It takes a brave institution to dedicate a show to the work of its most daring local artist, who proudly declared himself to be ‘a man without morals’ – the inscription that adorns his fake gravestone erected in 1950. That is what the Frac MÉCA in Bordeaux has done, with its new group exhibition ‘Molinier rose saumon’, responding to the work of the Surrealist, cross-dressing artist Pierre Molinier (1900–1976), who lived in nearby Agen until he took his own life. The exhibition explores his direct sources of inspiration and connections with contemporary artists, with works by, among others, Hans Bellmer, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, and Larry Clark.

Even more daringly, the show coincides with the 40th anniversary of the Fracs. Yet this mix of local and international contemporary art is precisely what these institutions were designed to do when they were founded in 1983 by then Culture Minister Jack Lang. These regional collections, now numbering 22, recognized the work of an art world outside Paris, and decentralized the commissioning of new art to regional authorities, municipalities, and communities. If only such a forward-thinking institution had existed during Molinier’s own lifetime.

Molinier spent much of his career working in isolation, exiled from local and national art scenes. He was thrown out of the Bordeaux Salon des Indépendants in 1951 amidst controversy over his orgiastic painting of the same year, Le Grand Combat. The Surrealists likewise first exhibited and then rejected him. His paintings and photomontages, in which he cut up and rearranged his own image, turning it into a many-limbed, multi-sexed being, certainly appealed to the group’s interest in repressed desires, fetishism, and the transgression of bourgeois morals. In any case, Molinier’s manipulated self-portraits and depictions of himself as a rubber sex doll, had more in common with those on the margins of Surrealism like Bellmer and Claude Cahun. It was only in the last years of his life that he was rediscovered by a generation of artists exploring gender performance, like the Swiss artist, Luciano Castelli. Molinier was included in the groundbreaking 1974 exhibition, curated by Jean-Christophe Ammann ‘Transformer: Aspects of Travesty’ at Kunstmuseum Lucerne, Switzerland and posthumously he achieved notoriety, influencing artists as diverse as Ron Athey and Cindy Sherman.

Molinier’s cross-dressing work could seem to appeal to contemporary ideas of gender fluidity and sexual transgression. But his depictions of himself in a feminized mask, corsets, fishnet stockings, and stilettos, penetrated by dildos on his heels, carry negative connotations of the transvestite, who fetishizes the feminine, reducing women to sexualized objects, or by associating womanliness with passivity. Rather than trying to dismantle binary gender, the crossdresser is seen by some as invested in preserving it for the temporary sexual thrill of transgression, only to return to one’s conventional identity.

One of the earliest artists to engage in gender performance and body transformation, before the advent of body art, Molinier’s tricksterish performances of self – he even faked his own death more than once – poke fun at attempts to organize sexuality and identity.

In the photomontages Mélange des godemichés et jambes (1967) or Triomphe, les jambes d’amour (1968), asses are exposed and stockinged legs float, but unattached to a body of either sex. Even where a penis is shown, it is often a dildo, rendering it unclear whether the sex is hetero-, homo-, or purely auto-erotic. His body is multiplied, making love to itself: an image of what Freud would diagnose as homosexual narcissism. But since he wants to have sex with himself as a woman, this seems oddly like straight sex. Mixing desire with identification isn’t a Queer pathology, but simply a part of all sexuality in which gender is something longed for and never achieved.

Perhaps Molinier’s multiplications of his own image turn him into a fetish, a series of substitutes, for which there is no real or stable self. His most repeated image is of himself as a woman with a penis, or within his sculptural work, a feminized phallus: his many dildos are made of wadded-together silk stockings. Unlike the fetishist, who for Freud anxiously seeks to cover over the reality of women’s difference, Molinier openly refutes it, preferring instead the image of the androgyne, the original bisexual self. His transvestism presents itself not as an imitation of a passive or castrated womanliness, but as a play with gender that nonetheless denies its essentialism.

For Molinier transvestism was also an anti-moral project. He told his biographer Pierre Petit, that his multi-limbed beings imitated pagan figures, Hindu gods, and Masonic symbols, in a rejection of a Christian tradition which he argued, had repressed androgyny. On his fake gravestone he wrote against public morals believed with complacency, adding that only the immoral man can find glory and honor. In 2018, trans writer Andrea Long Chu wrote in her article ‘On Liking Women’, published in n+1 magazine, that we should not politicize desire, since ‘that way lies moralism,’ and for her desire is ultimately ungovernable. Molinier’s satire seems to be more nuanced – it does not abandon questioning, but suspends prejudgment, allowing us to work out our own ethics.

Pierre Molinier is represented by Mennour, Paris.

‘Molinier rose saumon’
Frac Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA, Bordeaux
Until September 17, 2023

Paul Clinton is a writer and curator based in London.

Published on March 31, 2023.

Caption for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1. Pierre Molinier, Autoportrait couché, visage voilé, jambe gauche levée, 1955. Courtesy of Galerie Christophe Gaillard © Pierre Molinier, Adagp, Paris. 2. Pierre Molinier, Les jambes de la poupée, 1960-1976. © Adagp, Paris, 2023. Collection Frac Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA. 3. Pierre Molinier, Nous sommes le secret, ca. 1955. Courtesy of Galerie 1900-2000 and Galerie Christophe Gaillard. © Pierre Molinier, Adagp, Paris, 2023. 4. Pierre Molinier, Féminin Pluriel est Triste, 1968. Courtesy of Galerie 1900-2000 and Galerie Christophe Gaillard. © Pierre Molinier, Adagp, Paris, 2023.