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

Criticism, Spring, 1999 by Matthew Gumpert

We have seen how Baudrillard's attempts to excavate a history of the discourse of the image was undone by this same proscription. Let us call the copy of the Venus de Milo a simulation by all means, so long as we call the original the same thing.(90) in turning then, as we do now, to a series of copies, we are not moving from one order of mimesis to another, regressing from original to secondhand. It is not a question, in these artifacts, of dissimulating a "real" Venus de Milo; they are not being assayed (ontologically, ethically, aesthetically) by reference to a present or absent original. Think of the objects that follow as representations of each other, rather than as genealogical descendants of any singular, ancestral original. I have thus made no attempt to elaborate a typology of reproduction here; it is not the inflection of the particular medium with which I am concerned, but reproduction itself as a form of ritual idolatry.(91)

Venus of the Diner. On a placemat from a diner in Astoria, Queens (Fig. 5): Venus a crude scrawl. A trivialized classical motif frames Hellenistic sculpts, medieval palace, classical/temple, and contemporary map alike; all of these signifiers work together--along with a soup-stain or a stray french fry--as a bricolage standing for and selling the idea of "Greece," or, perhaps: "Lunch." Duplicated and degraded, by the same token the Venus is revived, her cult confirmed, because her humble employment in the service of the insignificant and the daily, sustains, while it mocks, as in a Passion or mystery rite, her ritual power. Think of this, in Bakhtinian terms, as a carnivalesque placemat; by laughing at culture, it celebrates it in popular, corporeal terms.(92)

[Figure 5 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Venus of the Matchbox. On a box of Mexican matches, "Clasicos de Lujo" (Fig. 6): the Venus de Milo, the Parthenon, the train "La Central." A rhetorical defense of quality: the classic (or classical). All of these objects are the "best" in their class, speaking cachet, prestige, power, and wealth; here they are drafted in the service of a box of fifty matches. Comedy? Hubris? Savvy marketing? All three, perhaps.

[Figure 6 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Salt-and-Pepper Venus. "Venus Salt and Pepper Shakers," from H. Fishlove & Co. in Chicago, 1948 (Fig. 7).(93) The box promotes and demotes the Venus: the Ionic column is there (requisite classical reference), but so are the slogans ("Gay!" "Practical? "Amusing!")that read like so many signifiers for "post-war commercial boom."

[Figure 7 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

How-Much-Is-That-Venus-in-the-Window de Milo. Venus above a coffee shop in New York.(94) An eminently postmodern landscape (Fig. 8): the beautiful and unique objet d'art a mere bibelot, grouped with the like (miniature classical busts and vases) and the unlike (clothing, signs, awnings, advertisements). This Venus works for a living: she stands in a window marked "L. Biagiotti: Better Made Displays." What is being sold here is not the 'Venus de Milo per se, but the very notion of display, the Venus long ago having become a sign for the whole category of the exhibited, the gazed upon, the displayed, Imagine yourself, now, walking past Puccio'S Cafe Espresso; you look up, see the words "Italian Kitchen," "Drink Coca-Cola," "Heros" and discern, still higher, the familiar form of the Venus de Milo. As you continue on your way, you spy an attractive pair of pants, and think, without pants one would be naked; naked like the Venus de Milo: the Venus has no arms, you remember; arms, legs; shirts, pants. You recall the Venus, the statues beside her; you wonder: are these the Heros of the Italian Kitchen? Does kitsch belong in a kitchen? Meanwhile your ruminations and bad puns are nearly brought to a sudden halt by a careening cab. Wittingly, unwittingly, you are a protagonist, along with the Venus de Milo, in a thousand parallel, competing, intersecting narratives, all of them private rituals sustaining, in one way or another, your cultic relation to that object.(95) The point here is not psychology, which, as represented here, is crude, a mere syntagm of associations, but epistemology and phenomenology: how we come to know, over and over again, the Venus; how she remains a feature of our cognitive, perceptual landscape.(96)