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

Criticism, Spring, 1999 by Matthew Gumpert

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Venus de Braquehais. Nothing restricts us to contemporary landscapes in our pursuit of the kitsch-object. Take Bruno Braquehais's Academic Study -- No. 5 (Fig. 9), one in a series of photographs produced in 1854.(97) Kitsch-Ingres, essentially: an odalisque in an orientalist setting, gazing upon and gazed upon by a plaster Venus de Milo. Elizabeth McCauley writes:

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   The chaste ... Venus ... gazing down on her ... anti-Greek counterpart ...
   draws the eye away from the real flesh and suggests that armless "art" is
   ... superior to clumsy "nature." This mishmash of ... props, representing
   classical, medieval, Renaissance, and Oriental cultures, confuses rather
   than legitimizes the presence of the ... nude ... Artifice, embodied in the
   baroque drapery and ... objects suggesting the senses, confronts nature in
   the ... unidealized female body.(98)

But it seems to me that what Braquehais's image "confuses" is precisely the distinction between "artifice" and "nature," flesh and plaster; both "models" are part of the "mishmash of pretentious props," of the "objects" in a space that is at once studio, harem, and museum. The photograph itself is, of course, one more object for the collectioneur: a souvenir. At the same time, Academic-Study--No. 5 is a product and celebration of the industry of idolatry; not only in thee reciprocal gazes of statue and woman, and that of the implicit viewer who looks from one to the other, but in the technologies of reproduction which the photograph both exposes and exploits: the souvenir Venus imitating the original; the statue itself mimicking flesh-and-bone (and vice versa); the female model playing the painted odalisque; the studio dressed up as harem; the photograph itself, reproducing and substituting for a "live" performance.

Venus of the Textbook. Souvenir and handbook for the souvenir-maker, Le Moulage is a how-to on sculptural reproduction. "J'ai choisi un exemple que chacun connait," writes Pascal Rosier, "la Venus de Milo."(99) If the Venus de Milo is the example everyone knows, Le Moulage is a guide on how to make examples of Venus, thereby ensuring that everyone know her. Moulage, "l'ensemble des operations permettant de reproduire cette oeuvre a un ou plusieurs exemplaires," is distinguished from faconnage, "l'intervention de la main ou de l'outil pour la production d'une oeuvre unique."(100) the two suggesting the Benjaminian distinction between art in the modern and the pre-modern era. But the first may function not as heresy but reformation, translating and disseminating Venuses, turning the Venus of the Louvre into a vernacular Venus, a Venus of the People. Le Moulage offers us not the birth of Venus (immaculate conception), but her continual rebirth.(101) Venus, once invaluable, immovable, singular, is now affordable; transportable, plural. Reformation, desecration. Wax Venuses are grouped with "objets ... que l'on trouve dans les boutiques de decoration: ... bougies ornementales ... imitations de plats cuisines ... corbeilles de fruits factices."(102)