Inverleith House is currently showing two exhibitions: on the ground floor is new work by Glasgow-based artist Sue Tompkins, while upstairs a survey of photographs by early twentieth-century artist Claude Cahun is on display.
Sue Tompkins’ work is mostly sound based, and this series was accompanied by a performance on the opening evening. In this exhibition, her non-performative works consist of typewritten text, scraps of tartan, safety pins, magazine adverts and tie-dye fabrics. The essential banality of Tompkins’ choice of material and limited selection of text means her work is teetering on the verge of insubstantiality.
The first works are undoubtedly the most remarkable. Spanning one wall, ‘W. Coast’ and ‘E. Coast’ are roughly cut out of a dull tartan fabric, and placed at either end. In between Tompkins has inserted sparse, often misspelt, typewritten phrases: ‘water elipses, don’t collapse like me’, ‘the streets are hot, the pavement is hot.’ These works embody Tompkins’ engagement with repetitive actions. We follow this visual monotony, so we are transferred from 'W. Coast' to 'E. Coast', via mundane, irrelevant postulations, with one distinctive blood-red blot in between. Finally, we end with the endearingly conciliatory ‘OK MUM.’
Tompkins manages to avoid the negative connotations of the frailty within her work, through her genuine and natural presentation. Her seemingly haphazard decision to present an old Clinique advert, encrusted with safety pins, or to tape fraying material to the walls, mirrors the artist’s performative actions in their impulsive, madcap manner. Ultimately, the risk of the large and beautiful gallery rooms swallowing Tompkins’s delicate pieces is overcome by their sincerity.
Simultaneously, Inverleith House has gathered together over 50 of Claude Cahun’s photographic prints for the first solo show of the Surrealist photographer ever presented in the UK. Cahun’s photographs are almost exclusively self-orientated. Her exploration of her own body and a fascination with identity are relentlessly presented by the artist, resulting in her critical appropriation by artists such as Francesca Woodman and Cindy Sherman.
Each photograph is minute, in black and white, and displays the artist in an array of fantastical guises: in a seaweed skirt, camouflaged as a brick wall, sinking through leopard print rushes, wearing traditional folk dress or seemingly on fire. In some photographs Cahun appears to have suddenly aged, as the images span her lifetime, presenting her multi-faceted character in its ostentatious youth and self-conscious maturity.
Cahun’s distinctive face, specifically her beak-like nose, provided the artist with a self-awareness which allowed for an intensive manipulation of the body. Naturally androgynous, she often presented herself as man, playfully questioning the ideology behind gender presentations. Cahun oscillates between the masculine and feminine aspects of her character, occasionally drawing exaggerated nipples onto her clothing, or adopting an arrogant chauvinistic pose. In one self-portrait she sits, made up like a woman but with the hair of a man, with the slogan on her nippled t-shirt ‘I’m in training, don’t kiss me.’
The humour in Cahun’s work is essential. Her disregard for gender barriers is more playful interrogation than political activism. For Cahun, identity is malleable, and presents itself through constant elimination, or exaggeration, or a complete disregard. Claude Cahun’s oeuvre is thoroughly engaging, undoubtedly agreeing with Andre Breton’s assertion that she was "one of the most curious spirits of [his] time."
first published in the journal, wednesday 9th march
www.journal-online.co.uk
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