How does the Surrealist photography (of Man Ray) engage with gender politics?

So what were these concerns about gender?  The problem for the surrealists was that their conception of gender difference was rooted in three conflicting theories of male-female relations.  Breton’s espousal of Marxism as one of the key pillars (alongside Freudian psychoanalysis) of his Surrealist revolution created a fundamental internal conflict.  Marxist theory stated that female emancipation was a bourgeois issue, with economic factors primarily responsible for their exploitation, and that full equality of women was dependent on the social equality of all.  Unfortunately for Breton this framework made no allowance for sexuality and love, concepts that Marxist writings considered a distraction, deviation and luxury when set against the greater revolutionary good.   As an alternative Breton considered, albeit briefly, the utopian French socialist philosopher Charles Fourier’s (1772-1837), discourse on gender equality and sexual difference.  Fourier, who despite his socialist utopian goals was closer to Freud than Marx, expressed an objective interest in manias, perversions, a variety of sexual proclivities, and in the notion that masculine and feminine qualities were independent of gender.  Breton and Surrealism’s conception of woman and gender differences was further complicated, and undermined, by contemporary developments in urban Paris.  Issues associated with societal, specifically bourgeois norms, such as the role of heterosexual marriage were being openly discussed.  Lesbianism was more ‘open’ (Gertrude Stein was a pioneer in this respect), transvestites and cross-dressing were challenging gender stereotypes in the seedier entertainment venues, and contemporary literature (e.g. Victor Marguerite’s La Garconne (1922) and Joan Rivière’s Womanliness as Masquerade  (1929)) was questioning traditional male-female distinctions.

Despite Breton’s own discomfort with gender politics, evidenced by his reluctance to discuss homosexual proclivities in the 1928 Recherches sur la sexualité sessions, surrealist photography addressed sexual difference in complex and diverse ways.  Claude Cahun (1894-1954) investigated culture and sexual identity in Aveux non avenues (1930) a book illustrated with her own collages, Rauol Ubac (1910-85) used solarisation and brûlage to manipulate the female form, and Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) created his anatomically ambivalent Poupees (1934).  Man Ray’s initial contribution to this diversity, Man (1918) [1] and Woman (1920 [2], highlights his exposure to the Dadaist, anti-art ‘aesthetic’ of Francis Picabia (1879-1953) and Marcel Duchamp.  Consistent with an iconography that substituted machines for human sexual relations (e.g. Portrait of a Young American Girl in the State of Nudity (1915) [3] and Bride (1912) [4]) Man Ray photographed these ‘ready-made’ mechanical objects of banal domesticity, imbuing them with Freudian overtones of aggressive male potency.  This fantasy of male procreation, a reaction to increasing demands for female emancipation, sexual equality, and the perceived threat of feminist emasculation, had antecedents in the utopian visions of Fourier and the St-Simonians.  These visions, which included the unnatural monogamy of marriage, and its substitution by free amorous relations, threatened the bourgeois family values that were already under attack from the emergence of an emancipated and masculinised ‘new woman’, a situation satirised in Guillaume Apollinaire’s ‘drama surréaliste’, Les Mamelles de Tirésias  (1917).  Man Ray’s exposure to this triumvirate of Apollinaire, Picabia and Duchamp and their fascination with gender reversals, male procreation, and male-female separatism was an important influence on his later photographic exploitation of gender identity.

This destabilisation of gender identity is particularly evident in the collaborative work of Man Ray and Duchamp.  Between 1920 and 1924 Man Ray photographed Duchamp in the guise of his carefully constructed, feminine, alter ego Rrose Sélavy (Eros, that’s life). Taken in conjunction with Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q [5] Robert Lebel has suggested that Man Ray’s photographs ‘might suggest  […] the artist’s inherent androgyny in the manner of Leonardo da Vinci to whom Duchamp had paid homage in his own way by providing the Mona Lisa with masculine attributes.’ This exploration of gender differences and stereotypes reflected contemporary psychological and social-anthropological debate in Europe and the United States.  The work of Freud and Jung, with his concept of the collective unconscious (i.e. a male and female unconscious) as a union of, potentially bisexual creative opposites, was challenging traditional views on male and female stereotypes.  Havelock Ellis’s Man and Woman: A Study of Human Secondary Sexual Characters (1894)  (translated by Claude Cahun) was also extremely influential with its observation that it is impossible to determine ‘any radical and essential characters of men and women uninfluenced by external modifying conditions.’ 

 Man Ray’s skills as a fashion photographer are evident in Duchamp’s experimentation with these issues of sexual difference.  The first group of photographs of Rrose Sélavy [6] & [7], taken in 1921, are perhaps less successful in conveying the femininity that Duchamp aspired to.  Nevertheless he used one photograph for his ‘assisted ready-made’ Belle Haleine – Eau de Violette (Beautiful Breath, Beautiful Water), the centrepiece of a brief Dada campaign in New York in 1921 ([8] & [9].  Inevitably, when dealing with Duchamp, the verbal punning and subversion associated with the caption (allusions to Helen of Troy, violence, rape, etc) were perhaps more important than the bisexuality of the visual image.   This changed with Man Ray’s second series of photographs (1924) that show Rrose Sélavy as a fashionable model, conveying a much greater aura of femininity ([10] & [11]).  Using the hat, fur and even hands (evidence of his ability to manipulate the photographic medium) of Picabia’s partner, Germaine Everling, Man Ray creates a film-star like portrait (with de riguer signature) for which Mary Caws makes the claim ‘There have not been many more seductive poses’.  However, even in the process of creating an apparently seductive feminine image something jars.  The blond wig, the heavy circles around the eyes, the thick eyebrows and the insolence of the gaze which looks straight at the viewer, invitingly, all create an ‘icon of disquiet’ wholly suggestive of the bisexuality, androgyny and transvestitism that Duchamp and Man Ray wished to convey.

In Photographs by Man Ray 1920-1934 Man Ray pursues this playing with gender initiated by his involvement with Duchamp.  The work consists of two sequences of photographs separated by a text ‘Men before the Mirror’, possibly attributed to Duchamp’s alter ego Rrose Sélavy.  In the first section the photographs proceed through close-ups of women, some dressed in a sexually ambivalent manner, and concludes with an image of the self-proclaimed lesbian writer Gertrude Stein.  The second section begins with an image of Man Ray with his camera and consists of a series of male portraits culminating in the female impersonator and cross dresser, Barbette Dressing [12]. Underlying this construction is Man Ray’s desire to question issues of the male gaze, accepted perceptions of gender differences, and the inherent threat to masculinity.

This threat of emasculation can be linked to what Rosalind Krauss has identified as the most ‘surrealist’ aspect of Man Ray’s photography.   She argues that fetishism is the substitution of the unnatural for the natural, its logic turning on a refusal to accept sexual difference, where ‘the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (mother’s) phallus which the little boy once believed in and does not wish to forgo.’ (the Oedipus–castration complex). Man Ray pursued this line of thinking in his photographs illustrating Tristan Tzara’s Minotaure essay analysing fashion (‘On a Certain Automatism of Taste’ (1933)), most imaginatively in his Hat (1933) [13]), with its implication of collapsed sexual identity.   However, it is in his reshaping of the fragments of the female body in fetishistic form (a preoccupation of many Surrealist photographers) where Man Ray subverts this fetishism, presenting ‘woman as phallus’ to the male gaze.  In his Anatomies (1929) [14], he portrays a woman’s (Lee Miller?) with her head pulled back and neck stretched, a technique he replicated in Lee Miller (Neck) (1930) [15].  Perhaps unaware of this subversion Krauss has theorised these views of a violently upended chin and neck, rendered ‘wierdless and gelatinous’ by lighting and contour, as the epitome of the George Bataille’s concept of the informe.  Using feminine body fragments and distorted perspective Man Ray creates a monstrous abstraction, that in its formlessness, echoes the spider or worm ‘crushed under foot’ or the universe as a ‘gob of spittle.’ 

Another of Man Ray’s many lovers, Meret Oppenheim, was the ‘canvas’ for probably his most famous photographic comment on the controversies about female gender roles during the 1930s.  His series of photographs for Minotaure No. 5 (1933), including Erotique Violeé [16], pictured Oppenheim naked beside an etching press in the studio of painter Louis Marcoussis.  Mary Caws has offered two contrasting readings of this multi-layered work. Using a medieval spinning wheel analogy she sees woman harmonising with a mechanical lover (echoing the mechamorphism of Picabia and Duchamp) to create a new modern (androgynous) female form, where ‘the primitive strength of the domestic meets a more contemporary magic of imprinting and metallic reproduction’.   Conversely she invokes St Catherine’s torture wheel, suggesting that there is the potential violence of convulsive beauty, implicit in the ‘aggression’ of the metallic form and its effective dismembering of the female body. In a more formal sense Man Ray manipulates the medium of black and white photography, a reversible process like the printing of the etching wheel, to suggest gender reversal.  The addition of a phallic protuberance in the form of the printing wheel handle, placed directly above the luxuriant pubic hair, arming the female body with a detachable phallus is the most overt statement of this intent.  Less obviously, the wheel partially covers the breasts (hinting at androgyny), the hairstyle is fashionably close-cropped, and the hips are angled away from the camera in a masculine fashion. The significance of Man Ray’s statement was reaffirmed when André Breton, in his article on ‘convulsive beauty’ (Minotaure (1934)) used a cropped version, deliberately and censoriously, removing the phallic signifier that highlighted the contemporary debate on contested gender relations.

An underlying thread in this analysis of Man Ray’s engagement with gender politics is the extent to which his photography can actually be construed as surrealist.  His involvement with the New York Dada movement of Duchamp and Picabia, the subsequent close collaboration with Duchamp’s ‘experiments’ in sexual difference, and Man Ray’s own reluctance to conform to Breton’s (or Bataille’s) surrealist philosophy, are evidence of his desire to maintain ‘ a solid immunity against many of its [surrealism’s] seductions.’  This perception of Man Ray as ‘more the abiding dadaist than he ever was truly a surrealist’, photographically responding to and reflecting on contemporary events and aesthetics, has been contested by the poststructuralist semioticians who see his wider oeuvre as central to their theorisation of surrealist photography.  Despite this discussion’s brief flirtation with fetishism and the informe their approach fails to convince.  This failure is perhaps expressed most eloquently in the words of a leading surrealist art historian commenting on Krauss’s essay and photographic catalogue:

‘as though touched both by scholarly voyeurism and by revulsion at reproductive heterosexuality, she exhibits photographs of fetishistic details showing mainly females with dripping genitals, sick and deformed body parts, and naked behinds – an anal display that arguably equates photographic inscription to an “indexical” impression on toilet paper’

Bibliography

Ades. D., Marcel Duchamp, Thames & Hudson (World of Art Series), London, 1999.

Caws. M., et al (eds.), Surrealism and Women, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1991.

Caws. M., The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1997.

Chadwick. W., Mirror Images: Women, Surrelaism and Self-Representation, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1998.

Chadwick. W., Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, Thames & Hudson, London, 1985.

Fernie. E., (ed.), Art History and its methods, a critical anthology, Phaidon, London, 1995.

Harrison, Charles and Paul Woods (eds.), Art in Theory 1900 – 1990: an Anthology of Changing Ideas,Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

Krauss R. E. and Livingstone. J., L’ Amour fou: Photography and Surrealism, Abbeville Press, New York, 1985.

Krauss. R. E., The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1985.

Mundy. J., (ed.), Desire Unbound, Tate Publishing, London, 2001.

Spector. J. J., Surrealist Art and Writing 1991/39: The Gold of Time, CUP, 1997.

Suleiman. S., (ed.), The Female Body in Western Culture, Harvard UP, Cambridge, Mass, 1986.

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