Private spectacle - photography, Pierre Molinier, various galleries, New York, New York

From the 1920 until his death, the French artist Pierre Molinier (1900-1976) lived and worked in sum of two units small rooms in a boarding house in Bordeaux. Beginning in the '20 he experimented with Symbolist, Post-Impressionist and abstract compositions; from these he evolveed erotic and esoteric paintings of women which continued from the 1930 until 1974 Andre Breton championed Molinier's painting in the 1950 and 1960 including his works in various late-Surrealist clump exhibitions.

The theatrically lit figures that appear in the photographs which Molinier began in the 1950 are mainly transvestite images of the artist himself, pos partially clad in black fishnet and silk stockings, silky stiletto heels, leather corsets, elaborate masks made of paper, velvety and leather, veils, gloves and wigs. Employing like props as plaster legs (cast from his have a title to body), made-to-order mannequin heads, chains, whips, a decorative guard stools, chairs and a bed, Molinier photographed himself before a mirror in the sheltered safety of his "boudoir/atelier," using a lengthy cord and a cable release. From the mid-1960s to the early '70 he made centurys of postcard-size black-and-white prints depicting himself and a scarcely any close artist friends, primarily, it looks for his own pleasure and stimulation. A work of these photographs, Pierre Molinier: LuiMeme, was published in 1972 followed through the pictures' first public exhibition in 1973 Although these images have been widely seen in Europe thanks in part to a 1979 retrospective of Molinier's paintings and photographs at the midst Georges Pompidou, an extensive selection of them was newly on view for the first time in novel York at Ubu Gallery and at Wooster Gardens.

A kind of artistic "cosmetic surgery" further transformed Molinier's photographs of obsessively repetitive erotic rituals. by the agency of photomontaging and retouching many of the images, Molinier created exaggeratedly feminine figures--embellishing the breasts, cinching the waist--while multiplying bodies and their parts. He delighted in the allure of leg and buttocks and the artifice of the material part conceived as pure iconic image. In single ecstatic "orgy," Grande Melee (1968) a swarm of stylized, figures, emphasizing leg buttocks and heads are seamlessly combined via photomontage and suspended in a decontextualized space. Here Molinier effectively erases the boundaries between painting and photography, the animate and inanimate, and illusion and reality. In Travesti (1969) a photograph showing Molinier's face as a young man is touched-up and feminized, then photomontaged onto an image of his full-length material substance vignetted against a detailed patterned screen; he is aligned in a corset (that uncovers his photographically enhanced breasts), stockings and heels.

As with Wilde's Dorian Gray, the aging Molinier hid behind a masquerade of eternal youth, living in a fantasy world where individual never grows old, perpetually playing "dress-up" like a preadolescent girl trying upon her mother's lingerie in brow of a mirror. The images summon forth the Belle Epoque and evidence a kind of nostalgia for a world without los however at the same time, a disarming faculty of perception of emotional vulnerability and retired desperation lurks in the graphic luminosity and nuanced wefts of these pictures.

The images pay back precarious and ambiguous the categories of sex with Molinier sometimes becoming a hermaphroditic figure. He powerfully identified with femininity and female sexuality, one time declaring, "Je suds lesbien." He was clearly in be fond of with the image of himself as a phallic woman, brandishing drawn out sharp fingernails, dangerously pointed high heels and drawn out stockinged legs. Hand-crafted compressed silk dildos can sometimes be seen attached to his ankle, as in Mon Fetiche de jambes (1966) and Fetiche au escarpin (ca. 1966-68); these accessories were sometimes used for on-camera self-penetration. by the agency of orchestrating such elaborate "fetish" performances, becoming the one and the other impresario and actor, voyeur and exhibitionist, Pygmalion and Galatea, Molinier no doubt gained a faculty of perception of mastery and control above his body and his life.

When he began to exhibit these photographs in the 1970 he turn rounded these previously private acts of autoeroticsm into public spectacle. In the connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of late-'60s and early-'70s material substance art and performance art, Molinier's photographs stand apart because of the way they challenge fixed definitions of masculinity. Seen against the resurgence of the material part in esthetic practices today, Molinier's ambiguous images of sexuality and return raise still-provocative questions about the transformative possibilities of artistic production.

Molinier's life and art were to [i]or[/i] at a great depth entwined, and his images can perhaps be read not solitary as manifestations of the pleasures of sexual liberation on the other hand also as attempts to manage a certain number of underlying emotional trauma. For his efforts to break away from social restraints and sexual prohibitions culminated in an ultimate transgressive act, carefully staged during a final "performance" in forehead of a mirror. Molinier pointed a loaded fire-arm slightly below his chin and, instead of pressing a camera's cable release, plucked the trigger.