Untitled (Claude Cahun in Le Mystère D’Adam) 1929

Editor: So, this is Claude Cahun’s "Untitled (Claude Cahun in Le Mystère D’Adam)" from 1929. It's a black and white photograph and looks like a performance still. It strikes me as incredibly theatrical. What’s your perspective on this work? Curator: I'm drawn to the materiality of this image. Look at the reflective wings, the plastic-like skirt. They seem cheaply made, challenging notions of preciousness in art. What do these choices about construction and resource suggest about gender, performance, and labor in Cahun’s time? Editor: That’s interesting. I hadn't considered the socio-economic aspect. So the almost thrown-together aesthetic is intentional, part of the artistic statement? Curator: Precisely! Cahun is consciously disrupting traditional notions of artistic skill, and maybe even societal expectation around dressmaking. Think about the labor involved in producing haute couture versus this seemingly ‘DIY’ aesthetic. Does this perhaps speak to a critique of bourgeois values? How does the choice of photography, a readily available medium, further challenge conventional artistic hierarchies? Editor: I see! Photography made it easier to create and share images more widely. And this connects to Cahun's identity play too, right? Creating a fluid, performative self? Curator: Exactly. It isn’t just *who* Cahun is representing, but *how* the image is materially created and distributed that gives it power. This photo also relates to surrealism which was a moment when people really questioned society through artistic media such as readymades for instance. Consider Marcel Duchamp and what he stood for. Cahun uses the photograph to play on similar codes of consumption and materiality, just in a portrait of the self. Editor: I never thought about it that way, focusing on the materials. This has given me so much to think about, particularly relating performance, queer identity, and modes of production. Curator: It all points to the complex ways artists engage with their social and material circumstances, doesn’t it?