![Confronting The Other: Translating Manet’s Olympia
Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura appropriates himself into well-known icons of Western art, portraying both male and female figures. In his 1988 photographic recapitulation of Edouard Manet’s Olympia he appears in the place of the voluptuous pale-skinned female who sparked such uproar at the Salon of 1865. Donning a blonde wig and a beauty spot, Morimura lies seductively upon the famous divan, wearing nothing but a strategically-placed hand and a pair of gold-heeled pink mules.
Manet’s Olympia has been parodied and reproduced countless times. However, it is Morimura’s encounter with Olympia and Larry Rivers’ I Like Olympia in Black Face which stand out particularly. Rivers, in Rabelaisian style, inverts Manet’s Olympia by foregrounding a black female nude alongside a white maid and cat. Unlike Morimura, Rivers retains a version of the original white female nude, black maid and black cat, but pushes it into the background of his work so that what we see is something akin to Olympia in negative.
Both Morimura and Rivers are sympathetic to the spirit of the original Olympia: by placing Manet’s Olympia into the long tradition of nudes in European painting it becomes obvious that the agenda here is not to idealise, like Titian’s Venus of Urbino or Ingres’ Grande Odalisque. Manet - unlike the forefathers of the genre - does not eulogise the bodily attributes of his nude; her earthly form is in no way removed from its social circumstance or promoted to a higher aesthetic plane. Instead Olympia is explicitly grounded within her time and place; she confronts us – or her viewer/voyeur/client - and in her defiant reality she simultaneously alienates and entices us.
Both Rivers and Morimura translate Manet’s confrontation with the tradition of the nude, yet they do not imitate Manet. A text or an image rendered literally through translation becomes a substitute; a proxy that aims at reaching transparency or equivalence of meaning. However such transparency can only be illusory, as the translator will necessarily be working in a different manner, time or place to the original. The Latin root of translation - to bear, carry, or bring - confirms that translation is an act of movement and a voyage for meaning. It is an act that creates a model of difference as opposed to one of imitation: rather than merely replicating, a translation can become an independent work in its own right.
The central tenet of Manet’s painting, which is translated by Rivers and Morimura, is ‘Otherness’. In Olympia this is found operating on several levels: the female as Other, the foreign black maid as Other and, more broadly, what Edward Said calls ‘the Orient’ as Other. Such inventions of Otherness form a nexus of knowledge and power, with the Other conventionally represented through and contained by the dominating framework: Western and male. As Edward Said writes - specifically referring to the Orient - the Other is ‘invented’. If we extend this to male/female structures the same applies, in Said’s terms: that the Other is established as a cultural contestant; a deep and recurring image of the unintelligible which shores up the primacy of the familiar.
By staging a confrontation with the Other, Rivers and Morimura reinvent it; they translate and redefine the terms of Manet’s Olympia. As Manet magnifies the female body in a typically ‘low’ situation, Rivers shifts racial and sexual power relations to the fore and Morimura, more specifically, places himself - a gay man and representative of the Japanese Orient - in the position of a female prostitute, realigning gender, power and race relations. Morimura’s work correlates with Manet’s as he conflates male and female body types, placing himself in Olympia’s original position. Morimura constructs a visual regime which updates Manet’s project. Drawing upon stereotypes of the Other and the Orient as a female entity to be dominated, he also contextualizes modern preoccupations with homosexuality by placing himself, a gay artist, at the work’s centre.
Jean Paul Sartre wrote in Being and Nothingness that the Other ‘is the indispensable mediator between myself and me. I am ashamed of myself as I appear to the Other.’ It is this that both Rivers and Morimura acknowledge and confront; trouble occurs for the Other when he or she discovers that they have become, in another’s prolix gaze, an object. The Other is then faced by the severe realisation that their own subjectivity makes no contribution whatsoever in another’s eyes to the character of that object. Manet, Rivers and Morimura play upon this realisation by translating and transposing convention. By forcing the viewer in the position of a client in the gaze of their provider (whether the original Olympia, Olympia in Black Face, or Olympia as gay Japanese male) each artist compels them to pass judgement upon his/herself as an object, for, as Sartre wrote, ‘it is as an object that [we] appear to the Other.’
This recognition resonates throughout each translation of Olympia. Consider the one thing that remains consistent throughout her different incarnations: the black ribbon tied around her neck. This ribbon restricts. It serves as a cut off point - a reminder that it is the body on offer here, only up to the neck. This encounter is not advertised as a matter of the mind; it belongs to the realm of objectivity and not subjectivity. And yet, each work’s ability to confront the viewer lies in its relocation of the subject, in a reversal of Otherness. In the end conventional power relations are deconstructed, they are laid bare, and it is we the viewer who become Other. The gaze is turned in, upon ourselves, and we are obliged to examine the conventions by which we see and live.
Victoria Spratt
Image:Larry Rivers, I Like Olympia in Black Face, 1970, Mixed Material, 182 X 194 X 100 cm, Centre Pompidou, Paris](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyiu6zqc9V1qd1s5mo1_500.jpg)
Confronting The Other: Translating Manet’s Olympia
Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura appropriates himself into well-known icons of Western art, portraying both male and female figures. In his 1988 photographic recapitulation of Edouard Manet’s Olympia he appears in the place of the voluptuous pale-skinned female who sparked such uproar at the Salon of 1865. Donning a blonde wig and a beauty spot, Morimura lies seductively upon the famous divan, wearing nothing but a strategically-placed hand and a pair of gold-heeled pink mules.
Manet’s Olympia has been parodied and reproduced countless times. However, it is Morimura’s encounter with Olympia and Larry Rivers’ I Like Olympia in Black Face which stand out particularly. Rivers, in Rabelaisian style, inverts Manet’s Olympia by foregrounding a black female nude alongside a white maid and cat. Unlike Morimura, Rivers retains a version of the original white female nude, black maid and black cat, but pushes it into the background of his work so that what we see is something akin to Olympia in negative.
Both Morimura and Rivers are sympathetic to the spirit of the original Olympia: by placing Manet’s Olympia into the long tradition of nudes in European painting it becomes obvious that the agenda here is not to idealise, like Titian’s Venus of Urbino or Ingres’ Grande Odalisque. Manet - unlike the forefathers of the genre - does not eulogise the bodily attributes of his nude; her earthly form is in no way removed from its social circumstance or promoted to a higher aesthetic plane. Instead Olympia is explicitly grounded within her time and place; she confronts us – or her viewer/voyeur/client - and in her defiant reality she simultaneously alienates and entices us.
Both Rivers and Morimura translate Manet’s confrontation with the tradition of the nude, yet they do not imitate Manet. A text or an image rendered literally through translation becomes a substitute; a proxy that aims at reaching transparency or equivalence of meaning. However such transparency can only be illusory, as the translator will necessarily be working in a different manner, time or place to the original. The Latin root of translation - to bear, carry, or bring - confirms that translation is an act of movement and a voyage for meaning. It is an act that creates a model of difference as opposed to one of imitation: rather than merely replicating, a translation can become an independent work in its own right.
The central tenet of Manet’s painting, which is translated by Rivers and Morimura, is ‘Otherness’. In Olympia this is found operating on several levels: the female as Other, the foreign black maid as Other and, more broadly, what Edward Said calls ‘the Orient’ as Other. Such inventions of Otherness form a nexus of knowledge and power, with the Other conventionally represented through and contained by the dominating framework: Western and male. As Edward Said writes - specifically referring to the Orient - the Other is ‘invented’. If we extend this to male/female structures the same applies, in Said’s terms: that the Other is established as a cultural contestant; a deep and recurring image of the unintelligible which shores up the primacy of the familiar.
By staging a confrontation with the Other, Rivers and Morimura reinvent it; they translate and redefine the terms of Manet’s Olympia. As Manet magnifies the female body in a typically ‘low’ situation, Rivers shifts racial and sexual power relations to the fore and Morimura, more specifically, places himself - a gay man and representative of the Japanese Orient - in the position of a female prostitute, realigning gender, power and race relations. Morimura’s work correlates with Manet’s as he conflates male and female body types, placing himself in Olympia’s original position. Morimura constructs a visual regime which updates Manet’s project. Drawing upon stereotypes of the Other and the Orient as a female entity to be dominated, he also contextualizes modern preoccupations with homosexuality by placing himself, a gay artist, at the work’s centre.
Jean Paul Sartre wrote in Being and Nothingness that the Other ‘is the indispensable mediator between myself and me. I am ashamed of myself as I appear to the Other.’ It is this that both Rivers and Morimura acknowledge and confront; trouble occurs for the Other when he or she discovers that they have become, in another’s prolix gaze, an object. The Other is then faced by the severe realisation that their own subjectivity makes no contribution whatsoever in another’s eyes to the character of that object. Manet, Rivers and Morimura play upon this realisation by translating and transposing convention. By forcing the viewer in the position of a client in the gaze of their provider (whether the original Olympia, Olympia in Black Face, or Olympia as gay Japanese male) each artist compels them to pass judgement upon his/herself as an object, for, as Sartre wrote, ‘it is as an object that [we] appear to the Other.’
This recognition resonates throughout each translation of Olympia. Consider the one thing that remains consistent throughout her different incarnations: the black ribbon tied around her neck. This ribbon restricts. It serves as a cut off point - a reminder that it is the body on offer here, only up to the neck. This encounter is not advertised as a matter of the mind; it belongs to the realm of objectivity and not subjectivity. And yet, each work’s ability to confront the viewer lies in its relocation of the subject, in a reversal of Otherness. In the end conventional power relations are deconstructed, they are laid bare, and it is we the viewer who become Other. The gaze is turned in, upon ourselves, and we are obliged to examine the conventions by which we see and live.
Victoria Spratt
Image:Larry Rivers, I Like Olympia in Black Face, 1970, Mixed Material, 182 X 194 X 100 cm, Centre Pompidou, Paris
