Surrealism was a gated realm created exclusively for male artists, the majority of whom objectified and fetishized women. For a female artist to unlock this gate, she had to fulfill the male artists’ need for narrowing the role of women down to an object of male desire. This conception of women blinded male Surrealists to the fact that women were individuals with multi-faceted personalities, who wanted to be more than their muses. Because of their blindness to women’s capabilities, women “functioned within male Surrealist works at best as an idealized Other, at worst as an object for the projection of unresolved anxieties.”[1] This objectification hindered women artists from joining the movement and gaining entry into the art world. Despite these stereotypes, some women did manage to become a part of the movement, but “even when [they] were included by [Andre] Breton and the male Surrealists, a full recognition of their conceptual and creative force [remained] lacking.”[2] Being a part of the movement as a female artist did not guarantee the same amount of respect, which was given to their male counterparts. Due to these problems, artists Frida Kahlo and Claude Cahun, despite exhibiting with the Surrealists and using their visual vocabulary, never became official members of the group. They used Surrealist practices, such as having dream-like images and mirrors in their art, but rather than using such practices to objectify women, they used these techniques to overcome ‘the subject-object split’, which was one of the core tenets of Surrealism. The subject-object split is the boundary between a subject, which acts, and an object, which is acted upon. To overcome it meant to treat everything as a subject, as an entity capable of independent action. The male Surrealists were not able to overcome this duality due to their obsession with “seeking transformation through a female representational object, which paradoxically [reinforced] the subject-object split that Surrealism was dedicated to overcoming.”[3] Kahlo and Cahun, on the other hand, overcame this duality by using their art as a venue to portray themselves as subjects, and not objects. Despite being females and not being a part of the movement, Frida Kahlo and Claude Cahun used one of Surrealism’s base beliefs to beat the male artists at their own game.

Both Kahlo and Cahun overcame the subject-object split through their self-portraits, which were not made for the pleasure of the male gaze. Rather, their self-portraits asked questions about identity, and were reflective of the artists’ unidealized reality and transgender sexuality. By refusing traditional constraints and categories for women, such as gender specific clothing and haircuts, Kahlo and Cahun blurred gender lines. Lillian Faderman, a scholar on lesbian relationships, notes:

[T]hroughout history, lesbians were persecuted (often burned or drowned) for their sexual activities if they also cross-dressed as men, whereas if they engaged in the same activities in female dress, they were usually only reprimanded in the courts. [The] cross-dressing lesbian created more confusion about gendered roles, claimed male social privileges, and demonstrated her transgression publicly and deliberately in a manner that made her reform and return to conventional heterosexuality seem impossible.[4]

By cross-dressing, Kahlo and Cahun took visual symbols of power away from men and changed the view of women from meek and submissive objects to proactive seekers of change. They confused the patriarchal Surrealist system so that it could no longer easily categorize who should be tyrannized and fetishized, and who should be admired, based on gender. Unlike the majority of the male Surrealists, Kahlo and Cahun accomplished the merging of opposites through their self-portraits. I will discuss why these artists were not official members of Surrealism, and how they still serve as inspirations today, while analyzing them and their works to further prove their success in overcoming the subject-object split.

Frida Kahlo was one of the “young women who joined the Surrealist circle in Paris in the 1930s. [These women] declared themselves not Surrealist while nevertheless exhibiting with the group on occasion and adopting many of Surrealism’s core tenets.”[5] This was because of the problematic ideas of the male Surrealists as well as the differences in their art work. While the Surrealists’ main focus was on dream imagery, Kahlo drew on her personal experience to turn her work into a political tool. In Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, Kahlo is portrayed as described in the title. She has just cropped her hair, hair that is lying all around her and looks a little animated, and has donned a man’s suit which seems large for her body but does not sag on her shoulders. She sits on a chair with a mournful expression, but her gaze is unfaltering and shameless. Margaret A. Lindauer, author of Devouring Frida: The Art History and Popular Celebrity of Frida Kahlo, points out that Kahlo “wears earrings and women’s shoes. So Kahlo has not presented herself as a man [rather] she has combined feminine and masculine [stereotypes].”[6] She has not given up her gender to become someone she is not. Instead, she is wearing men’s clothing to change her figure from a sexual feminine object to one of a woman in charge of her own image. By cropping her hair, a signifier of her gender, she paints herself as a subject capable of “liberating [herself] from patriarchally defined gender tyranny, not in order to become a man, but to have available some of the social privileges symbolically reserved for men.”[7] In her quest to liberate herself, Kahlo turned down the offer of becoming an official member of Surrealism, a movement with members who contradicted their own principles by objectifying women and not giving them the same privileges as men. For Kahlo, overcoming the subject-object split and opening up the eyes of her audience to women’s subjectivity was more important.

Due to her life-long fight against female objectification, Kahlo is an inspiration for women to break out of gender restrictions. By redressing her body and capturing it in paint, she still challenges and defies the roles and rules society placed on her. Through her art, even after death, she refuses to let her individuality be boxed, wrapped and ribboned by anyone, and does not remain silent about her identity. In her work, her gaze is never submissive. Even when subdued, it speaks against the compact, pleasurable descriptions that women are forced into. Kahlo’s self-portraits “do not employ the traditionally gendered imagery of colonization but [subvert] them to overthrow the binary-driven hierarchies of art and the colonizer-colonized.”[8] By putting the colonizer and the colonized, the male and the female, into the same space without any boundaries, Kahlo overcomes the subject-object split that previously divided these entities. With this act, she introduces women to the fact that gender should not be inhibiting them from raising their social status to the same level as men’s.

Unlike Kahlo, who was offered a position as a member in Surrealism because of her exoticism, and declined it, Claude Cahun wanted to join the movement and make changes within it. But unlike Kahlo, Cahun pushed gender lines beyond the male Surrealists’ comfort level. This is why “Andre Breton remained relatively unresponsive to Cahun’s attempts to gain artistic affirmation from them [and] never embraced [her] as a core member of the group.”[9] This goes to show the group’s hypocrisy. They were proud of admitting women into their group, but if a woman’s voice was louder than theirs, they kept her at a safe distance. For the Surrealists, Cahun was unacceptable as a woman since she could not be “treated as [an object] expected to serve as an inspiration for male genius [nor would she] allow manipulation of [her body] for aesthetic purposes and male sexual desire.”[10] Rather, she was an intelligent subject who created art that destroyed notions of females as objects made for the pleasure of men. She wanted to be a part of Surrealism despite their hypocritical values because like the male Surrealists, she also “wished to elevate the unconscious, the irrational, and the dream as inspiration and method for her art [with focus on the female body].”[11] But Cahun wanted to use these Surrealist ideas to overcome the subject-object split, instead of fetishizing the female body. She started with changing her name from Lucy Schwob to Claude Cahun. Claude is not a gender-specific name, and Cahun was her Jewish grandmother’s last name[12]. By renaming herself, Cahun rejected gender differences and showed pride in her Jewish ancestry in spite of the dangers that Jews faced during World War II. Her self-portraits are extensions of her reality. These portraits challenge “the gaze that had become accustomed to objectifying women [and subvert] the social and sexual hierarchy in which the artist [was] quintessentially male and his material female.[13] By removing boundaries dividing genders, and the lines dividing the active subject and the passive object, Cahun defied male Surrealist’s ideas while strictly following Surrealist principles. She rebelled against gender stereotypes and merged the split between subject and object without yielding into any of the Surrealist ideas for women, which is why, despite her groundbreaking work, the Surrealists never accepted her as a member of their movement.

By exploring and exhibiting her own image without idealizing it, Cahun took the power of objectifying women away from men and influenced other women to do the same. For instance, in her self-portrait with the mirror, Cahun wears a man’s coat and hair cut, and instead of looking in the mirror, she looks directly at her viewer. By doing so, “she challenges the traditional notion of a woman’s relationship with her mirror as an expression of female vanity. More importantly, she disrupts the fixed polarities of gender difference and the privileging gaze of men by showing that she is not simply the object of a gaze.”[14] She asks her audience to look at her as she is, a confident, unique, transgender figure. Like Kahlo, Cahun brings “to the surface previously hidden or feared aspects of the self, thereby empowering women’s ability [to create] a more liberated self-definition, a definition that allow[s] for multiplicity and paradox.”[15] In this way, she owns her position as an independent and strong subject with many aspects to her personality. She portrays herself untainted by any societal or gender constraints, and in doing so, she creates a way for other women to break through the objectification that is placed on them. Cahun overcomes the subject-object split through her art, by giving the same amount of control to the model, as she gives to the photographer. In her work, she turns the conventional object into a subject, and inspires others to do the same.

Both Claude Cahun and Frida Kahlo accomplished one of Surrealism’s main goals, overcoming the subject-object split, without being members of the movement, while the male Surrealists ignorantly worked against the standards that they themselves had set up. By breaking through conventions, Cahun and Kahlo changed how women were viewed by men and encouraged women to embrace their positions as subjects. They questioned stereotypes and created powerful work by portraying themselves as figures capable of authority. They disturbed the art world in a meaningful way. They fought tough battles so we could win today.

Unfortunately, their battles are far from won. Women might be less dependent on men in the present society, but they are still too often treated as objects that only reflect what men want. The act of focusing on individual female body parts to ‘celebrate’, or rather objectify them, which the male Surrealists enjoyed, is still very much a part of both men’s and women’s mindsets today. While men are seen as whole individuals, women are reduced to cleavages and legs. This objectification of women is used to sell movies, TV shows, cosmetics, magazines and clothes amongst many other products. And with the help of these products, this objectification is reiterated to the future generation of girls so they grow up thinking that while men can have many body types, it is the norm for a woman to have only one. To counter these societal entrapments, we need to keep on finding female inspirations who broke and break through these stereotypes; we need to remember to say “I want!”, before “I want to be wanted.”

Bibliography

Cahun, Claude. Self-portrait. Photograph. 1928. Jersey Heritage Collections, Jersey.
Caws, Mary Ann, Surrealism and Women. Cambridge: MIT Press. 1991. Google Books.
Chadwick, Whitney. Mirror images: women, surrealism, and self-representation. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.

Chadwick, Whitney. Women artists and the surrealist movement. London: Thames and Hudson, 1985.

Belton, Robert J, The Beribboned Bomb: The Image of Woman in Male Surrealist Art. Calgary: Calgary Press, 1995. Ebrary Reader.
Elliot, Bridget and Jo-Ann Wallace. “Fleurs du mal or second-hand roses?: Natalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, and the `Originality of the Avant-Garde.” Feminist Review 40 (1992): 6-30. doi:10.2307/1395274.

Ferman, Gloria. “Art History and the Case for the Women of Surrealism.” The Journal of General Education 27 (1975): 31-54. url: http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy-library.ocad.ca/stable/27796489
Kahlo, Frida. Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair. Oil on canvas. 1940. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Knafo, Danielle. “Claude Cahun: The Third Sex.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 2 (2001): 29-60. url:http://journals1.scholarsportal.info.ezproxy-library.ocad.ca/pdf/15240657/v02i0001/29_cctts.xml.

Lindauer, Margaret A., Devouring Frida: The Art History and Popular Celebrity of Frida Kahlo. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2011. Google Books.

Mahon, Alyce. “The Lost Secret Frida Kahlo and the Surrealist Imaginary.” Journal Of Surrealism & The Americas 5 (2011): 33-52. url: http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy-library.ocad.ca/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=e086131e-06ab-43c1-a2ce-87e62e55aaeb%40sessionmgr114&vid=3&hid=117.
Wampole, Christy. “The Impudence of Claude Cahun.” L’Esprit Créateur 53 (2013): 101-113. doi: 10.1353/esp.2013.0009.

[1]Mary Ann Caws, Surrealism and Women (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 8. Google Books.

[2] Ibid., 2.

[3]Ibid., 8

[4]Bridget Elliot and Jo-Ann Wallace. “Fleurs du mal or second-hand roses?: Natalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, and the `Originality of the Avant-Garde” Feminist Review 40 (1992): 20, doi:10.2307/1395274.

[5]Whitney Chadwick, Mirror images: women, surrealism, and self-representation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 5.

[6]           Margaret A. Lindauer, Devouring Frida: The Art History and Popular Celebrity of Frida Kahlo (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 45. Google Books.

[7]Lindauer, Devouring Frida: The Art History and Popular Celebrity of Frida Kahlo.

[8]Alyce Mahon. “The Lost Secret Frida Kahlo and the Surrealist Imaginary,” Journal Of Surrealism & The Americas 5 (2011): 43, url: http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy-library.ocad.ca/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=e086131e-06ab-43c1-a2ce-87e62e55aaeb%40sessionmgr114&vid=3&hid=117.

[9]Christy Wampole. “The Impudence of Claude Cahun,” L’Esprit Créateur 53 (2013): 102, doi: 10.1353/esp.2013.0009.

[10]Danielle Knafo. “Claude Cahun: The Third Sex,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 2 (2001): 35, url:http://journals1.scholarsportal.info.ezproxy-library.ocad.ca/pdf/15240657/v02i0001/29_cctts.xml.

[11]Ibid., 36

[12]Wampole, “The Impudence of Claude,” 101.

[13]Knafo, “Claude Cahun: The Third Sex”, 36.

[14]Knafo, “Claude Cahun: The Third Sex”, 37.

[15]Ibid., 58.

Published on: Jun 27, 2014

Painting has been pronounced dead many times. Douglas Crimp, one of the main critics of painting, argues that painting has become old-fashioned. With the use of techniques such as appropriation, quotation and duplication, newer mediums like photography, film, and video are doing what painting has failed to do (Miles, Christopher). Yet, the majority of art history revolves around painting – along with the majority of current art schools, artist studios, and art galleries. The medium may be defined as traditional, elite, and controversial, but contemporary painting’s role is crucial in advancing current conceptual art practices.

Paintings give works of art the distinguishable, physical qualities that make them art objects. If these properties are taken away from them, what qualifies as art is left to the museums and the art market to decide. Benjamin Buchloh states that freedom of conceptual art from medium and traditional criteria of judging art only strengthens the power of the art institutions. They determine whether it is art and what is not (Verwoert 3-4). This institutionalization of art can be prevented through painting, which gives art the visual properties that can be used to critique artistic ability, and gives power to artists rather than the art institutes.

Contemporary painting gives art some solid borders to push, some conventions that keep it from becoming so loose that its ideas become non-sensible. It holds art back from becoming so content based that the visual critique of works becomes completely irrelevant, from becoming cold, robotic, and boxed in theories and words. What is left to define then is, what counts as contemporary? And how a medium so bound with tradition can speak of our time and advance current conceptual art practices.

This curatorial catalogue essay is about the works of Olafur Eliasson, Marlene Dumas and Vija Celmins. Each artist has one work in the exhibition and all works can be defined by Arthur Danto’s definition of contemporary art: “what happens after there are no more periods in some master narrator of art” (Verwoert 5). Without relying on just historical backgrounds, each painting exhibits the importance of contemporary painting in the progression of present conceptual practices and makes Robert Musil’s words in The Man Without Qualities true: “If some painting is still to come, if painters are still to come, they will not come from where we expect them to” (Birnbaum 157). The artists use their historical medium in unexpected ways that analyse their surroundings, their subjects and art critics – rather than, as Bois says, relying “uncritically on the traditional understanding of the medium” (Verwoert 5). They are fully engaged in their work, keeping painting from becoming in Gerhard Richter’s words, “pure idiocy” (Crimp 24) – and all of their works follow Bois’s notion of a conceptual painting; a painting that is self-evident and produces “its own justification by means of continuous formal self-scrutiny and the creation of contextual relations” (Verwoert, 5). They produce dialogue about themselves in the context of the art world and through that, they have an impact on conceptual art practices.

The first painting I will discuss is Olafur Eliasson’s Green River (Tokyo, Japan, 2001, Stockholm, Sweden, 2000, Los Angeles, USA, 1999, Moss, Norway, 1998 and Bremen, Germany, 1998).

In this work, Olafur has taken pigment out of the studio and thrown it into rivers, turning them green, changing urban landscapes at a huge scale, and also changing the relationship between paint and painting, medium and artwork. This painting is described by Daniel Birnbaum as being “a zone of contagion, constantly branching out and widening its scope” (158).

In the interview between Olafur Eliasson and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Obrist describes the significant idea, the goal of this project, to be a vehicle that makes “the city visible for its inhabitants, who no longer take any notice of the way it works or what’s special about it, [and to challenge] their perception of their environment as something changeless and reassuring.” The painting makes the city, for a brief period, an interactive physical space rather than a mental backdrop. Other than commenting on the role of our surroundings, by taking paint outside the studio and making it part of an urban landscape, Olafur has blurred the boundaries between different art forms. By taking pigment out of its familiar setting, he has widened the scope of painting and merged it into other disciplines like performance art and installation. Using this approach, he has opened up more space for conceptual art practices to step over the lines of medium specificity and to engage painting with environments outside of museums and studios.

The second painting in this exhibition is Marlene Dumas’s Feather Stola (Oil on Canvas, 2000).

In this painting, the artist uses quick brush strokes, like the expressionists, to lay out a rough form of a nude woman. The nude woman is a traditional subject in the Western art world as a seductive form, but in Dumas’ painting, the colours make her look more bruised and hurt instead of seductive or appealing. Dumas’s sources for her paintings come from photographs in which the subject has already posed once for the camera. She takes these subjects and instead of painting portraits of them, she paints their faces and bodies to represent emotions, moods, and events. The themes of her paintings revolve around race, sexuality and a strange play between violence and tenderness (Horlock).

In Feather Stola, she has worked up a rough figure with soft brush marks, portraying lust and eroticism but in a way that looks both frightening and vulnerable. The relationship between art and female beauty is explored in this work, challenging Western perceptions of the female body. With self-awareness about the traditional medium and subject in her work, Dumas questions conventions embedded in art practices. Through this image, she has created room for not just painting, but also for the use of traditional subject matter in art works as a practice that is capable of self-critique, not unlike the unconventional and experimental materials often used in the current art world. Feather Stola is an example for conceptual artists who prefer working in traditional mediums, of how a medium does not have to limit conceptuality, and can instead, be used to further it.

The last painting to be discussed in this essay is Vija Celmins’ Untitled (Ocean) (Oil on Linen, 1990-95).

Vija Celmins’ work is a painting of a photograph. The photograph was taken in an instant, however the painting itself took five years to complete. One can feel the passing of time while viewing the piece, not just because of the length of time it took to paint it, but also because of the repetitiveness of the waves, stilled in their movement.

In addition to this piece, Celmins’ work is greatly influenced by Clement Greenberg, a Modern art critic. Her paintings are shaped by his theories about abstract works: “there are no longer centres of interest, highlights, dominating forms, every part [is] equivalent in stress to every other part” (Birnbaum et al. 82). She uses his criteria for painting in a way that works for a realistic painting so that her paintings lie in between abstraction and photorealism and describes her goal with her own work as “multidimensional, going back and forth in space while remaining true to the flatness of the surface” (Celmins, 85).

Her painting is flat, yet it depicts the fluidity of waves, but despite the illusionistic style of painting, it comes from Greenberg’s definition of abstract paintings. While following the rules established for painting by Greenberg, Celmins changes them to do the opposite of what they are for so that even with a flattened picture plane, her paintings have areas of depth. With the use of a much debated medium, she manages to intelligently criticize Greenberg’s writings about painting as a flat surface, while still following his opinions in her paintings, in his beliefs in a movement that could turn around and question “its own foundation, not to subvert it but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence” (1). Through this thoughtful way of thinking about the inspiration of her work, Celmins’ paintings both follow and defy Greenberg’s ideas. They break through traditional modes of thinking about abstraction versus realism and develop new areas of exploration in conceptual art.

Olafur Eliasson, Marlene Dumas, and Vija Celmins, each use paint in innovative ways that involve self-analysis. All the works in this exhibition portray the way painting’s role has changed over time and how a traditional medium can be used in a contemporary way so that it becomes a source of inspiration and advancement for current conceptual art practices. Instead of a window leading us into another world, paintings have become a mirror reflecting their time. They have turned into a network of thoughtful ideas instead of pictures created for aesthetic enjoyment. With the use of paint, metaphors come back into use and create a break from literalism that ties down art with the use of other more immediate mediums (Brisman, 1-2). By bridging conceptuality and painting together, art can be saved from the museums and art markets, painting can play a useful role in the current art world, and conceptual art can gain new perspectives by becoming more open to the history and traditions of painting.

Works Cited

Birnbaum, Daniel, et al. Defining Contemporary Art: 25 Years in 200 Pivotal Artworks. London: Phaidon, 2011. Print.

Birnbaum, Daniel, Vija Celmins, Douglas Crimp, et al. Painting: Documents of Contemporary Art. London: Whitechapel Gallery, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2011. Print.

Brisman, Avi. “Blindfolding The Muse: The Plight Of Painting In The Age Of Conceptual Art.” CAA Reviews (1999): 1-2. Art & Architecture Complete. Web. 15 Mar. 2013.

Celmins, Vija. Untitled (Ocean). 1995. Sotheby’s New York. Sothebey’s. Web. 22 May 2013.

Danto, Arthur. “INTRODUCTION: Modern, Postmodern, and Contemporary.” After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (1996): 5. Print.

Dumas, Marlene. Feather Stola. 2000. Saatchi Gallery,London. Saachi Gallery. Web. 22 May 2013.

Eliasson, Olafur. Green River. 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998. Japan, Sweden, USA, Norway and Germany. Web. 22 May 2013.

Greenberg, Clement. Modernist Painting. Np, nd. Web.

Horlock, Mary. “Marlene Dumas | Tate.”Home | Tate. N.p., 11 June 1997. Web. 30 Mar. 2013.

Miles, Christopher. “The Death of Painting and The Writing of Painting’s Post-Crisis,Post-Critique Future by Christopher Miles | ART LIES: A Contemporary Art Quarterly.” ART LIES: A Contemporary Art Quarterly. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Apr. 2013.

Obrist, Hans Ulrich. Conversation between Olafur Eliasson and Hans Ulrich Obrist. In Olafur Eliasson: Chaque matin je me sens différent. Chaque soir je me sens le meme. Edited by Joseph Jacquet. Exhibition catalogue. Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2002: 17-37. Translation by John Tittensor. Web. 15 Mar. 2013.

Verwoert, Jan. “Afterall • Autumn/Winter 2005 • Why Are Conceptual Artists Painting Again? Because They Think It’s a Good Idea.” Afterall. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2013.

Published on: May 4, 2013