SM and Surrealism
Dustin Tranberg
(London) (Arts section, p.25)
All spelling errors are my own.
***
Pierre Molinier, the forgotten Surrealist
-----------------------------------------
Even by the standards of the Surrealists, Pierre Molinier led an extra-
ordinary life. Locked away in his Bordeaux studio (or 'boudoir' as he
preferred to call it) the artist acted out the kind of sado-masochistic
fantasies that Salvador Dali and his contemporaries dared only to explore
in paint. Iain Gale reports:
Je suis lesbien declares the artist. His legs are encased in black
stockings, secured to a suspender belt; his waist is constricted by a
tight corset. On his head he wears a veil and a black mask. His fingers
press a switch, a shutter clicks and Pierre Molinier, the forgotten
Surrealist, is caught on camera forever. From his photographs Molinier
greets us with a demonaic grin. A plastic penis has been inserted
between his buttocks.
An avowed homosexual transvestite, Pierre Molinier lived the violence
and sexual obsessions his fellow Surrealists only dreamt about. Now barely
remembered as a footnote to the Surrealist movement, it was Molinier --
not Dali, nor Magritte -- who did it for real. Between 1965 and his
suicide in 1976, he chronicled his exploration of his subconscious tran-
sexual desires in _Cents_Photographes_Erotique_: graphically detailed
images of pain and pleasure now on show in London.
Molinier was born in 1900. From 1920 he studied as a painter, progressing
in style through Realism and Impressionism to abstraction. By 1936 he
was producing surreal Symbolist works in which he interwove Moreau-esque
imagery with a fascination for the more savage aspects of ancient Egyptian
and Indian religions, Satanism and the teachings of the Brotherhood, a
secret masonic order which he had joined in the 1920s. It was in these
paintings of cruel, multi-limbed women, reminiscent of the work of Hans
Belmer, that the artist began his investigation of the sexual ambiguity
which was to become his obsession.
In 1955 Molinier made contact with the leading Surrealist Andr/e Breton
and by 1959 was showing at the International Surrealist Exhibition. At
this time he defined the purpose of his art as "for my own stimulation",
indicating his future direction in one of his exhibits in the 1965
Surrealist show -- a dildo. It was also in this year that Molinier, with
the aid of a remote control switch, began to create photographs in which
he assumed the roles of dominatrix and succuba previously taken by the
women of his paintings.
In these beautifully-made, intimate black and white photographs, Molinier,
either alone with doll-like mannekins or with female models, appears as
a transvestite, transformed by his "fetish" wardrobe of fishnet stockings,
suspender belt, stilettos, mask and corset. In montages, an unlikely
number of stockinged limbs intertwine to create the women of Molinier's
paintings. In other, more direct images, the artist presents himself
alone, in dominant pose, with his hands on his hips or lying in submission
across a chair, buttocks exposed to the camera. At their most extreme
the pictures involve self-sodomisation with a cleverly devised home-made
dildo which the artist attached to the high heel of his shoe. His ingenuity
knew no bounds. He even constructed a set of stocks which enabled him
to practice auto-fellatio.
On an immediate level Molinier's erotic self-portraits recall Salvador
Dali's enigmatic painting of 1954 "Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by her
own Chastity", but it is possible to discern earlier roots. When Molinier
stands, hands on hips, empasizing his own exaggerated genitals, he echoes
Donatello's disquietingly erotic Renaissance bronze putto "Attis Amor",
now in the Bargello museum in Florence. Contorting himself in self-
satisfaction, he becomes a figure from Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights".
Similarly, Molinier the priapic, laughing demon is the Dionysius of ancient
Greek sculpture. The honesty with which the artist addresses his naked
self suggests precedents in Schiele, Picasso and Stanley Spencer and such
followers as Robert Mapplethorpe and Cindy Sherman. In common with the
sexually-explorative works of these artists, Molinier's photographs --
neither gratuitous nor exploitative -- also invoke the debate between
erotic art and pornography.
The Surrealists, like the Symbolists and Romantics before them, were
concerned to liberate man's latent eroticism through their art. In 1959,
Breton defined eroticism as "a privileged place, a theatre in which
incitement and prohibition play their roles, and where the most profound
moments of life make sport", and for the last 11 years of his life Molinier
played out his own most profound moments in the "theatre" of his Bordeaux
"boudoir-atelier".
Molinier intended his photographs to shock. He invites each viewer to
bring to the images his or her own response, of excitement or disgust.
What was essential was that everyone should be "contaminated". Only then
would they be able to know themselves, to discover their true erotic
sensibility and find real spiritual freedom. Molinier explored his own
senses and uncovered connections between religious ritual and sexuality
which he believed had been obscured by the post-Renaissance morality he
so despised. He was a transvestite Baudelaire who rather than words,
chooses as his medium the corset, the mask and the chain. He asks the
viewer to challenge received orthodoxies of art and morality and, like
a jester, seeks to destroy taboos. In both this, and his transvestism,
Molinier echoes the ancient Shamanic tradition and his experiments in
sexual transformation can be interpreted as an attempt to regain the
primordial, Platonic perfection of the androgyne. It is significant that
his (unrealised) biography was to have been entitled _The_Shaman_and_His_
_Creatures_.
At the time that they were made, Molinier's photographs may have carried
the power to shock that was necessary to achieve his aim. But whether
they have the same effect on today's audience is as questionable as their
pornographic status. To our eyes, dulled perhaps by the monumental
technicolour coitus of Jeff Koons and La Cicciolina, they seem almost as
quaint as the Edwardian boudoir photographs which hang in public bars.
Paradoxically, Molinier's own legacy works against him. His importance
lies not in the power of his work to affect a contemporary audience, but
in his position in the development of performance art. In making himself
the subject of his own art, Molinier foresaw the future "outrages" of
Warhol, Acconci, Agullo and Gilbert and George. His acts and the images
they engendered were to Molinier the "magical" door through which he might
take his audience to rediscover a lost truth of the human condition. When
he shot himself dead on 3 March 1976, he was only enacting the final act
of self-transformation. His boastful epitaph says it all: "Here lies
Pierre Molinier. This was a man without morality."
------
Pierre Molinier's photographs are at the Cabinet Gallery, 8 Clifton Mansions,
429 Coldharbour Lane, Brixton, London SW9