Coup d'œil

Abstract

Coup d'oeil is centred on a close reading of an untitled object produced by Claude Cahun for the 1936 Exposition surréaliste d'objets. Locating Cahun's art and thought in relation to avant-garde aesthetics, and investigating them through the related psychoanalytic concepts of sexual difference, fetishism, and the Oedipus and castration complexes (which, the author argues, are deployed critically in her work), the article attempts to arrive at an understanding of Cahun's efforts to imagine or invent a place for a woman as artist and subject of desire, while refusing any stable sense of identity. It is argued that Cahun's own conception of desire remains Oedipal in nature, in keeping with an artistic strategy that operates explicitly within the literary, legal, and psychical codes of her day in order to put them in question. the revolt against the sexual and social norms of society that Cahun stages in all her work is tied to an understanding, shared with the Surrealists, of the importance of a poetic mode of thought, and her object is consciously part of an object-making strategy that envisages the supersession of art, and its replacement by a 'poetry made by all' (the refrain of most of the twentieth-century avant-garde). by making herself the fit subject of her investigations, Cahun advances such an understanding, while foregrounding the historical difficulties women have had in being recognized as artistic and sexual subjects rather than objects. Her work, which is tied to the avant-garde project, ceases when that project is no longer viable in the political circumstances of the late 1930s. © Oxford University Press.