Jürgen Klauke

In these sassy, severe works from the 1970s, Jürgen Klauke transforms his body through low-tech effects. In the first photo of his black-and-white triptych Illusion, 1972, he uses a mirror to produce a bilaterally symmetrical image of himself without a penis. In the next two, he’s wearing pantyhose, and the angled mirror turns his crotch into a diamond-shaped void. It’s a great use of nude nylons—at once exploiting their functional properties (to constrain flesh and efface detail), their potency as a symbol of feminine conformity, and their fetishy charge. Ich & Ich (I & I), 1970, depicts an expressionless Klauke with an Eno-ish pageboy and a handlebar moustache in incremental stages of makeup application. His charted metamorphosis is reminiscent of Eleanor Antin’s Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, 1972, a serial photographic documentation of her thirty-seven-day weight-loss performance. As Klauke’s bearded face is contoured, it becomes more feminine, but also gaunt, even malevolent. His is not a straightforward, or strictly playful, makeover.

While his work from this period engages with the ideas of his feminist contemporaries and body-art forbears, it also merges the aesthetics of queer Surrealists—such as Claude Cahun and especially Pierre Molinier—with glam rock’s androgyny and artifice. In the full-color “Transformer ” pictures from 1973, Klauke wears a red leather outfit with platform boots and long, upwardly curved nipple extensions, one of which he kittenishly licks. There’s also a hand-sewn garment in the Rot photos from 1974: A fascinating hermaphroditic genital apron that can be worn casually like a sweatshirt tied around the waist or fastened up, over pants, to give the impression one has a lipped fissure extending from tailbone to pubis, with an almost navel-high, pinky-like dick.