Product Description
The Femininmasculin catalogue is organized around the deployment of works according to five general thematics, each foregrounded through references to one particular work appearing on a title page for that catalogue section: “L’Origine du monde” (Courbet’s 1866 painting of the same title), “Identites et Mascarades” (Man Ray’s 1921 photograph of Duchamp as Rrose Selavy), “Histoires de l’oeil” (Duchamp’s installation, Etant donnes, itself not present in the show), “Attractions et Repulsions” (Picasso’s 1931 Le Baiser), and “Histoires naturelies” (Frederic Bruly Bouabre’s 1977 Les Visages – sexualite des escargots). Occupying about half the catalogue pages, these richly illustrated sections are each introduced by curator Marie-Laure Bernadac with several pages featuring Dickensian chapter headings that lay out the issues evoked by that particular set of works. While these sections make few explicit references to theoretical texts, they nevertheless stake out, through their pointed positioning of the exhibited works in relation to the theoretical concerns of the show, a series of wide-ranging premises about how these themes have organized this exploration of “le sexe de l’art.”
