Kate Barry's 2009 performance piece Victorine Meurent is the latest in a series of works that reconsider the image of the model made famous in notorious paintings that Édouard Manet created in the mid-1800s.
Barry's longstanding love affair with Meurent lets her bring the voice of the rebellious model (who was also an accomplished painter) into a modern context with a new orientation.
“My use of narrative allows me to animate the life of nineteenth century artist while investigating my own experience living as a queer woman in 2009,” explains Barry.
To chronicle the development of the performance and the works that led to it, Barry was interviewed for Guerilla by writer and curator Anna Khimasia.
AK: So Kate, how did this affair with Victorine Meurent begin?
KB: Like many love stories, mine took place in Paris in the springtime, but let me start from the beginning…
I have always been interested in the relationship between popular culture and the female body. Most recently, in 2007, I produced a set of mud flaps using the iconography of the “mud-flap girl,” only I also sketched in her impossible skeletal form. I worked with a professional trucker who used the mud-flaps and I traced the journey of the mud-flaps on a blog.
Kate Barry, Mud-Flap Girl, Mud-Flap, 2007.
Kate Barry, Mud Flap Girl (Highway Project), 2007.
I became more interested in the history of the female body as sexual object, and its relationship to art production which led me to the odalisque figure, of which Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) is perhaps the most notorious. Victorine Meurent is Manet’s famous model.
Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863.
At this point in the love affair two things happened that brought us closer together. I began a series of drawings, using red wine and ink, investigating the corporeal nature of Manet’s Olympia and the relationship between the inner and outer body.
Kate Barry, Olympia #5, gouache, wine and ink on paper, 30.5 x 22.9 cm, 2009.
Kate Barry, Olympia #7, gouache, wine and ink on paper, 30.5 x 22.9 cm, 2009.
I also spent part of the summer of 2008 in Paris where I was able to visit Victorine Meurent daily at the Musée d’Orsay. My visits culminated in a performance, Lettre à une amie: I wrote a love letter to Victorine. After twenty minutes of writing, I made an offering of the letter and six red roses.
Kate Barry, Lettre á une amie, 2008.
AK: In your latest performance piece, you actually become Victorine Meurent, is that correct? Can you talk about some of the motivations for taking on this role?
KB: Victorine Meurent was a really interesting woman; she was very strong and sassy. She was a musician and painter and she met Manet while busking in the streets of Paris. At one point she was exhibiting in the same Paris Salon as Manet. Exhibiting in the prestigious Paris Salon is an incredible achievement for a woman of the nineteenth century, usually the Salon did not allow women to exhibit. This is also the era when women were denied access to art school and a university education.
AK: So do you feel a certain affinity with Victorine Meurent?
KB: Absolutely, because the other interesting thing about Victorine Meurent is that she was a lesbian. She had a reputation of being rebellious not only because of her non-traditional career, but also because of her liaisons with other women. The census records of the day show that she lived with another woman for ten years until her lover died.
My performance is inspired by Victorine Meurent's determination. I developed a performance piece that would bring her story into the twenty-first century. My use of narrative allows me to animate the life of a nineteenth century artist while investigating my own experience living as a queer woman in 2009.
AK: What sort of texts where you able to find? What about her paintings?
KB: Victorine Meurent's paintings are lost; she experienced a fire very late in her life and she lost many important things. Apparently one of her paintings survived, was bought by a private collection and is now at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire de Colombes in France. Unfortunately I do not know the subject matter of her paintings.
AK: But as a subject, Meurent as Manet’s Olympia has been written about so often, from T. J. Clark to Linda Nochlin to Amelia Jones and Rebecca Schneider. There are also numerous contemporary artists, like Carolee Schneeman and Yasumasa Morimura, who engage with Manet’s iconic painting. How is your representation and dialogue with her different from these past scholarly and artistic engagements?
KB: I feel like I am taking part in a conversation with other artists who have also commented on Manet’s work. I am most interested in Victorine Meurent, I wanted to find a way to bring her voice into the twenty-first century.
AK: There are, admittedly, some challenges in giving her a voice, a voice which is really your voice. Can you talk about how you created the script and how you hope to perhaps evade some of the criticism surrounding the appropriation of another’s voice?
KB: The ethical challenges surrounding appropriation in contemporary art is a huge subject.
AK: But you intentionally move away from trying to recreate the painting and focus more on role-playing, no?
KB: Yes, the script I wrote is based on what I understand to be misconceptions around Victorine Meurent. For example, when I was an undergraduate art student I learned she was "Manet's prostitute." Art historian Eunice Lipton states that Victorine Meurent never sold sex for money. In my performance I try to offer another voice.
AK: Manet's Olympia is often used in discussions of the gaze … traditionally men looking is seen as active, women being looked at is considered passive or so the argument goes ... naked women as object are displayed to be consumed by the male gaze. Yet Olympia returns the gaze. How do you think your own constructions of desire, particularly lesbian desire, in both this project and Lettre à une amie might contribute to these discussions?
KB: I no longer think about the gaze in terms of men versus woman. The play with gender and race is what makes the artist Yasumasa Morimura's response to Olympia so great. He inserts an Asian, male body into the frame both as Olympia and as the maid. I think bringing in the notion of women desiring other women will bring something new to the conversation.
AK: So in your own work, in which you lie provocatively in a similar position to Victorine Meurent in Manet’s painting, is there a danger of reproducing rather than critiquing the female body as object of desire?
KB: At first I didn't want to use the odalisque pose because it is so loaded, but I realized this pose allows me to "return the gaze" and to use the act of looking as a strategy in the performance. Audience members describe my performance as "captivating" and "unsettling."
Kate Barry, Victorine Meurent, 2009.
AK: You also use a camera in your performance, can you elaborate on your use of technology?
KB: To return to an earlier question, I guess one of the ways in which my performance differs from past engagements is that I have tried to incorporate technology and think about the ways we see in the twenty-first century. I use technology in the performance because it is a part of our everyday lives.
Documentation is also an important issue for performance. I document all my performances and perhaps the video footage will become a separate work. The key with documentation is to realize that is it documentation and not the performance. I have performance stills from Victorine Meurent where at first glance it might appear that I'm framing the female body as sex object; however, this is a very limited interpretation of the performance, and in a way it misrepresents the piece.
During my next exhibition in August 2009 at AXNÉO7, I am hoping to stream the performance live on a website. Someone sitting on a bus in France, watching the performance on their iPhone, will have a very different experience of the performance from someone sitting in the gallery in Quebec at a live performance.
