Clare Rae explores ideas of performance and gesture to interrogate and subvert dominant modes of representation. Her work is informed by feminist theory, and presents an alternate and often awkward experience of the female body. Known for her engagement with domestic and institutional spaces, Rae’s work has recently been captured and exhibited in locations such as the National Gallery of Victoria, Monash University, the Abbotsford Convent, Sutton Project Space and the Substation, Melbourne.
Clare did a shoot inspired by Claude Cahun in jersey where Cahun lived during WW2 .
Here are some images I produced loosely inspired by the work of Sam Contis (as found in my Artist References). I am happy with some of these, and those which I liked I have edited and will include below.
Cindy Sherman was born on the 19th of January 1954 in New Jersey. Her work consists mostly of portraiture that explores ideas of identity, where she assumes the presentation of a myriad of characters. She has had a long and successful career, with her work being exhibited across America and Europe, and was made an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 2010.
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Arguably her breakthrough work was her series Untitled Film Stills created between 1977 and 1980 after she moved to New York. She is portrayed in a variety of different guises with props, having taken the role of model, photographer, stylist and director, and, in turn, plays the part of typical female caricatures in performance media to create scenes that resemble those from mid-20th-century B movies. These images rely on female stereotypes and caricatures such as the jaded seductress, the unhappy housewife, the jilted lover, and the vulnerable naif.
Later in her career, Sherman began to focus on colour prints with more emphasis on costume, lighting and facials. As time went on, in series such as History Portraits‘Sherman provides hints of their artifice. She often wears exaggerated wigs and prosthetic body parts or creates settings that seem obviously patched together. In this way, she parodies her source images and the societal attitudes that they reflect and perpetuate. She also alerts viewers that photographs cannot necessarily be trusted. Like other art forms, photographs are shaped by the person who makes them and can mislead, manipulate, and express a particular point of view.’ https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/cindy-sherman-untitled-number-228-1990/
“I wish I could treat every day as Halloween, and get dressed up and go out into the world as some eccentric character,”
Cindy Sherman
Claude Cahun
Claude Cahun, born Lucy Schwob in Nantes in 1984, was a pioneer of non-conventional gender presentation in performance art, being one of the first artists of her time to openly and publicly explore the boundaries of gender identity. She is best known for her self portraiture that explores this as well as her personal resistance against the Nazi regime that occupied Jersey during the period that she lived there, for which she was imprisoned and sentenced to death in 1944.
Cahun moved to Jersey in 1937 alongside her stepsister and lover Marcel Moore and stayed up until her death in 1954. Her work is most extensively documented with the Jersey Heritage Trust for this reason. Her death sentence was unable to be fulfilled due to the liberation of Jersey the year after its issue, and so she was freed from imprisonment.
Cahun and Moore
However, soon after her freedom was granted, she died of ill health (possibly owed to the conditions of her imprisonment) in 1954. Moore committed suicide in 1972 and they are buried together in St Brelade’s Churchyard.
Cahun and Moore’s gravestone in St Brelade’s churchyard, Jersey
What was so pioneering about Cahun’s work?
Cahun’s work presented her in conventionally masculine clothing and hairstyles and often portrayed her in what was a series of typically masculine roles; including a dandy, a weight lifter, and an aviator. This was down to Cahun’s own personal preferences as to how she presented herself – ever since a young age she had struggled with her gender identity and in choosing her new name to be Claude as opposed to Lucy, she was able to use a name that was, in France, used by both men and women. This offered some respite to her and, through this, as well as shaving her head, Cahun was able to channel a much more androgynous appearance and ambiguous character.
Obviously, at the time of production, a lot of her work shocked viewers with its stark and brazen breaking of ‘the rules’. Cahun was not conducting herself in the manner that was expected of her and this was the most unique aspect of her style. Her resistant nature is shown in how she treated the occupying Germans and it is therefore only expected for this to shine through in her work.
This article explores her relevance in today’s world.
“Under this mask, another mask. I will never be finished removing all these faces.”
Claude Cahun
Nilupa Yasmin
Nilupa Yasmin is a primarily lens-based artist who also explores crafting in her work (as a reclamation of what is a stereotypically and expected female activity in India), which focuses heavily on the subjects of identity, self, and culture. As a British-Bangladeshi, Yasmin finds inspiration in her heritage and connections between her family background and her life in South London. This connection is one that will strike a chord with many as the community of South Asians in London and other major British cities is a large one, and her work discusses and explores experiences that are fairly common in this community.
Her series Mother Told Me Stories is her most recent multi-media project that explores the reclamation of the skill of embroidery from the British Raj‘s attempts to abolish the Indian cotton trade in 1876 and control how it was used. This work presents self-portraits of Yasmin, as with the majority of her pieces, in the role of Bangladeshi women weaving Kanthas (traditional quilts embroidered from scraps of cloth), alongside embroidered fabric and some wording that gives further context to the piece.
One of the pieces in the series.
An overlook of the collection in an exhibition setting.
I am also personally interested by the series Wallpaper of Memories, where Yasmin combines old family photos with an arrangement of various patterns found within each image. She curates a response that connects, once again, her own success as an artist to her personal and family history to create a contemporary piece.
Sam Contis
Sam Contis, born 1982 in Pennsylvania, is a visual artist whose work focuses on aspects of the beauty of the human form and its relationship with human connection. Her work has been widely exhibited in locations such as the Barbican in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. ‘Contis puts us face to face with detail, texture, and flesh, creating an intensely physical terrain where individuals and the landscape surrounds us. “The earth and body become indistinguishable,” she said.’ (https://www.moma.org/artists/68380)
Taking inspiration from Kurland we went out to the cliff paths on the north coast. We found an area of flowers and grass to try and recreate her girl pictures. We found an area of flowers on the cliff paths, similar to her work. We also found an old fort with a bridge which created some nice pictures.
Claude Cahun was a French surrealist photographer, sculptor, and writer. Schwob adopted the pseudonym Claude Cahun in 1914. Cahun is best known as a writer and self-portraitist, who assumed a variety of performative personae.
Some of Cahun’s portraits feature the artist looking directly into the camera lens at the viewer, head shaved, often revealing only the head/shoulders and also blurring any gender indicators and behaviours. This serves to undermine the stereotypes and ideals of what a person should look like depending on their gender identity.
Claude Cahun’s photographic self-portraits present mystery, exuberance, and sobriety. Born in France, Cahun lived mostly on the island of Jersey with long-term partner, and stepsister, Marcel Moore. They both changed to using gender-neutral pronouns during early adulthood and were previously known as known as Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe. Moore, although not often seen, was always present in being an artist collaborator and Cahun’s personal support. Cahun’s self exploration has been described as relentless and at times unsettling as they use their gender ambiguity and unique looks to create meaning in their art. Tragically in line with the fragmentary nature of Cahun’s outlook, much of the artist’s work was destroyed following an arrest and subsequent imprisonment for resistance against the Nazis.
This image above is a very famous piece of their work, continuing along their usual ambiguous and weird style of portraiture. The shaved head and use of framing from the shoulders and upwards allows the artist to not conform to any gender stereotypes or fall within any brackets as they are not showing any stereotypical features of being male or female. In my opinion, the double exposure is a representation of Claude looking back at themselves and potentially trying to understand themselves. The confused expression could be a representation of their struggles with their identity and their journey to becoming comfortable with themselves and who they are.
The themes of ‘FEMININITY and MASCULINITY’ are a binary opposite – a pair of related terms or concepts that are opposite in meaning.
According to Ferdinand de Saussure, binary opposition is the system by which two theoretical opposites are strictly defined and set off against one another. Using binary opposites can often be very helpful in generating ideas for a photographic project as it provides a framework – a set of boundaries to work within.
inspired shoot:
Using the binary opposites of BOY/GIRL and BLACK/WHITE
Femininity – a set of attributes, behaviours, and roles generally associated with women and girls.
Masculinity – a set of attributes, behaviours, and roles associated with men and boys.
Both can be theoretically understood as being a social construct, while there is also evidence that some behaviours considered masculine/feminine are influenced by cultural and biological factors.
Identity – Identity encompasses the memories, experiences, relationships, and values that makes up a person’s sense of self. This combined creates a sense of who we are over time, even as new developments are being made and incorporated into our identity.
How can identity by place?
Personal identity formation and evolution is impacted by various factors such as society, family, friends, ethnicity, race, culture, location, opportunities, media, interests, appearance, self-expression, and life experiences.
Exposure to different cultures can affect our identity and interacting with similar and different cultures in diverse environments enables us to continuously adapt our own beliefs, values and perceptions and form a redefined sense of self. Our culture shapes the way we work and play, and correlates with how we view ourselves and others and it affects our values and morals. This is how the society we live in influences our choices. But ones individual choices can also influence others and ultimately help shape/change our society.
Identity politics is defined as a political approach wherein people of a particular race, nationality, religion, gender, sexual orientation, social background, social class, or other identifying factors develop political agendas that are based upon these identities. While the term originated from the need to reshape movements that had until then prioritized the monotony of sameness over the value of difference.
For example, the “second wave” feminist movement fought for body autonomy, pushed for women’s equality and demanded that women be treated as human beings. However, similar to the first wave of feminism, centered around women’s suffrage and gaining the right to vote, white women became the default standard for all women. This then made it seem like the change desired was progress for white women and not all women.
Identity politics is deeply connected with the oppression of some groups in society and analyses that oppression. The term is used primarily to describe political movements in western societies, covering nationalist, multicultural, women’s rights, civil rights, and LGBT movements.
Identity politics has been a major driving force behind social progress and is seen as a step in the creation of more inclusive and fair nations.
However when it comes to identity politics, it can lead some political figures to overemphasise the importance of identity in the greater scheme of politics and in summary it can be used by politicians to get votes by exploiting identity politics.
Culture wars
A culture war is a cultural conflict between social groups and the struggle for dominance of their values, beliefs, and practices.
These movements can be viewed as being psoitively impactful as people are fighting for change and what they believe in however some disagree and critisize the idea that the concept is artificial, imposed, or asymmetric, rather than a result of authentic differences between cultures.
Francesca Woodman is known best for her non-traditional self portrait images. There is a regular pattern of semi-nudity that is half hidden and obscured. She uses furniture, or hides herself through a long exposure to blur her body. She was born in Colorado in 1958, and began shooting in her early teenage years whilst at boarding school. During this she managed to shoot around 800 photos. Due to the fact her father was a printer and photographer meant she was brought up in an environment where making and talking about art were part of everyday life. She was influenced by European culture and had a significant impact on her artistic development. Surrealist art and Claud Cahun are also seen through her work as an influence. Woodman later took her life at the young age of twenty-two.
Her images hold a delicate sense due to their small scale, and convey an underlying sense of human fragility. It creates a personal sense to her work. Most of her images are shot in the ARTIST ROOMS COLLECTION from her previous boyfriend. On the images that she produced, she wrote messages to him and these became part of her work.
Woodman challenged the idea that the camera fixes time and space, and she explored what she could create with her camera. She would manipulate light and how movement created photographic effects.
I like Woodman’s work because her identity isn’t shown but the image still shows emotion and presents her thoughts. I would like to take her idea of using a slow shutter to obscure her body and create an effect where time is frozen in an image. It shows movement stuck in time, and I think this links well to the idea that stereotypes are stuck in place. If I used her technique I would probably use nature as a surrounding instead of her typical moody and worn backgrounds.
Analysis
Clare Rae
‘I am an artist working in Naarm, on the lands of the eastern Kulin Nations also known as Melbourne, Australia. I acknowledge the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups on whose unceded lands I live and work. I respectfully acknowledge their Ancestors and Elders, past and present.’
Clare explores ideas or performance and gesture to interrogate and subvert dominant modes of representation. Feminist theory is a big part of her work to present an alternate and often awkward experience of subjectivity and the female body which is typically hers. She has a main focus in her photography to explore performance documentation, especially with how the camera acts as a collaborator, and not a mute witness, to the performer.
She received first class Honours in Fine Art in 2009 at RMIT University, completed a Master of Arts by research in 2014 at Monash University and in 2020 she began a PhD at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.
On a visit to Jersey in 2017 as part of the Archisle international artist-in-residence programme, she ran workshops and researched Claud Cahun’s archives. Her series inspired by Cahun was called Never standing on two feet and she considered Claud’s engagement with the physical and cultural landscapes of Jersey.
Rae said: ‘Like Cahun’s, my photographs depict my body in relation to place‘… Cahun used self-portraiture to subvert the dominance of the male gaze in photographic depictions of the female body in the landscape... My practice is invested in the feminist act of self-representation and I draw parallels between my performances of an expanding vocabulary of gesture and Cahun’s overtly performative images of the body expressing a multiplicity of identity‘.
I think Rae’s work links well to the idea of feminism, the representation of the female body and its movement and shape, but destabilising the common stereotypes of the male gaze. I think the abstract forms she creates with her body creates dominance in her image whilst being placed in simple settings. The fact that the colours and backgrounds are minimalistic and basic emphasise the impact of her body. Her face is often hidden in her images which also presents the female body as powerful, even without identity.
