0. The Dandy and the Diva or Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy

        In 1921, in a sort of parody of the conventions of the portrait of a female star of the era, Marcel Duchamp adopted a female pseudonym and dressed as a woman for a series of photographs taken by Man Ray. Duchamp thus took on, in his own artistic image, the characteristics of the kind of media personality that was becoming established during those years with the rising power of mass culture. While Duchamp’s dandyism can be read only in relation to his gradual transformation into the female Rrose Sélavy, his femininity is no doubt itself also based on the historically-based indifference and artificiality of dandyism.

1. Artificial Masculinity

        In following the path traced by Duchamp, Andy Warhol feminized his own artistic image while taking inspiration from the cult of celebrity in 1960s America. He introduced the artist’s image into commodity circulation, likening it to the spectacle of the star system. By transposing the person of the artist onto the indifferent pose of the media image, Warhol situated himself between the artificiality of the dandy and the excess of the diva.
        Between 1980 and 1982, Warhol made a series of self-portraits in drag, some of them in collaboration with the photographer Christopher Makos. The latter’s photographs show Warhol’s entire body, whereas another series--done by Warhol himself with a Polaroid camera between 1980 and 1982--shows only the face(1). Makos’s photographs, entitled Altered Image, underscore the ambivalence of gender in dress codes. Warhol is standing, soberly dressed in jeans, a white shirt and tie. The made-up face and the blond wig contrast with the sobriety of the clothing. He displays an ambivalent pose, both modest and eroticized: he is looking at the viewer, whereas his hands simultaneously hide and point to his genitals. The clothing, which refers to the normative masculinity of the young American nerd, conflict with the makeup, the wig, and the ostensibly artificial pose, which are evocative of the excessive femininity of the drag queen. This opposition underscores his sexual ambivalence and thus becomes central to the image.
        In his own self-representation, Warhol applies the same principles that made his silkscreens from the 1960s so successful. In these images of celebrities (Elvis, Marilyn, Liz Taylor, and so on), which were silkscreened and mass-produced, Warhol stressed the dimension of artifice by emphasizing the makeup rather than the lines of the face and by eliminating any trace of subjectivity. What remains is the mythical image of the diva, her face repeated and commodified. The aura of the diva is clearly evoked in Warhol’s appearance, particularly in his extreme blondness which is reminiscent of the artificiality of such female Hollywood stars as Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner, and obviously Marilyn Monroe, whose radiant white purity emanates from each of her portraits. Warhol’s blond hair refers back to the phantasy of an artificial form of beauty and a divine sort of celebrity, which he always pursued(2).
        However, Warhol’s feminization is also in line with contemporary practices aimed at subverting gender boundaries. Sexual ambiguity was a fashionable phenomenon both in artistic circles and in the popular culture in the 1970s and 1980s--rock stars like Lou Reed or David Bowie often represented themselves as feminized and sexually ambiguous.
        By positioning themselves between marginal practices (transvestism) and the ambivalences of mass culture (the worship and imitation of the star), these Self-Portraits in Drag fit perfectly into a “camp” aesthetic, the attitude Susan Sontag situated within the historical tradition of dandyism. Camp is a taste for all that is exaggerated and artificial, a way of being that privileges style over content(3). According to Sontag, the attitude of camp corresponds to a form of aestheticism in which being is equivalent to playing a role, whereas self-expression is tolerated only in excess. Camp identity corresponds therefore not to identity but to the staging of identity. Sontag defines camp as the dandy in the time of mass culture, which goes beyond the distinction between the unique object and the mass-produced object, for, as she wrote, “Camp taste transcends the nausea of the replica.”(4)
        Unlike Duchamp, Warhol did not divide his identity into a masculine one and a feminine one, but he feminized his position. He wanted to reproduce the erasure of subjectivity that was characteristic of the self-portraits of Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy, manifesting in this way the same absence of interest in the intentionality traditionally attributed to the artist. Through the myth of celebrity, he updated the tension between the anonymity of the commodified image and the cult of personality. In this theatricalized self-image, Warhol constructs an identity that exists only in the public sphere and that allows him to attain a sort of distance from himself. A genuine disembodied public subject, he wanted to lose the traces of his own subjectivity through the paradox of an anonymity that is capable of making him recognizable, therefore famous.
        Warhol’s self-portraits in drag serve to clarify the relationship between this desire for anonymity and a recourse to femininity. In the same fashion as Duchamp, who had taken inspiration from images of divas from the 1920s in order to sift out a certain idea of the artist, Warhol appropriates for himself the image of Hollywood stars who are protagonists of his works. Through their ambivalent masculinity, Duchamp and Warhol sketch out a media strategy that highlights the instability of the artist’s position--an instability that is situated between the de-subjectivation of the commodified image and the personalization of the celebrity. In self-portraits in drag, the tension between the cult of personality and the erasure of subjectivity is transposed onto the difference between the sexes, suggesting that the instability of the transvestite is the very site in which the artist’s ambivalence expresses itself.(5)

2. Imitations and Masquerades

        For woman artists who began to work during those same years, self-staging became a media strategy in which the imitative structure of femininity appears to be questioned. However, dandyism and its “camp” derivatives, which constitute the backdrop for Duchamp’s and Warhol’s dressing in drag, refer back to an essentially masculine universe(6). These notions also contain a potential for women, and more specifically for feminists, because they can function as a form of gender parody. Indeed, it is not an accident if the notion of gender parody has been explored by numerous feminist theorists. For Judith Butler in particular, gender is in itself drag; every assignment of identity imitates a behavior that has been historically determined in the culture and in society. While drag does destabilize this norm, which it reveals by parodying it, it does not constitute for Butler a practice that would be subversive in itself. It is a matter, rather, of an ambivalent terrain where the subject is implicated in a power structure it repeats while at the same time opposing it.
        While destabilization proceeds by way of reversal, how is one to interpret the often excessive imitation of the norm of femininity which is so common in the work of women artists? Indeed, when such repetition does not function through dressing in drag, things become complicated. In her book on feminine “camp,” Pamela Robertson proposes to use the psychoanalytically-derived notion of masquerade to interpret the imitation, by women, of the excessive femininity of the diva(7). In masquerade, the woman imitates a femininity that is thought of as authentic but that is itself already an imitation. This implies that femininity is not an essence but is defined within the culture, within the image and the representation. In the work of women artists who stage an excessive form of femininity, there is thus a basic difference with respect to the parody of drag, and that difference resides in the identity between she who imitates and the role she plays: she plays at being she who she already was.
        Hannah Wilke, who defined herself as a feminist artist, shows this female masquerade in actual fact through her photographic stagings from the 1970s. A large portion of her work is based almost entirely on her own photographic image, which takes back up, in an exacerbated and almost obsessive fashion, the question of the female image. S.O.S. Scarification Object Series (1974-1982) is made up of a series of photographs set in a grid, within which Wilke adopts some artificial glamor poses inspired by fashion imagery. Her skin is covered by small pieces of chewing gum she has stuck on herself after having chewed them. This insertion of the organic is the only disturbing element in these images of an attractive woman in provocative poses. In reference to this work, Amelia Jones underscores that Wilke’s various poses are a response to the massive commodification of the bodies of celebrities, often female ones, which are used to stimulate the desire of the consumer(8). The grid structure Wilke adopts for S.O.S. is reminiscent of the way in which Warhol framed his images of celebrities, which were mass produced like all products for sale.
        Wilke actively appropriates for herself this aura of glamor that renders advertising images so attractive. As John Berger summarizes, glamor is the condition for being envied: “You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest. . . . It is this which explains the absent, unfocused look of so many glamour images. They look out over the looks of envy which sustain them”(9). It is precisely this detachment, this disinterestedness with regard to others that renders these representations both inauthentic and desirable. Wilke implements the rhetoric of the pose: adopting a pose signifies appearing to the spectator as if one were frozen, immobilized, that is to say, as if one were already an image. However, the insertions of chewing gum on the body are there to remind one of the carnal reality of the body, like a trace of authenticity that emerges on the surface of the skin and of the image.

3. Rhetoric of the Pose

        Cindy Sherman’s work is exemplary of a tendency that came to the fore in the early 1980s, in particular in the United States. She activates the rhetoric of the pose through the representation of femininity as a surface effect. As Craig Owens summarizes it, this strategy of the pose is based on imitation: “The mimic appropriates official discourse--the discourse of the Other--but in such a way that its authority, its power to function as a model, is cast into doubt.”(10)
        In the early 1980s, Sherman, who had gone over to color photography, produced a series of images that were inspired by fashion shots and the accompanying world of glamor. In these photographs, where the element of parody is affirmed much more forcefully than in her previous series, the artists calls into question in a more aggressive way the notions of beauty, style, femininity, and manufactured desire. One can also note that in this series of photographs, Sherman fastens on the image of the diva by radicalizing the ambivalence, typical of the diva, between the artificiality of her public existence and the authenticity of her suffering. In this context, Untitled (Marilyn) from 1982 connects fashion photography with celebrity portraits. Here Sherman is clearly imitating Marilyn Monroe and is retrospectively appropriating for herself Monroe’s image as an unhappy diva with a tragic destiny, as registered in her expression of melancholic distress as well as in a pose that emphasizes her fragility and the need for help which make her even more desirable.
        The double portrait of Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince--Untitled (Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman)--from 1980 allows one to return to the question of sexual reversal and of the kind of imitation that is peculiar to the dandy. This double portrait constitutes an exception in Sherman’s overall work because it is her only collaboration with another artist. In these two photographs, Sherman and Prince are dressed in the same way, in a sober masculine suit (black tie over a white shirt and black coat). They even have the same “page-girl” haircut, which is a sign both of early-1980s fashion and of androgyny. And they display similar poses, with the affected gesture of a hand covering the lips, as if to hide the face from the viewer and, simultaneously, to underscore an inner concentration and a certain impenetrability. These are some very seductive images, bordering on the world of fashion: both artists flaunt the same carefully staged and sophisticatedly made-up pose, while the lighting highlights the extreme whiteness of the skin which emerges from the dark mass of the background and the clothing, matched with the radiance of the hair. Glamorous elegance emanates from the entire image: these are perfectly dandy portraits.
        The staging that characterizes this double portrait does not concern only the look described above but also, obviously, one’s sexual identity. This double portrait does not seek to make a woman pass for a man or vice versa, since the fact that it is a matter of two persons of opposite sexes is perfectly clear. It treats, rather, the ambivalence of sexual assignments and suggests that dandyism is to be found precisely in this instability. Sherman’s portrait displays this ambivalence between the effeminate young man and the transvestite woman. However, in looking at Prince’s portrait, I cannot prevent myself from seeing in it an imitation of Sherman’s. But who is imitating who in this double portrait? Is a man imitating a woman dressed up as a man or is a woman imitating an effeminate man? It is perhaps in posing these questions that this double portrait indicates that imitation is at the heart of every image-borne, identity-based strategy.

Notes

1. See Christopher Makos, Andy (Paris: Assouline 2001).
2. See Elisabeth Bronfen, Die Diva. Eine Geschichte der Bewunderung (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2002), pp. 169-70.
3. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp” (1964), in Against Interpretation, and Other Essays (New York: Picador, 1966).
4. Ibid., p. 289.
5. See, in this regard, what Judith Butler has written: “Drag is the site of a certain ambivalence, one which reflects the more general situation of being implicated in the regimes of power by which one is constructed and, hence, of being implicated in the very regimes of power that one opposes” (Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” [New York: Routledge 1993], p. 125).
6. It nonetheless must be pointed out that recent studies have looked into female dandyism as embodied by such figures as Coco Chanel, Claude Cahun, and Madonna. See the collection of essays edited by Susan Fillin-Yeh, Dandies, Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2001).
7. Pamela Robertson, Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). For the notion of masquerade, see Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” in Victor Burgin, et al., Formations of Fantasy (London: Methuen, 1986) and Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991).
8. Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 38.
9. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 133.
10. Craig Owens, “Posing,” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), p. 201.