Travesti (with corset and nylons), 1969, All photos courtesy Ubu Gallery. © ArtNet Worldwide 1997 Title unknown/ self-portrait, ca. 1966-68 Grande Melee, 1968

pierre molinier at wooster gardens and ubu gallery by Catherine Morris The French artist Pierre Molinier (1900- 1976) spent the better part of the last decade of his life developing a photographic universe in which he himself was the featured player in representing his own obsessive, elaborate and highly stylized sexual fantasies. With the help of an array of specially made props--dolls, various prosthetic limbs, stiletto heels, dildoes and an occasional trusted friend-- Molinier made his own body the armature for the construction of an extraordinary production of photographic work. Typically intimate in format and antique in appearance, his black-and-white photographs range from formally traditional self- portraits to elaborately constructed collages of abstracted legs, masked faces, penises and buttocks. Much of his work involves transvestitism; Molinier seemed obsessed with having sex with himself in the guise of a woman. Two current exhibitions of Molinier's photographs at Wooster Gardens in Soho (through Nov. 9) and uptown at Ubu Gallery (through Oct. 22) complement each other in their presentations of the theatrical and fascinatingly myopic world this reclusive artist built for himself over the course of more than 50 years spent living in Bordeaux. Though most of his life he was as a painter (at some point using his own semen on his canvases), the last nine years of his life were devoted exclusively to making photographs. In one small room, with a limited number of tools, Molinier created his own body-art language: a language that could be seen to bridge the art historical generations between the "Poupee" of Hans Bellmer and performance work of Bob Flanagan. The exhibition at Wooster Gardens features 41 images, many of them composed of cut, cropped and collaged photographs that were then rephotographed. Molinier's working methods are fairly common--Surrealist inspired portraits and montaged images composed of favorite body parts. It is the artist's thematic preoccupations, however, that captivate more than his formal concerns. Molinier's exploration of sex-- exclusively his own sex and sexual fantasies--is unrelenting, unapologetic and self-consciously stylized. The selection of photographs at the Ubu Gallery reflects the more formally refined Molinier. In this exhibition the full impact of Molinier's sophisticated theater of one is realized in a full dress performance. The elaborate photomontages, the Grand Melee are a formal end to Molinier's thematic. Here sex becomes a being unto itself, composed of the parts of his own body Molinier has gladly donated as the building material for the construction of his voracious muse. In 1976, at age 76, Molinier committed suicide. Ubu Gallery, 16 East 78 Street, NYC, NY 10021, Sept. 7-Oct. 22, 1996. Wooster Gardens/Brent Sikkema, 558 B'way, NYC, NY 10012, Sept. 7-Oct. 5, 1996. CATHERINE MORRIS is a New York writer and art historian.