signifier of
male power in Western culture, is slit, castrated, and offset against the feminine symbol of the
moon. The upright female hand; and, in Cahun's Object, the lowered, vertical eye as vagina
with pubic hair, raised up on a stick to a position of examination; and in Bataille's Story of the
Eye, the eye lowered and inserted into the vagina, become "round phallicisms" which
obliterate the distinction between masculine and feminine, declassifying and removing
boundaries, becoming formless through alteration. 35 Cahun's crudely painted de-sublimated
Man Ray, 1933, Still Life
vaginal eye seems to both argue against Breton's sublimation of women but at the same time
questions Man Ray's and Bataille's heterosexual male perspective on eroticism and desire.
Cahun then takes one step further than Buñuel, Bataille and Man Ray by adding two
ambiguous political sentences to the base of Objet:
"The Marseillaise is a Revolutionary Song. The law punishes the counterfeiter with
hard labour."
35
Krauss, R., (1985), The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, MA, USA,
p.63
17
In Bets are Off, Cahun critiques the process by which once revolutionary poetry, such as The
Marseillaise, can become counter-revolutionary, for example, if it is appropriated as a
unifying anthem in the support of bourgeois nationalism. When the French Communist Party
(PCF) joined the Popular Front Alliance in 1935, the leader, Jacques Duclos, proclaimed,
"We won't forget The Marseillaise is a revolutionary song, whose ringing call we take up
with pleasure..." thus publicly committing the PCF to mainstream bourgeois, nationalistic
values opposed by Cahun.36
A parallel can be drawn from the appropriation of The Marseillaise by the bourgeoisie and
Cahun's appropriation and alteration of works by heterosexual male Surrealists. Cahun points
out that not only can the appropriation of objects and images be used as an agent of
revolutionary change and a challenge to sexual stereotypes, but also erstwhile revolutionary
songs, such as The Marseillaise, can be appropriated by the bourgeoisie to play a hegemonic
function within society.
The second sentence, "The law punishes the counterfeiter with hard labour", refers to the text
inscribed on paper money to deter counterfeiters by threat of hard labour. This seems to refer
to the accumulation and protection of capital, its relationship to labour and production, and a
plea for a poetics of objects, spelt out by Cahun in her article, "...there is nothing left of the
awful feast where reason could show us only the enslavement of man by man, by matter, by
systems...it is for us to discover where reason stops, to seize matter and to hold onto it with
the awareness of our liberation." 37
Harris asserts that Objet links to Cahun's expectation that the " shackles of mind-destroying
hard labour and the golden bridle of passions will be broken again and again"38 by the
liberating force of objects. In other words, work, represented by the hand, and sexual desire,
represented by the eye, together with everyday objects, represented by the ball, stick and
cardboard of Objet, will liberate the imagination and result in poetic objects for all, rather
than mass produced objects resulting from alienated labour.39
Objet is complex, multi-layered, ambiguous, even deliberately obscure, as Cahun uses a

process of appropriation, negation and indeterminacy to question politics, sexual difference
and aesthetics. It makes apparent the impossibility of reading Cahun's works without some
understanding of the implicit cultural connotations that are historically specific to the
Surrealist discourse of the 1930s. Not only is Cahun playing with sexual difference,
opposing capitalism and critiquing the social realism of communist art, she is challenging the
"art" object with her focus on the hand and touch and use of everyday materials, refusing to
take her assigned place as an "artist". Instead, she proposes an alternative, nonprofessional,
un-glossed, even transgressive, poetic practice.
36
37
opcit, Cahun, C., 1936, p.60
38
ibid, Cahun, C., 1936, p.45
39
18
Anti-Colonialism and Dissidence
Cahun, C. 1927, Untitled (in pose of Buddha)
Cahun made a number of calm, meditative, unusually symmetrical self-portraits from 1927
which are virtually unrecognisable as a western woman, let alone Cahun. They suggest the
influence of her academic and Orientalist great-uncle Cahun, along with her participation in
the Theatre Esoterique which was concerned with introducing philosophical or theosophical
unknown works influenced by the oriental theatre of Japanese Noh, Sufism and sacred Indian
dances. Rather than simply opposing colonialism, Cahun used Orientalism as a critique of
Western capitalism.
Cahun, C., 1928, Untitled, (masked naked)
19
Cahun, C., 1930, Cahun with black waitress
The Truth of the Colonies Exhibition, 1931, organised by the PCF, Anti-Imperialism League
and Surrealists, as a dissident counter-criticism of the Colonial Exposition of 1931, organised
by the French government at which the viewer could experience a global village of the major
European powers in one visit. Nancy Cunard's "Negro: Anthology, 1931-1933", includes a
Surrealist tract "Murderous Humanitarianism" signed by all the leading Surrealists,
accompanied by a photograph of a black "Colonial Negro tailor in a small factory in France"
presents the social contradictions of colonialism. According to Bate40, the man is "foreign"
or "other" but familiar, black and French. He wears European clothes so is assimilated into
French appearance yet a servant industrial worker making clothes, which he himself models,
for the French bourgeoisie. This tract anticipated Barthes's critique of the post WWII
exhibition, "The Family of Man", 1955, exhibition in which he asks, "let us ...ask the North
African workers of the Goutte d'Or district in Paris what they think of The Great Family of
Man" 41 and John Berger's 1975 critique of the exploitation of migrant Algerian workers in
Paris.42
Cahun's self-portraits in the pose of the Buddha meditating, another standing arm in arm with
a black woman dressed as a waitress (also, "foreign" or "other" but familiar, black, French
and servile) and another in which Cahun wears a teutonic-style national costume and long
blonde plaits with the backdrop of a simple rustic house, and finally, her own face (as mask)
juxtaposed between a display of masks at the British museum, all refuse homogenised
40
opcit, Bate, D., (2004), p.230
41
Barthes, R. (1981), The Great Family of Man Paladin, London, p.102
42
Berger, J., (1975), A Seventh Man, Verso, London.
20
identity politics and instead adopt "the contradiction and conflict at the centre of dissident
practice"43
Cahun, C., 1938, untitled (Teutonic dress)
Cahun, C., 1936, (Cahun behind) Têtes de Cristal, British Museum
With such explicit references to ethnicity, national identity, difference and alterity, Cahun
expands the narcissistic question asked by Breton, "Who am I?" 44 to an exterior,
internationalist question of "Who are We?", which challenges Western assumptions of
civilisation, power and superiority.
43
opcit, Bate, D, (2004), p.230
44
Breton, A., (1928), Nadja, trans. Richard Howard, Penguin, London, 1999, p.11
21
Continuing the colonial debate and in a Surrealist

game of appropriation, the Surrealist photographer,
Man Ray, targeted Ingres the painter, an icon of
French imperialism and neo-classical painter of light-
skinned, oriental, turban-wearing female nude bathers
in harems, despite the fact that the furthest east he
travelled was Rome.
Man Ray's title of Ingres's Violin has, at least, a double

meaning. While Ingres did indeed own and play the
violin, in French, the term "violin playing" also means
"hobby" implying playing but without serious intent.
In Man Ray's photograph, the black f-shaped sound
holes from the body of a violin are montaged onto the
naked body of the model posing as an odalisque nude
to create a "visual pun."45
Ingres, 1808, Bather of Valpincon
The female body is equated with a violin and

according to Bate, violates the representation of
woman with the joking connotation that the
oriental woman can be played like a violin or
used as a sexual plaything, literally fiddled with,
by the French colonial male.
Man Ray deploys his flattened, colour and

backdrop-free, imitation using the medium of
photography not only to ridicule the institutional
adulation of Ingres as the French father of form
and bourgeois high art, and, Bate argues, to
critique the capitulation of modernists such as
Picasso to classicism, but also to question
Western perceptions of the Orient and to reject
French colonial values.
Man Ray, 1924, Violin d'Ingres
45
opcit, Bate, D., (2004), p.117
22
In a photograph from 1930, Cahun seems to playfully mock Man Ray's "professionalism" as
a photographer by appropriating the glamorous and sexually charged model as subject and
substituting herself. However, instead of smoothly rounded shoulders and softly cleft
buttocks, she displays an angular boniness, vulnerably perching on rough, cleft rocks,
wearing a utility rubber swimming cap instead of a fashionable turban, the profile of her
large, long nose dominant against the dark sea. Shot from above in stark sunlight, she sets
herself apart from the classical and commercially fashionable art scene. Instead of the strong
sense of the voyeuristic male artist and captive, subservient muse of the Ingres and Man Ray
images, Cahun is self-contained and intimate. As a self-referential, self-portrait, the signifier
and the signified are totally blurred, yet as an appropriation of Man Ray and Ingres, it is also
retorts, "Consider this then, am I not She also?" in a subtle but explicit challenge to the
stereotype of woman as muse.
Cahun, C., 1930, Untitled (Odalisque)
The Theatre and the Self

The theatre was of primary concern to Cahun and an important influence on her rejection of
the artist as the centre of the work, rather than the work itself. Both Cahun, as actor, and
Moore, as designer, were keen participants in the avant-garde theatre. In 1927, Moore
designed the set and Cahun took the part of Une Femme in Constant Lounsbery's Judith, in
which Judith in disguise, seduces and decapitates the enemy, Holofernes, in an ambiguous
combination of lust and hatred. Cahun's self-portrait of her own "dismembered" head in a bell
jar from the same year seems to be an experiment in dramatically "serving herself up" as the
23
decapitated Holofernes in an uncanny reversal of roles. The appropriation of this enigmatic

image by Man Ray and Lee Miller acknowledges Cahun's influence at this time. 46
“...Lee’s friend, Tanja Ramm, her head was apparently placed inside a bell jar, although
perhaps it was actually beside it. This was an idea that can be found... in the domestic pre-
Surrealism of commercial stereoscopic cards from the 1850s... revived with substantially
more edge in Paris in the 1920s. The earliest use of the idea in Surrealist circles appears to be
by Claude Cahun in a photographic self-portrait from around 1925." 47
The stereoscopic image appealed to the Surrealists because of its uncanny deployment of
doubling and layering of similar images to produce a three-dimensional effect when viewed
through a stereoscope.
Cahun, C,. @1924, Keepsake Miller, L., 1930, Tania Ramm in Bell Jar
However, in a further twist of this Surrealist game of appropriation, it cannot be ignored that
Cahun's Keepsake is strikingly similar to Gustav Klimt's shockingly,at the time, voluptuous
and orgasmic depiction, Judith I, in which Judith herself appears to have been decapitated by
a heavy gold choker which cuts her head from her body while the head of Holofernes barely
features in the bottom right corner of the frame.
46
In a 2016 conversation with Sarah French from the Lee Miller Archives & The Penrose Collection, she
advised that the Cahun and Miller images form part of the 2017, National Portrait Gallery exhibition, Gillian
Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the mask, another mask (a quote from Cahun) and provided the authority
of this appropriation as Haworth-Booth, M., 2007, exhibition catalogue to the V&A’s, 'The Art of Lee Miller',
2007 exhibition.
47
The footnote is the following: Francois Leperlier (ed.), Claude Cahun: Photographe (Paris,1995), p.3.
(Haworth-Booth, M.,( 2007), p.47).
24
In 1901 Vienna, the painting was misread by critics to be of the murder of John the Baptist,
based on Oscar Wilde's 1891 tragedy, Salome, rather than the pious Judith. In light of this
"cross-over" with Salome, the appropriation of Klimt's image, and the placing her own
"decapitated" head on a plate, Cahun could be making a comment on a libel case which she
transcribed. The case was brought to court by leading dancer, Maud Allan, in response to
accusations that her erotically lesbian performance in the 1918, Royal Court production of
Salome, was depraved. Cahun might also be referencing her own Jewish heritage and the
right-wing pre-war rise in French anti-Semitic positioning of Jewish women as camouflaged
seducers deserving of rape and murder.
Klimt, G., 1901, Judith I
Of course, without turning to the writings of Cahun, such interpretative assumptions might
seem obscure or even flimsy. In Heroines, (1925), excerpts of which were published in
Mercure de France, Cahun transforms and stages her own version of well-known myths, one
of which, The Sadistic Judith, takes the form of a satirical and de-Sadeian monologue from
25
the female protagonist's point of view. 48 Instead of the biblical version of the introverted,
hair-shirted Judith virtuously sacrificing her honour to free her persecuted people, Cahun
presents Judith as the pet dog slayer, with sharpened fingernails, begging to be sexually
enslaved by the monstrously ugly Holofernes, lusting after the "distinctive, hateful
characteristics of the enemy race...beware of all that can bite, tear, and suck until your foreign
blood is exhausted - delicious." There is a deliberate inversion of anti-Semitic rhetoric here,
while the female is portrayed as more sadistic and sexually voracious than the conquering
misogynist. Then, having murdered the object of her lust, she is thwarted when her rejection
of the praise and glory from her people is ignored, "The joy of the crowd has a thousand
mouths - and no ears", alluding to the sacrifice of the self to the identity of the mob. While
Holofernes loses his life, the murdering Judith is "served up" and "carried in triumph... on a
pedestal of human flesh." forced into the stereotype role of heroine which she despises.
Cahun's Keepsake illustrates this serving up of Judith, as she trades places with Holofernes
and John the Baptist.
Again, this practice of reversing roles and arguing first for and then against and then further
dissecting a position until meaning is blurred, is key to Cahun's indeterminism. Her intent is
to oscillate between all points of view, through various personae and media, until all points of
view are blurred. Although somewhere there might be an ultrafine position that, if only it
could be sliced out and clarified, might be definitive; suspicious of absolutes, she deliberately
jettisons it. This brings to mind Duchamp's concept of "inframince" (trans. infra thin) which
describes the imperceptible separation between two things or concepts such as: a reflection
from the mirror itself; Duchamp from his female alter-ego, Rrose Selavy; the physical
elements of photomontage or collage. Indeterminism takes place in the space where the
signifier and the signified become blurred.
Cahun exploits a similar approach in order to argue the thin separation of the self-portrait
from a masquerade, the culturally acceptable identity or myth from the real, the heterosexual
from the homosexual, male from female, the ungraspable differences between one culture or
behaviour and another, the physical and metaphorical space between a mask and the face:
I remember it was Carnival. I had spent my solitary hours disguising my soul. Its masks were
so perfect that when their paths crossed in the grand square of my consciousness they didn't
recognise each other. Beguiled by their comic ugliness, I explored the worst possible
instincts; I welcomed young monsters into myself and nurtured them. But the make-up I had
used seemed indelible. I rubbed so hard to remove it that I took off my skin. And my soul, like
a flayed face, naked, no longer had a human form.49
The anthropologist, Michael Taussig, might summarise Cahun's practice as an attempt by an

outsider to adapt to her environment while at the same time maintaining her individuality
through a dialectic relationship between mimesis, the ability to perpetuate sameness, to copy,
imitate, explore difference and become other, and alterity, the ability to produce and maintain
48
Cahun, C., (1925), 'The Sadistic Judith' from Heroines, ed. Rice, S., (1999), Inverted Odysseys,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. pp.51 - 54
49
) opcit, Cahun, C., (1930p.14
26
difference.50 However, Cahun's indeterminism not only relies on this attempt but is a product
of her overt awareness that we are always adopting a behaviour of mimesis and of
masquerade, and that it can never be separated from the self. The self is indeterminate. There
is no absolute self.
Cahun, C., 1929, Self-portrait as Elle

This overt awareness was demonstrated when Cahun participated in Albert-Biro's avant-
garde, 1929 Le Plateau theatre, which not only provide the source for some of her most
iconic self-portraits but also some context of her indeterminate sense of self. Albert-Biro
advocated the methods of Alfred Jarry, the founder of modern theatre, who, through
exaggerated comic violence; anti-realistic; non-human; wooden acting techniques; puppetry;
masks and the infamous and absurd dictatorial antihero, challenged the hitherto assumption
that the theatre must reproduce life.
Albert-Biro recruited non-professional actors who could emulate awkward puppets, so-called
uber-marionettes, where any display of emotion was disallowed. Impassive masks and face
makeup alongside minimal staging and stark lighting prevented any concessions to realism.
Cahun's renowned performance as Elle in Bluebeard exceeded Albert-Biro's expectations as
50
Taussig, M., (1993), Mimesis and Alterity, Routledge, NY, USA, xii
27
she mastered the stage directions of an angular rigidity of pose, rhythmic speech, frontal stare
and sexual deadness. Evidence that she was intimately involved in the staging, make-up and
costumes for her roles, of Albert-Biro's delight at her devotion to the smallest detail of the
performances, and her carefully staged photographs, lends weight to the argument that they
are in fact, self-portraits or at least that such theatrical techniques were equally deployed on
the "private stage" of her self-portraits51. The use of masks, make-up, costume and cross-
dressing, awkwardly angular or rigidly symmetrical posture and backdrops in her self-
portraiture and the inclusion of images from the Albert-Biro roles in her auto-biographical
collages, demonstrate the important influence of reducing the human to marionette in her
relentless quest to ritualistically expose the metaphorical masks and mannerisms of human
behaviour.
Cahun, C., 1928, Untitled (Theatre Masks)
It was this understanding of culturally determined learned behaviours counter-balanced by

imaginative playfulness that enabled Cahun and her partner Moore to embark on a successful,
daring, black humoured, performative act of resistance against the Nazis from July 1940.
Having moved to Jersey in 1938 to escape Fascism, their indirect action was designed to de-
motivate the occupying army stationed on Jersey from 1940 and to incite them to overthrow
the Nazi command.
51
Welby-Everard, M., (2006), 'Imaging the Actor: the Theatre of Claude Cahun', Oxford Art Journal, (March
2006) no. 29, p.4
28
Using a typewriter and writing in German, they ran their own "news service" for German
soldiers by composing ambiguous humorous anti-Nazi tracts and leaving them in cigarette
cartons for tobacco-starved soldiers to find, under the windscreen wipers of Nazi vehicles,
and on the gravestones of recently buried German soldiers. They sent the tracts from the ludic
name of "The Soldier with No Name" and for some time, the Nazi command was convinced
that a group of German soldiers were directing a full-scale operation of insubordination.
Even after their first arrest, the Nazi command apologised to the two middle-aged ladies for
their mistake because it was not considered possible that they could be responsible for such
acts.
That they managed to carry out this resistance for four years is a tribute to their inventiveness
and understanding of the limitations of the Nazi psyche based on a set of fixed stereo-typed
cultural rules. Cahun and Moore exploited this regimented way of thinking and lack of
imagination, along with a failure to understand anything except the physical manifestation of
a joke rather than the subtle indeterminacy of irony. In a case of overt, ironic determinism,
they realised that they did not need a disguise, but simply to fulfill the stereotype of middle-
aged, eccentric women with cats, in which they carried out their resistance in plain sight.
Cahun, C., 1945, Self Portrait (Nazi badge between teeth)
29
The Camera and Neo-Narcissisum
Cahun advocated art for all from the imagination, made using readily available everyday
tools and materials. Although she indulged in the games and activities of chance of the early
Surrealists, she did not need to resort to such automatist techniques to access her imagination.
Her work is conceptually complex, she plans carefully and she uses tools and materials in a
very deliberate way. It is therefore important to examine Cahun's choice of photography as a
medium and in particular, her use of the camera, in support of her ambivalence to traditional,
formal art and as a means to deliberate indeterminacy through which she challenges
preconceptions and expresses her denial of absolutes.
A thorough and technical analysis of Cahun's tools and techniques by Stevenson 52 reveals
that, unlike many of her Surrealist contemporaries, notably Man Ray, she rarely exploited
professional photographic tools, techniques and special effects such as solarisation. Instead,
Cahun used the same basic, folding, leather-bellowed, pocket camera for over thirty years.
Most of her photographs are lit by daylight or an occasional, unsophisticated, single light.
There is no evidence that she used an exposure metre but simply followed the camera and
film manufacturer's instructions on exposure. Her films were developed in photographic
laboratories via high street chemist shops.
Despite her extraordinary self-portraits, she did not use a delayed-action or a clockwork time
release or a long cable release, evidenced by the presence of a finger in some shots implying
that somebody else operated the shutter. It was a collaborative approach with her partner,
Marcel Moore, who acted as model during the set-up of the shot, as evidenced by negatives
of Marcel in specific poses, while Cahun designed the composition, and then, once Cahun
was in position and in role, she instructed Moore to release the shutter.
Cahun, C. 1928, set up negative of Marcel Moore
52
Stevenson, J., (2006), 'Claude Cahun: An Analysis of Her Photographic Technique', Don't Kiss Me, ed.
Downie, L., Tate Publishing, London, UK. p.46-48
30
Cahun, C. 1928, Self-portrait, (chequered jacket)
Stevenson concludes that Cahun was not a professional or even a sophisticated amateur
photographer and that she used the camera merely as a device to record her performance and
assemblage practices. Given that she had the means and capability to receive training and buy
equipment, it could be concluded that she had no desire to develop her photography skills.
However, her relationship with the camera is more complex than Stevenson allows.
Her seemingly casual engagement with the techniques of photography is entirely consistent
with her philosophical standpoint that revolutionary art should be made by all and should not
conform to formal, elitist, technical methods and bourgeois taste. In selecting the "low" art of
photography, rather than painting or sculpture, and then using the most basic techniques
rejected by professional studios, Cahun is making a deliberate, political and anti-aesthetic
choice. That her self-portraits were rarely published and never displayed in a gallery during
her lifetime is not an indicator that she did not take them seriously, as evidenced by their
thoughtful staging, careful composition, particular use of costume and makeup and their
extraordinary originality.
Although there is no certainty, since much of her work is missing or destroyed, it seems that
there are very few of what might be described as "un-staged" casual snapshots of Cahun. In
those that do exist, she often edited herself out. When she attended, and possibly exhibited,
at the 1936 Surrealist Exhibition in London, she is included in a negative of a snapshot
standing next to the leading Surrealists, looking conventionally fashionable in a floral dress
with crimped hairstyle. This is one of a series of shots in which it can be assumed that each
person in the image took turns to photograph the others, using Cahun's camera. The marks on
31
the negative show that she subsequently cropped herself out before the photograph was
printed. It is perhaps too assumptive to attribute this act of self-negation to a philosophical
aversion to being seen on the margins of the shot, or in conventional female dress, or even
trivial reasons of vanity or humility, but it is an indicator of the level of deliberate editorial
control she exercised over her imagery.
Cahun, C., 1936, Gascoigne, Penrose, Breton, Mensens,

Cahun
Cahun, C., 1936, Gascoigne, Penrose, Breton,

Mensens
For Cahun, photography was not merely the method by which she recorded her work. It was
the very deliberate possibilities it offered to create uncanny, provocative, amusing and
challenging images that appealed. In order to understand the lengths to which she went to
exploit the illusory nature of photography to challenge accepted norms, it is worth examining
a striking and unusual photographic image made in 1928.
32
Cahun, C., 1928, Self-portrait (Double in Pool)
Two naked, images of Cahun appear suspended, one upright, one inverted, in a chimney of
water between two rocky structures, as if a cross-section has been cut and the viewer is able
to see in through an aquarium window. The figures have short cropped hair and show no
female attributes, the eyes are tight shut as if not yet born. They each face mute, rough stone
and deny each other's existence. There is an impression of unborn twins floating back to
back, one in breech, in amniotic fluid of a womb; or two preserved specimens in a museum of
curiosity, similar but different. It is as if the figures are buoyant, ever-changing and moving
up and down like the uncannily similar, shape-shifting bubbles in a lava lamp.
One of the originals from which this image is made reveals that the two negatives have both
been turned to the vertical and then one has been inverted. It is clear that in order to remain
still and floating horizontal in a rock pool, Cahun has bound her ankles to the rocks with rope
or seaweed and is keeping her shoulders and chin just above the water level by holding on to
the underwater surface of the rocks. In order to de-sex her body, she is turned in, her breast
and vagina obscured. The curves of the body fold in towards the womb-like rock face.
33
Cahun, C. 1928, Self-portrait, (Rock Pool)
When considered with an image made two years later in a similar location, it can be
concluded that Cahun and her partner, Moore, have gone to great physical and technical
efforts to make the exact ambiguous image that Cahun had in mind in order to parody the
myth of the self-obsessed Narcissus, who fell in love with his own image.
Cahun, C., 1930, Self-portrait (Narcissus)
34
Further, if we examine the section on self-knowledge and Narcissus in Disavowals, it is

possible to see that she is playing out in front of the camera her own meditations on
Narcissus:
I close my eyes in order to bound off the orgy...I curl up in a ball, I give up my boundaries, I
fold myself toward an imaginary centre...I have my head shaved, my teeth pulled and my
breasts cut off - everything that bothers my gaze or slows it down - my stomach, my ovaries,
the conscious and encysted brain. When I have but one card left in my hand, only the beating
heart to note to perfection, surely I will have won. 53
The style of writing is reminiscent of the irony, violence and bodily rhetoric of a seminal text
for the Surrealists, the Comte de Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldorer,54 particularly the
descriptions of extreme masochism.
Shaw interprets this stripping away as Cahun's masochistic drive towards an escape from the
contingencies of the body and the female in an attempt to achieve a state of self-
contemplation. Yet Cahun goes on to conclude that the tendency to "push toward the
absolute" is a tendency to "push towards the absurd". 55 This represents a rejection of her
Symbolist heritage and the view of Narcissus as the emblem of the artist, and the work of art
as a product of self-contemplation, the absolute primordial self. Instead she reveals the
deception of self-reflection and proposes turning away from the search for the absolute self
and outwards to a "neo-narcissism of a practical humanity" of imperfection and frailty and
collaboration.56
Summary
Full appreciation of Cahun's work requires a breath-taking scope of cross-disciplinary and
contextual knowledge acknowledged by her biographer, Francois Leperlier: "there is not
room...to disentangle…the sources, contextual indicators, inter-textual processes which
...testify to [her]...great capacity for assimilation" 57
While closely aligned to Surrealism, there was much that she rejected and that Surrealism
rejected in her. She did not practise automatism, instead she selected Surrealist techniques
and ideas to make work that, while a product of a wide-ranging imagination, was thoughtfully
crafted and completely under her direction. She aligned with the leftist political sympathies
of many Surrealists but vehemently opposed those who capitulated to social realism as
propaganda. She sustained a healthy critique of Breton's views on the woman as muse, beauty
and homosexuality and Bataille's de-sublimation, while respected by them both. In doing so
she more than demonstrated that she was, at least, their intellectual equal.
53
opcit, Cahun, C.,(1930), p.35-36
54
Comte de Lautréamont, (1868-69), Les Chants de Maldorer, trans.Paul Knight, Penguin Classics; Reprint
edition (26 Jan. 1978)
55
opcit, Shaw, J., (2013), p.79
56
opcit, Cahun, C.,(1930), p.32
57
ibid, afterword by Francois Leperlier.
35
Often too neatly aligned with post-modern concerns with identity, Cahun's work unravels the
political and cultural climate of inter-war Paris and proposes a non-hierarchical, non-binary
relationship between the self and society. In retrospect, it can be argued that Cahun's practice
opens up space for outsiders and qualifies as one of Foucault 's "founders of discursivity"
alongside Freud's psychological theories, and Marx's political philosophy, whose ground-
breaking work fertilised ideas beyond its own discourse. 58 However, since Cahun's work was
unavailable for critical analysis until the 1980s, thirty years after her death in 1954, it is
perhaps all the more remarkable that such a claim is still viable today.
At the core of her practice was her commitment to critically challenge complacency and
accept nothing, especially the role of the artist, as absolute. When she questions her own
subjectivity it is often to comment on wide-ranging social, political, psychological or
aesthetic conditions. However, she avoids overt political propaganda and a straight narrative
voice. Instead, she holds a lens to herself and then uncannily performs; cuts; fragments;
doubles; inverts; montages and negates the image or text into an alternative artifice using a
practice that is consistently and unapologetically indeterminate.
58
Foucault, M., 'What is an Author?', (1969), lecture to Societe Francais, trans. Harari, J.V., The Continental
Aesthetic Reader, ed. Clive Cazeaux, Routledge, London, 2011.p.536.
36
Bibliography
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Articles/Journals/Essays/Catalogues/Collections
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Harper and Row, NY, USA (1972)
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JHT/1995/00045/2/4
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Representation, MIT Press, Cambridge, USA
Conley, K., (2004), 'Claude Cahun's Iconic Heads: from the The Sadistic Judith to Human
Frontier', Papers of Surrealism, Issue 2, Summer 2004,
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disavowals (accessed July 2016)
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Ellis, H., (1929), 'La Femme dans la societe,1:L'hygiene social, Etudes de psychologie
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and Marcel Moore', IWM Junior Visiting Fellows' Conferences, Vol 22, Vienna, from
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40
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41
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42

The Indeterminacy of Claude Cahun

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Sarah Cliff MFA Dissertation 2017

The Indeterminacy of Claude Cahun

Cahun, C., (1927) Self-Portrait (Aviator with swimming goggles)

Word count: 9,523

The Indeterminacy of Claude Cahun

Cahun, C., 1930, Disavowals, Chapter 3

Cahun's refusal to be defined is consistently present through argument and counter-argument,

makes any attempt to categorise Cahun's practice at risk of presenting an over-simplified

Before the cock crows I will deny myself without counting.2

Cahun, C., 1914, Self-portrait (Medusa)

Magritte, R., 1929, Je ne vois pas la femme

In contrast, the fragmented heliogravure collages in Cahun's manifesto, Disavowals are a

Cahun, C., 1930, Disavowals, Chapter 1

The physical construction of the Chapter One heliogravure in Disavowals, presented

Unlike John Heartfield’s use of realistic mass media

Surely you are not claiming to be more homosexual than I?16

Politics and Aesthetics

Ernst, M., 1926, The Fugitive, Natural History

The Uncanny Object and De-sublimation

Cahun, C., 1930, Untitled (petrol pumps)

Cahun, C. 1937, From The Woodpecker's Heart

Cahun, C., 1936, Poupée

Bellmer, H., 1934, Poupée

Breker, A.,1940-41, Berufung

Buñuel, L., 1929, Stills from Le Chien d'Andalou

Cahun, C., 1936, Object

Man Ray, 1933, Still Life

Objet is complex, multi-layered, ambiguous, even deliberately obscure, as Cahun uses a

Anti-Colonialism and Dissidence

Cahun, C. 1927, Untitled (in pose of Buddha)

Cahun, C., 1928, Untitled, (masked naked)

Cahun, C., 1930, Cahun with black waitress

Cahun, C., 1938, untitled (Teutonic dress)

Cahun, C., 1936, (Cahun behind) Têtes de Cristal, British Museum

Continuing the colonial debate and in a Surrealist

Man Ray's title of Ingres's Violin has, at least, a double

Ingres, 1808, Bather of Valpincon

The female body is equated with a violin and

Man Ray deploys his flattened, colour and

Man Ray, 1924, Violin d'Ingres

Cahun, C., 1930, Untitled (Odalisque)

The Theatre and the Self

decapitated Holofernes in an uncanny reversal of roles. The appropriation of this enigmatic

Klimt, G., 1901, Judith I

The anthropologist, Michael Taussig, might summarise Cahun's practice as an attempt by an

Cahun, C., 1929, Self-portrait as Elle

Cahun, C., 1928, Untitled (Theatre Masks)

It was this understanding of culturally determined learned behaviours counter-balanced by

Cahun, C., 1945, Self Portrait (Nazi badge between teeth)

The Camera and Neo-Narcissisum

Cahun, C. 1928, set up negative of Marcel Moore

Cahun, C. 1928, Self-portrait, (chequered jacket)

Cahun, C., 1936, Gascoigne, Penrose, Breton, Mensens,

Cahun, C., 1936, Gascoigne, Penrose, Breton,

Cahun, C., 1928, Self-portrait (Double in Pool)

Cahun, C. 1928, Self-portrait, (Rock Pool)

Cahun, C., 1930, Self-portrait (Narcissus)

Further, if we examine the section on self-knowledge and Narcissus in Disavowals, it is

Cahun, C., 1930, Disavowals, Chapter 6

Bate, D., (2004), Photography and Surrealism, I.B. Taurus, London, UK

Bataille, G., (1928), Histoire de l'oeil, trans. Joachim Neugroschal,

Barnes, D., (1929), Nightwood, Faber and Faber, London, UK

Doy, G., (2007), A Sensual Politics of Photography, IB Taurus, London, UK