The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars, edited by Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003, 259 pp., $29.00 paperback, ISBN 0-8135-3292-2; $65.00 hardcover, ISBN 0-8135-3291-4 This book is so good, I could almost write about it chapter by chapter. Highlights include “Looking Like a Lesbian: Portraiture and Sexual Identity in 1920s Paris,” “Djuna Barnes: Looking Like a Lesbian/Poet” which has a particularly interesting photograph of Barnes’s butchy lover, Thelma Wood, and “Collaborative Self-Images in Claude Cahun’s Aveux non avenus.” Caucus member Joe Lucchesi writes on “Romaine Brooks, Radclyffe Hall, and the Lesbian Image in The Forge;” Bridget Elliott on “Allegories of Regeneration in [Romaine] Brooks and Picasso,” and Amy Lyford on the cross-dressing male known as Barbette. The influence of her bisexuality on the work of painter Tamara de Lempicka is discussed in a particularly fascinating essay, “Painting the Perverse: Tamara de Lempicka and the Modern Woman Artist.”
Art -- A Sex Book by John Waters and Bruce Hainley. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2003, 207 pp.. $29.95 paperback, ISBN 0-500-28435-0. This is a visually odd mixture of sexually explicit pictures, including male and female genitals, pictures which appear to have no connection to sexuality, a lovely watercolor by Monica Majoli, old pornography photographs, and what purports to be a world record of peristaltic action by Michelle Hines. The text is a series of transcribed conversations between filmmaker Waters (Pink Flamingos, Serial Mom, and Pecker) and Hainley, a contributing editor for Artforum and author of Andy Warhol: Piss and Sex Paintings and Drawings.
It seems to me that this is a particularly guy book with conversations about Warhol’s Factory, Max’s Kansas City (in NYC) and hustler bars in LA intermingled with comments like BH: “Often the best art is a kind of destruction, usually of whatever it was ‘art’ was previously thought to be. It can be, un, satanic.” JW: “I think satanists are cute. Whenever I do book signings, I always pose with satanists who show up, especially if they’re young and have on little T-shirts that say “I love Satan”, because it makes the press really nervous -- and yet newspapers always run that picture.” (p. 42)
Phototextualities: Intersections of Photography and Narrative, edited by Alex Hughes and Andrea Noble. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003, 287 pp., $24.95 paperback, ISBN 0-8263-2825-3. Although I expected more queer content from the publisher’s blurb (thrown off, I suppose by references to “gender”), Phototextualities contains a very interesting essay about the evolution of subject and audience in the early work of bisexual photographer Nan Goldin, “Nan Goldin: Bohemian Ballads” by Chris Townsend.
Keep This Sex Out of My Sight, with essays by Elvan Zabunyan, Chrystel Besse, Arlette Fontan, Françoise Gallart, and Marie-Joseph Bertini. Paris: Éditions Dis Voir, 2003, 127 pp., $24.95, ISBN 2-914563-10-8, dist. by D.A.P., Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. In several essays on female genitalia, the female artist, and creativity, Keep This Sex Out of My Sight addresses the question, “Under what conditions can women today change the cultural modes of representing them?” It includes a particularly nice image from Zoe Leonard’s installation at the Documenta IX, Kassel, 1992.
Xenia Hausner: Heart Matters, edited by Wieland Schmied. New York: Forum Gallery Editions, [2000?], 254 pp., $65.00, dist. by D.A.P., Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. (announced as August 2003 title by DAP) I have no idea what the affectional preferences of Xenia Hausner (1951-) might be, but love the range of couplings in her paintings, some of men and women together, and some with Sapphic overtones such as three women in a sleeping compartment in “Orient Express,” two women sprawled on a couch in”Sensual Certainty,” or two women embracing in “Let’s Dance.” And then there are the genderless associations such as “Ménage à Trois” in which three pillows are scattered across a couch. The paintings are large and vividly colored.
BOOK REVIEW
Allen, Mariette Pathy. The gender frontier. Essays by Grady T. Turner, Riki Wilchins, Jamison Green and Dr. Milton Diamond. Heidelberg: Kehrer, 2003. 167 pp., with numerous illus., about half in color. ISBN 3-936636-04-4
“When I show my work to people outside the transgender community they want me to define the categories, to explain who is what, and how their bodies work. But what interests me are questions such as: How would you react to this image if I told you it’s a man or a woman? What does that do to your definition of yourself? Does your identity change when your partner changes?” These first words of the introduction by Mariette Pathy Allen set the stage for a collection of compelling photographs done in a no-nonsense style. Not merely documenting the gender frontier, these photos present these people as activists, workers, lovers, family, and friends, with photos before, during and after crossing the imprecise gender frontier.
The book is well designed, with some full-page photos and others with plenty of margin, or as an illustration to give context to some text. Some of the photos are portraits with little context but most depict one or more persons engaged in some activity. There are also nine stories about individuals and two poems each by Colleen Mullins and H.C. O’Brien. The bilingual text (English and German) is presented inobtrusively.
The essays are cogent and reflect, as the book as a whole does, a variety of views of the transgender community. Grady Turner writes as a critic about the aesthetics and subjects of the photos. Activist Riki Wilchins discusses how she moved from being wary of the photographer to a new respect for “the power of image and of [Allen’s] work.” Jamison Green, writer and educator, also writes from the viewpoint of a transgendered person but less personally. Milton Diamond adds an impassioned scientific viewpoint.
We deal with issues of identity everyday, in our own lives and in those with whom we interact. We are defined by our bodies and clothing, by our professions, by our places of residence, by the others with whom we associate or not. Allen’s photos show us again how fundamental but undependable and elusive gender identification can be. Her generosity toward the subject(s) is apparent in each photograph.
Reviewed by Sherman Clarke
sherman.clarke@nyu.edu