High Line Festival: Claude Cahun [Update]
The High Line Festival is a multi-disciplinary arts event in its inaugural year. Each year, one artist will curate the music, film, visual art, and comedy; David Bowie has the honour this year. Part of the proceeds of ticket sales goes to Friends of the High Line, the not-for-profit working with the City towards the preservation of the old El.
The festival seems more like a highly commercial, loose assortment of big-sponsor events brought together under the High Line banner, with only a few chosen by Mr. Bowie himself. One of those, which I will be attending, is:
Time Out Presents — The Photography of CLAUDE CAHUN PUBLIC ART EXHIBITION
May 18th - 20th, Dusk to Midnight
A muliti-media exhibition in the gardens of the General Theological Seminary, 175 Ninth Avenue
Free and Open to the Public
Claude Cahun is:
…a pioneer of the gender-bending role-playing now seen in works by artists such as Cindy Sherman (born the year Cahun died), Nikki S. Lee, and many others.
Lucy Schwob (pseudonym Claude Cahun) (1894–1954) was a French photographer and writer, born in Nantes to a family of prominent Jewish intellectuals. In her early teens she began what would become a deeply devoted lifelong relationship with Suzanne Malherbe (pseudonym Marcel Moore) (1892–1972). An extraordinary couple who worked and lived together for more than forty years, Cahun and Moore created images and writings of startling originality. Avid participants in the cultural avant-garde in Montparnasse during the 1920s and ’30s, they ultimately moved to Jersey, in the Channel Islands (the only part of Great Britain to be occupied by the Germans during World War II). Both Cahun and Moore were part of the Resistance during the occupation. In 1944 they were arrested, tried, and sentenced to death. Their sentences were never carried out, and they were released after liberation in 1945. Cahun never fully recovered from her treatment in prison. She died in 1954.
The choice to present her work in David Bowie’s words:
I saw a little of Cahun’s work in Paris a hundred years ago and then I heard that she had a show in the UK last year. I just had to get her for the High Line. You could call her transgressive or you could call her a cross dressing Man Ray with surrealist tendencies. I find this work really quite mad, in the nicest way. Outside of France and now the UK she has not had the kind of recognition that, as a founding follower, friend and worker of the original surrealist movement, she surely deserves. Meret Oppenheim was not the only one with a short haircut. Nothing could better do this, I thought, than to show her photographs through the digital technology of the 21st century and in a setting that embraces the pastoral sanctuary of her last years.
[Update: ARTFORUM’s Zach Baron comments more specifically as to the aloof nature of throwing these events together and calling it a festival.]
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