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Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation - Review

Art Journal, Summer, 1999 by Sue Taylor

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998. Essays by Dawn Ades, Whitney Chadwick, Salomon Grimberg, Katy Kline, Helaine Posner, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Dickran Tashjian. 200 pp., 18 color ills., 65 b/w. $35 paper.

Exh. schedule: Mirror Images, MIT List Center, Cambridge, Mass., April 9-June 28, 1998; Miami Art Museum, September 18-November 29, 1998; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art:, January 8 - April 20, 1999.

More Articles of Interest: Body trouble - exhibit on figurative representation at the 1995 Venice Biennale; Bellmer now. - books on artist Hans Bellmer - book review; Hans Bellmer at Ubu - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article; Dark night of the doll. - book review; The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait. - book reviews

Since Whitney Chadwick's groundbreaking history, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, appeared in 1985, surrealist studies have enjoyed a tremendous flowering. Contributions from scholars sympathetic to feminist and psychoanalytic paradigms have enriched the field as never before. For many writers, a central problem has been the ostensible misogynistic tendencies of male surrealists who fantasized violent mistreatments of the female body; Chadwick demonstrated how women artists attempted to position themselves within a movement that conceived of the feminine as passive, childlike, exhibitionist, or masochistic. In the essays selected for Mirror Images, she has narrowed her inquiry to self-representation or -portraiture, while extending it to subsequent generations of women artists engaged in a dialogue with surrealism on the problematic subjects of femininity, body, and self.

Dickran Tashjian's essay, "Marcel Duchamp and Transgender Coupling," has little to do with self-representation by women artists, but treats ambiguities of gender in photographs of Rrose Selavy by Man Ray and of Joseph Cornell by Lee Miller and Duane Michals. The article is something of an anomaly in this volume, which itself suffers from a minor identity crisis. "Not intended strictly as an exhibition catalogue" (ix), the book lacks a checklist. Yet, curiously, it lists the numerous lenders, sponsors, and museum venues for the traveling exhibition of the same title. The effect is mystifying, since within the book we never discover the precise content of the exhibition but are burdened with its acknowledgments and teased with reproductions of works by artists such as Lindee Climo, Dorothy Cross, or Kay Sage - mentioned only in passing or not at all in the texts.

Nevertheless, Mirror Images does deliver myriad new insights and a variety of interpretive approaches, especially concerning works by Claude Cahun and Frida Kahlo, as well as Yayoi Kusama, Ana Mendieta, Cindy Sherman, and Francesca Woodman. Cahun, a relatively recent rediscovery, did not appear in Chadwick's original survey; her intriguing self-portrait photographs - in which she posed as puppet, vampire, bald-headed androgyne - have invited recent comparisons with Sherman's ongoing masquerade. Katy Kline's essay for Mirror Images, however, illustrates important distinctions between the two artists. While both question female identity and the unitary subject, "Sherman posits multiple roles," Kline contends, but "Cahun posits multiple selves" (79). A lesbian among her homophobic surrealist colleagues, Cahun had an urgent personal stake in the possibility of a "third sex" theorized by Havelock Ellis, whose writings she translated into French. Similarly, Susan Rubin Suleiman qualifies comparisons between Sherman's contemporary Sex Pictures and Hans Bellmer's 1930s photographs of dolls, both of which employ mannequins to disturbing effect. Suleiman brilliantly imagines an ambivalent "yes, but" dialogue between these oeuvres, establishing an active, critical stance for Sherman rather than merely a passive influence descended through patrilineal channels. Juxtaposing Bellmer's bondage photographs of his companion Unica Zurn with Woodman's pictures of her own body bound with ribbon, Suleiman reads the latter as an ironic commentary on the fetishism so endemic in surrealism as practiced by men.

Woodman also produced two photographic series in the mid-1970s in which her naked body seems subsumed into the fabric of a decaying house. Helaine Posner, in "The Self and the World," compares this poignant vanishing act with Kusama's self-obliteration in psychedelic environments of polka-dots and with Mendieta's disappearance in the ethereal Silhueta series, where impressions of her body in sand or mud are all that remain of the artist's attempts to merge with the maternal earth. Although the relationship of this work to surrealism as Posner explains it is tentative, the elusive self fusing with the environment recalls Roger Caillois's surrealist contention (published in Minotaure in 1935) that camouflage in nature, in moths and butterflies for instance, indicates not a defensive adaptation but a desire to overcome "the distinction... between the organism and its surroundings" - in other words, a universal death drive.

While Posner offers the obligatory disclaimer about "not attempting to psychoanalyze these artists" (170), Salomon Grimberg presents a fascinating Kohutian interpretation of Kahlo's self-portraits and self-fashioning as evidence of a narcissistic personality disorder, also expressed in her insatiable need for appreciative mirroring in friends and lovers. He relies on her artworks, diaries, and poems to suggest that Kahlo chose Diego Rivera as a "self-object" to compensate for an otherwise unintegrated sense of being. For Grimberg, the painful paintings of her lonely birth and surrender to an emotionally detached wet-nurse evince the incomplete bonding in infancy that fueled Kahlo's desperate desire to please others. He understands her Tehuana costume as a seductive strategy aimed at Rivera. Dawn Ades, on the other hand, relates it more broadly to the political discourse of mexicanidad - and within that, to Kahlo's identification with a regional native-American matriarchy. Ades's contribution to the book includes an explanation of how, in contrast to French surrealism, Mexican modernism, attached to values of the Revolution, had to take account of a national culture. As women artists, Kahlo and Maria Izquierdo were doubly marginalized in this context, not allowed to participate in the official world of mural painting. Their oneiric images were hailed by Andre Breton and Antonin Artaud respectively, but they rejected affiliation with surrealism, using its modes, "the gothic and the dream" (125), to assert personal, national, and artistic identities. Ades aligns them with women surrealists Joyce Mansour, Nora Mitrani, and Dorothea Tanning whose various projects transcended the passive and reified femininity envisioned by their male counterparts.

Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation - Review

Art Journal, Summer, 1999 by Sue Taylor

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