Venus de Kitsch: Or, The Passion of the Venus de Milo

Criticism, Spring, 1999 by Matthew Gumpert

Theophanies

SUMMER IN PARIS, at the Louvre. But it could be Jerusalem, or Mecca. We stand before the Venus de Milo like pilgrims, silent, rapt (Fig. 1).(1) At the end of the hallway that leads, like a via sacra, to the statue, someone points, whispers: "There she is." The salle du Louvre the cella of a temple: a cultic space purged of all movement, history, desire. Temple? Or train station? There are shouts, laughter; children playing hide-and-seek, or looking anxiously for bathrooms. Some tourists are clearly bored; others make fun of the statue they have travelled so far to see. A man with a movie camera pans from head to toe and exclaims: "Would you look at the size of her feet? Must be size twelve? All the while, the sporadic insult of flashes, and a guard's futile refrain: "No flash!"

[Figure 1 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Summer in New York, at Gus's, a Greek restaurant. Wine, laughter, the usual irreverent repartee. The waiter brings a plate of octopus; someone asks: "So, what are you working on?" As if summoned into being by the question, there, above the bar, beside a bottle of ouzo: the Venus de Milo. A reproduction, that is. I point: "Her."

Introduction

How far is the Musee du Louvre from Gus's Restaurant? How far is the "real" Venus de Milo from the "reproduction"? Art from kitsch? Consider the reproduction of the Venus de Milo--what I call the Venus de Kitsch--as symptom and symbol of the "postmodern condition."(2) To celebrate this condition--call it the "triumph of commodification," the "waning of affect," the "reign of the simulacrum," or the "loss of the real"--is to embrace what Susan Sontag long ago called camp sensibility which "makes no distinction between the unique ... and the mass-produced object." Camp sensibility (we would say postmodernity) "transcends the nausea of the replica"(3) This essay celebrates the replica; not, however, because the distinction between original and copy has been neutralized by contemporary technologies and modes of cognition, but because it is naive to believe that such a distinction was ever viable.(4) I want to show that the theophanies sketched out above are, and have always been, identical. Which came first? The question rests on premises I am trying to undo; to ask it is to seek out temporal, aesthetic, ontological priority for an object which remains ever elusive. The "first" Venus de Milo--an object that, I will argue, cannot be said to exist--is also, we like to believe, the most beautiful, and the most real.

Both the Musee du Louvre and Gus's Restaurant, it is my contention, offer mock theophanies: in both places, idolatry (the worship of an image) combats and conspires with iconoclasm (the desecration of an image).(5) That is my subject here: kitsch as idol. Postmodern criticism's defining trait, it could be argued, is its obsession with the image.(6) Idolatry? No; postmodernism's conflation of object and image is, in fact, an idealistic effort to rescue object from image. Postmodernism is nostalgic criticism, masquerading as a criticism of nostalgia; a New Iconoclasm posing as a New Idolatry. Our culture's adoration of classical art is a paradigmatic expression of that nostalgia. Under its spell we collapse the distance between the Musee du Louvre and Gus's Restaurant, or we magnify it into something untraversable. I will attempt to traverse the distance between these two spaces without nostalgia; to show that they have always been the same scene.

Kitsch as Idol

Although kitsch is difficult to define, it has always referred (1) to the aesthetic species of falsehood: the imitation. Clement Greenburg defines kitsch as "ersatz culture," "the debased ... simulacrum of genuine culture";(7) (2) to a strictly modern phenomenon, tied to the rise of popular culture. For Walter Benjamin the premodern cult object was inseparable from its "aura"; it was unique our relation to it ritualized, particularized.(8) With the advent of mechanical reproduction, the aura is lost: the cult object becomes a product, infinitely reproducible. What is the aura? The term's indeterminacy is the source of its power, turning art into an archaic mystery cult.

For the Benjaminians, the waning of the old cult, and the rise of the new (that of kitsch, or the Anti-Aura) is linked closely to modernity: to new audiences, economies, technologies.(9) The typically apocalyptic-ecstatic postmodern diagnosis (Jameson, Harvey, Baudrillard), on the other hand, of a contemporary world saturated and anaesthetized by mediated images, where imitation is indistinguishable from original, art from commerce, suggests a more recent triumph. Celeste Olalquiaga's equation of kitsch and a postmodernity marked by "irreverent recycling" is standard.(10) But here postmodern criticism is itself distinguished by the very repetition it purports to expose in contemporary culture; Olalquiaga's postmodernity is an "irreverent recycling" of the discourse of modernism. Both modernist and postmodernist remain nostalgic prophets, the difference being that the postmodernist appears to celebrate what the modernist proscribes.