Disavowals

Memories? Choice morsels. My soul is fragmentary.--from DisavowalsClaude
Cahun (1894-1954), born Lucy Schwob, was a poet, performer, resistance fighter,
prisoner, Surrealist, "constructor and explorer of objects," photographer,
and "queer freak" who invented her life by flaunting the interchangability
of roles and playing with the ambivalence of identity. Whether feigning
vulnerability on the arm of her lover and stepsister Suzanne Malherbe aka Marcel
Moore ("the other me"), making theatrical public appearances in disguise
(sailor, gymnast, gypsy), or making herself up (vampire, Buddha, mannequin, angel)
for self-portraits and installations, she rendered opposites inoperative and exposed
the thinness of gender and power constructs by reducing them to mere surface
costumes. In May 1930 Éditions Carrefour of Paris published 500 copies of a book
called Aveux non avenues, in which Cahun explored these same dialectics in book
form. It is the nearest thing to a memoir Cahun wrote, but in fact the book is an
anti-memoir, a critique of autobiography, where she uses subversive photomontages
and statements to present herself as a force of genius possessed of the need to
resist identification and to maintain within herself "the mania of the
exception." Disavowals is the first appearance of that work, widely considered
to be her most important text, in English. Reproductions of the original
photomontages introduce the various sections, which in turn explore Cahun's
distinctive ideas and obsessions--self-interrogation, narcissism, metamorphosis,
love, gender-switching, humor, fear. An extensive introduction by Tate curator
Jennifer Mundy sets the text in the context of Cahun's life and art. Also included
is a translation of the original preface by Cahun's friend Pierre Mac Orlan, a
comment by her biographer, François Leperlier, a note on the translation by Susan de
Muth, and a postscript by Agnès Lhermitte.