Rrose is a Rrose Revisited
Gender and sexuality are multivalent, a spectrum of intersecting identities.
This year is the twentieth anniversary of Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography. In 1995, an exhibition proposal I submitted to the National Endowment for the Arts received one of the last exhibition grants to be awarded before the NEA was gutted by right-wing Republicans as part of the culture wars of the late 1980s and early ’90s. Two years later, in 1997, the exhibition opened in New York at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and then traveled to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. On the cover of its catalog is the gender-bending Surrealist artist and writer Claude Cahun.
The title, , combines the first name of Marcel Duchamp’s feminine alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, whose name plays on the French phrase “” (Eros, that’s life), with Gertrude Stein’s poetic “motto,” in order to queer Duchamp’s Dada gesture. As telegraphed through its subtitle, , the exhibition was inspired in part by Judith Butler’s thinking about gender; the deconstruction of femininity by Pictures Generation artists, especially Cindy Sherman;
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