There are many stories concerning the life of the 18th-century French spy Charles Geneviève Louis Auguste André Timothée, more succinctly known as Chevalière d’Éon. Most popularly, d’Éon is said to have been born in a French village, entered the King’s service, and was sent to Russia undercover as a young woman. After spending 10 years in subterfuge, d’Éon presented as a woman for the rest of their life. Yet others reject this narrative, stating d’Éon lived a life of military achievement; and even d’Éon’s autobiography, which breaks the gendered rules of French language, says something else altogether.
For Madison Bycroft, what’s interesting is how these ‘truths’ are contingent, and are stretched to accommodate differing narratives, political motives and agendas. Rather than creating a work about d’Éon, Bycroft has created a film that uses d’Éon’s memoir to investigate biography itself. “I’m interested in biography and how we tell stories about other people because it’s one of the most direct ways of making a relation to another person, in an artistic form,” they explain.
While Bycroft acknowledges a contemporary tendency to narrate people’s lives in comfortable yet limiting frameworks, the artist is interested in alternative ways of storytelling, more attuned to the unknowability of personhood. In the film Bycroft references d’Éon’s life through three central characters, foraying into the surreal. The film’s costumes are all 18th-century European regality, with classical wigs and painted faces, but the tone is mystical, the lighting dewy, and the narrative non-linear.
By researching d’Éon’s life, Bycroft presses on how we might conceive identity: that a person is never reducible to one identity marker. “It’s trying to think about how identity can exist for a person without us articulating it for them,” says Bycroft. “It’s finding the edges of a character, or the space outside of character, without trying to delimit or explain, or describe who, that person is or was.”
BIOPIC or Charles Geneviève Louis Auguste André Timothée
Madison Bycroft
Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art
31 July—24 September
This article was originally published in the July/August 2021 print edition of Art Guide Australia.
Due to the current Covid-19 pandemic, opening hours of galleries and museums across Australia are affected. We recommend that you check gallery opening hours prior to visiting.
In a new collaborative exhibition at PS Art Space, in partnership with Cool Change Contemporary, five artists with process-lead practices contemplate material ethics through actively engaging in slowness and reuse.
Isaac Julien’s 2022 video work Once Again…(Statues Never Die) exposes the unseen emotional registers inherent to the struggle for colonial repatriation by mapping the places where poetics and politics intersect.
A new exhibition at the Australian National Capital Artists Inc (ANCA) asks 12 artists—including Dan Powers, S.A.Adair, Emma Beer and Lisa Sammut—to explore scale: from the miniature to the monumental.
About Face is a smart piece of marketing. The new book on portrait painting from Australia and New Zealand has a mission to change buyers’ minds about the field. But as Jane O’Sullivan discovers, any sales pitch wears thin if it’s repeated often enough, and the close attention to how portrait painting is received by the market means that other important conversations fade to the background.
In her latest exhibition at THIS IS NO FANTASY, Ellen Dahl presents works from an ongoing photographic series that has captured many sites—from the Norwegian archipelago Svalbard to Tasmania—creating a dialogue between works that center place.
Lismore Regional Gallery is reopening to the public following extensive closure resulting from the devastating floods in 2022. The redesigned space will host a number of new exhibitions opening this weekend.
