Screen - Dark Matter Archives

40~ It may be that 1 am asking for too much. Certainly 1 am askingfor the difficult. and equally certainly for something Manet didnot do. 1 am pointing to the fact that there are always othermeanings in any given social space - counter-meanings, alternativeorders of meaning. produced by the culture itself. in theclash of classes. ideologies and forms of contro l.~d 1 suppose Iam saying. ultimately. that any critique of the esrablis~d. domi­~an[ systems 6f meaningW-iIl degenerate into a mere -refusal- tosignify unless it seeks to found its meanings - discover its contrarymeaning - not in some magic re-presentation, on the otherside of negation and refusal. but in signs which are already present,fighting for room _ meanings rooted in actual forms of life;repressed meanings. the meanings of the dominated.1How exactly that is to be done is another matter-. It will mostassuredly not be achieved in a single painting. (There is no hopefor 'Socialism in one Art-work', to borrow a phrase from Art­Language.) A clue to Manet's tactics in 1865. and their limitations.might come if we widened our focus for a moment and looked notjust at Olympia but its companion painting in the Salon, Jesusinsulted by the Soldiers (Figure 7) . This picture lVas also unpopularin 1865: some critics held it to be worse than Olympia. even; andmany agreed in seeing it as a deliberate caricature of religious art.But the operative word here is art: if the JeStls is paired with theOlympia. the effect of the pairing is to entrench both pictures inthe world of painting : they belong together only as contrastingartistic ca~g~ bizarre versions of the n~'!.nd tbealtarpie.ce~ T he contrasrWiili Courbet's procedure in 1853 isstriking: where the opposition of The Wrestlers" and The Batherundermined the possibility of instating either term in its normalplace in the canon. and reading it as pictures were meant to be~reaA. the conjunction oT'Oiympia and Jesus was meant to establishTitian (and perhaps even Baudelaire) all the more securely.Not that it did so. in fact; but this is the abiding paradox ofManer's art. In any case, Olympia and Jesus were far from beingManet's last word on the subject: the particular pairings and15 On The Wrestlers groupings of pictures in subsequent Salons. and the whole sequencein 1853 see of pictures displayed - or refused display - in the later 1860s. isK Herding. 'LesLutteurs "detestabIes":critique de Emperor Maximilian as the intended fo cus on the 1867 one-manmuch more open and erratic and rebarbative. (The Execution ofstyle, critique show ; The Balcony beside The Luncheon in the Studio in 1869; thesociale. Histoire etCritique des Arts, attempt to paint a big picture of a Bicycle Race in 1870.) But theno 4-5. May 1978. ambiguities of Manet's strategy are clear. What gives his workwhich again in the 1860s its peculiar force. and perhaps its continuing power ofexamines thecritical reaction example, is that at the same time as his art turns inward on itsin depth.own means and materials - clinging, with a kind of desperation.to the fragments of tradition left to it - it encounters and engagesa whole contrary iconography. Its subjects are vulgar; the fastidiousaction of paint upon tbem does not soften, but rather intensifies,their awk\ ....·ardness ; the painting's purpose seems to be to show usthe artifice of th is familiar repertoire of modern We. and . call inquestion the forms in which the city contrives its own appearance.Doing so. as we have seen, excluded Manet's are from the care andcomprehension of almost all his contemporaries; though whetherthat is mattcr for praise or blame depends, in the end. on our senseof the possible. now and then.41MANET Christ ins ult~par Ies soldats.Arc Institute of Chicago