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PIERRE MOLINIER (French, 1900-1976) FÉTICHE-GODMICHÉ à DEUX POUPÉE VIOLÉE (1967) PANTOMIME CÉLES...

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PIERRE MOLINIER (French, 1900-1976) FÉTICHE-GODMICHÉ à DEUX POUPÉE VIOLÉE (1967) PANTOMIME CÉLES...
PIERRE MOLINIER (French, 1900-1976) FÉTICHE-GODMICHÉ à DEUX POUPÉE VIOLÉE (1967) PANTOMIME CÉLESTE (1967) MOI EN 1925 (1969) UNTITLED (1966-68) various inscriptions and stamps on prints' versos five gelatin silver prints each: 5 x 7 in. (12.7 x 17.8 cm) 1966-1969 PROVENANCE Cabinet Gallery, LONDON Private Collection, NEW YORK LITERATURE Peter Gorsen, PIERRE MOLINIER, LUI MÊME: ESSAY ÜBER D. SURREALISTISCHEN HERMAPHRODITEN, Munich, 1972, pls. 11, 20, 40, 46 (4 of the 5 images illustrated) Juan Vincente Aliaga and Maite Cañamás, PIERRE MOLINER, Valencia, IVAM Centre Julio González, 1999, pp. 117, 157, 164 (3 of the 5 images illustrated) For most of his career, Pierre Molinier self-identified as a painter, and was warmly welcomed into French surrealist circles in the early 1950s. Only late in his life, at the age of 64, did the artist turn to photography, producing a remarkable series of photomontages before committing suicide in 1976. Despite its belatedness, Molinier's photographic achievement was astonishingly original. His groundbreaking images combined outré sexuality, gender performance, and photomontage techniques to presciently anticipate many issues that dominated art and photography in the late twentieth century. All of Molinier's photographs were shot and developed in his small apartment and studio in Bordeaux. Here the artist amassed the various costumes and props that recur in his images. As the present works demonstrate, Molinier often fashioned a simple theatrical setting from a patterned folding screen and, at times, a single bar stool. On this stage, the artist and his models performed for the camera wearing masks, corsets, silk stockings, high heels, dildos, and other fetish objects. A self-avowed transvestite and foot-fetishist, Molinier challenged normative, bourgeois standards of sexuality with his own hermaphroditic ideal. While clearly human, his figures confuse traditional gender categories through a ritualistic process of cross-dressing. Whether photographed alone or engaged in sexual acts with one another, these androgynous actors celebrate the multiplicity of sexual desire. Although their content corresponds with the general climate of sexual liberation that characterized the 1960s, Molinier's photographs maintain a distinctly older appearance. The artist achieved this effect through a complicated process of photomontage. Beginning with a positive print, Molinier often manipulated his initial image. After dismembering and reconfiguring his subjects' bodies, the artist produced another negative, from which a new positive print was generated. This process was repeated indefinitely until a satisfying final print was realized. An ultimate result of these manipulations was a grainy loss of definition, which only enhanced the fluid androgyny of his subjects. As Peter Gorsen has claimed, "Molinier was not the only artist who returned what was thought to be lost to photographic representation, namely the ritualistic aura: the singular effect of a distance no matter how close it may be in actuality, and the lack of which, according to Walter Benjamin, distinguished photography and film as progressive mass media. Or perhaps he had to transform photography and, through photo-technical processes, make it into a singular, unrepeatable image because he was an occult, surrealist painter. Molinier's montages - whose documentary content may be infinitely reproducible, but whose aesthetic appearance, artistic manipulation, and handcrafted character makes them absolutely singular - partake equally in realistic representation and artistic sublimation" (Peter Gorsen, "The Artist's Desiring Gaze On Objects of Fetishism," PIERRE MOLINIER, exh. cat., Winnipeg: Plug In Inc., 1997, p. 27).
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