I’d begin by discussing some attitudes in Manet’s practice that still make him relevant today, Olympia might come in handy for this purpose. Manet here wishes to update Titian (just as he will with Goya) bringing him to a register which isn’t courtly, but merely appears to be. In Olympia’s slanted eyeline we find Titian’s Venus of Urbino: imposing, sinuous and fleshy, with a black backdrop on the left and an opening on the right, perhaps an illusory exit that’s behind the Venus’s gaze but sitting within ours. Elements of La Maja Desnuda also emerge, the somewhat trembling gaze as she looks back at us, with a malice that could have belonged to Ava Gardner in the 1950’s. Dream-like ladies looking at us, at me, at the room, at the painter, at the viewer. To better understand what’s at stake we need realize though that the woman painted, Olympia, is a prostitute, mischievous and sensuous, mocking and living flesh. The neck bow suggests she is on sale, ready to be unpacked like gift; her figure is icy, challenge brims in her eyes which come across as arrogant rather than shy. Upon closer look another important element arises, she is not here in the material world, neither does she really exists in the world of painting. Nothing precedes here, Olympia is rootless, she’s simply born out of herself. She is a slippage, the fact that nothing precedes here puts in check the reality within which she exists. She exists exclusively on the plane of language, a modern and unpreceded language. Olympia shows us a shadowed desire, an excitation hidden behind a pompous and intellectualized faced. Within the history of signs, a new now emerges: conceptual and lustful at once. In referencing Olympia Bataille argues that the canvas’s goal is to “disappoint expectations”, this is a supposedly lascivious nude which really doesn’t have anything lascivious about it. Olympia negates one of the fields in which she’s supposed to exist: this frustrates the viewer but in the same breadth redirects the painting’s significance. I begin to see the outcomes born out of this operation. Here I am in front of Warhol who, speaking of his 1964 video Blow Job, claimed to have made a video that fails all targets: it shows too much to belong to the world of intellectuals, while showing too little to be classified as pornography. It isn’t disappointing an expectation per se, but it comes close. Courbet also comes to mind, and perhaps he could bring us closer to the point. He too looks for modernity at the bottom, finding it in the everyday: real, unclouded and poor. It’s not about the origin of the world as much as it’s about giving dignity to a Funeral at Ornans, to the rocks, the low skies looked at from close up. It’s about being closer to the scene because to be is to be there, and along with this, assigning large dimensions to non-epic scenes, scenes interested exclusively in reality. In following this line of reasoning though we might miss the point by being excessively orthodox. Even though he’s seeking for a contemporary idea of the image, Courbet fails to capture Manet’s rising modernity. He doesn’t seem to see the extra-ordinary field the latter gestures towards. Manet’s leap doesn’t pertain to the realm of content or form, but of meaning in its deepest and most existential form. All they have in common is a certain pursuit of directness and presence, but Olympia already has a character of being an operation. In being in a non-existent physical place, a Renaissance inspired prostitute catapulted in the 1800s, she rather exists as a mental space. She brings about with herself a sense of frustration in reference specifically to the pictorial heritage that she (doesn’t) come from. In this sense it’s almost as if she were whipping crude reality. In fact Olympia, as we stated, has a physicality about her: she doesn’t twirl amongst Zephyr and fairies. Her sensuous flesh is exhibited and on sale. Painting is being mocked here. Manet kills her victim but without forgetting her; Bataille further stated that in every ritual sacrifice the victim is a central character, the means through which change is accomplished. The victim, in other words, can’t be killed. Here’s another paradox: the victim has to die however it’s destined to die, without such a death we’d only be left with useless tools and vacuous desires. Manet then lets Olympia make the grade: he martyrs her by presenting her to the academy of art. But as she stands martyred she opens up for us whole new worlds and visual languages which branch out to the present day. Cinico tv, which somehow comes from Herzog’s Even Dwarfs Started Small, would seem to belong more to Courbet’s crudeness than to this, but it’s from Manet that any sacrificial vision takes shape. It should indeed be a Courbet lost in meaning, with a cynical outlook on the world view which he didn’t have. In Ciprì and Maresco’s vision, humanity is shown to us here and now, degraded, in a world that has ended, where women no longer exist. Cinico tv gets from Courbet the freshness, the truth, the rocky rawness. But it’s from Manet that it understands the possibility of turning the sense outside of the object itself, of sacrificing it and in doing so transforming it into a vision and a torment, all brought to a pitch of post-atomic degradation, impossible to think of previously. The affinity is indeed in the discovery of the formless possibility of reality. Herzog’s aforementioned film is perhaps a better example, as it still embraces the flow of life, whereas Ciprì and Maresco lose it. Herzog is both present and absent, just as Olympia was and wasn’t in the exhibitions of 1864.
Let us look back at Olympia in her time and context; she embodies a new reality that rises above everything and everyone, an act of the mind, gesturing towards a surrealist opening. But if surrealism opened up the mind while still generating symbols, and if even abstract expressionism remained in touch with the sensuous and feelings, it is in this emotional abstraction that, with Olympia, we discover something else. We discover that there is an opening of the mind that is an abandonment, that is in a murky, in the sense of not smooth, not pure, one-sided agreement with thoughts hidden by the unconscious. Something that doesn’t emerge through clear symbols, a raw and lasciviousness energy that elegantly moves, a loneliness within the performance. Not a spit of the mind but rather its meanderings: a mixture of beauty and lyricism, where beauty is found in its non-lyrical elements: Courtly dirt, as it were. We look solemnly at Olympia while she stares back at us irreverently and naked, she isn’t born from a seashell, she comes from the streets and is born from the mind, from a place of possible and perhaps necessary thought. A woman for sale in the courtly context of great painting, of the great aristocracy, a space which reveals a subdued filth, present in all the nude Venuses rising from the waters, a punctum that reveals the pornographic mind of the Parisians of the time disguised as Greeks and from this street reveals every erotic drive across all eras. A place sought out, a Pasoliniesque, but actually, seen today’s perspective, maybe even Fellini-like poetry of life.
