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| MANET'S CATS 3 |
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From "The Painter of (post)Modern Cats"
Illusions of mastery are replaced by other illusions. Manet becomes elusive, allusive and art historians set up other illusions. The elusive elements, such as cats, are marginalized, scarcely alluded to, for they reveal and revel in a lack of control which is a lack in dependence within, a lack within dependence, a lack with dependence, a lack of independence. A lack which is most revealing when the greatest attempts are made to conceal it, to fill it. The claims to mastering Manet, to call on his presence, instead invoke and provoke his absence, failing to stimulate it.
Perhaps this is all that can be said when writing about Manet, around Manet, on Manet. Manet offers nothing to write about, nothing to write around, nothing to write on, except cats. A cat-amenial discharge from Manet's absence. Quotations, punctuation marks, puns, footnotes. A completely incomplete incompleteness. Absences that can never be filled. Is this the cat's gaze? Is this the gaze in Manet? A gaze that reveals an absence, longing for a presence that can never be present enough; can never be sent often enough. An effacement of presence, leaving only traces. What could fulfil this gaze of the cat? The gaze of the (m)other? To say that the gaze of the cat could be fulfilled would be to fall into the illusion that it could be mastered, that the gaze could be satisfied. The cat's gaze is insatiable. It always needs more, longing, but never belonging. It is a gaze readily open to illusions, but one that reflects those illusions back on the viewer, revealing only the viewer's desire, and leaving the cat's gaze, the gaze in Manet's work, Manet's gaze, as always non-present, unfulfilled.
There is nothing in Manet that can be mastered. All that can be mastered is nothing; an absence that transforms all acts of mastery into acts of masturbation, preventing inter-dis-course, preventing Manet's insemination. Even in seminal works, such as T.J. Clark's, Manet's presence never gives birth, being always absent, always being sent away, always reflecting the author's own dissemination; the author's own inscription into the text.
That in depicting a prostitute/Marxist reading in 1865/1984, Manet/Clark dealt with modernity/post-modernity in one of its most poignant and familiar, but also difficult aspects: Difficult because it had already become a commonplace in the 1860s/1980s that women of this kind/Marxists, formerly confined to the edges of society/Academic discourse, had more and more usurped the center of things and seemed to be making the city/Academia over in their image. Thus, the features defining "the prostitute"/"the Marxist" were losing whatever clarity they had once possessed, as the difference between the middle and the margin of the social order/Academic field became blurred, and Manet's picture/Clark's book was suspected of revelling in that state of affairs, marked as it was by a shifting, inconsequential circuit of signs/methods -all of them apparently clues to its subject's/Clark's identity, sexual/Freudian and social/Marxist, but too few of them/methods adding up. (T.J. Clark/my changes follow immediately after the '/')
Clark's attempt to inseminate Manet's presence meets an absence and spills over, being disseminated throughout his text. "Seurat's/Clark's subject, by contrast, is the intermingling of class/methods, not their real separation; it is the elaborate texture of controls and avoidances that the classes/methods bring with them to the place of pleasure/Clark's text."(T.J. Clark with changes) "This possibility -the presence/absence yet again of prostitution/a Freudian interpretation, thinly disguised- is something that the critics/Clark appear(s) to delight in, it gives their reading/Clark's writing added spice." (T.J. Clark with changes)
Clark rarely invokes Manet's name, but when he does invoke Manet's presence, Manet's conscious, this conscious is consciously or unconsciously revealed as an absence by Clark; a reflective absence, reflecting Clark's presence, his own abundance which overflows his discussion of Manet and permeates throughout his text.
What Manet/Clark was reading/writing was a detective story/an attempt at filling Manet's absence, in fact/fiction, one of the early classics of the genre/one in a long line of the history of art as artistic presence, whose sedentary hero, Auguste Dupin/Clark, solves the mystery in question/interprets the painting in question -the murder of a Parisian grisette/Olympia- without leaving his study, on the basis of clues he gleans from reports in newspapers. (T.J. Clark with changes)
But this all pervading presence of Clark cannot hide Manet's absence, as staring into the gaze of the cat, whose absence reflects back upon the viewer, Clark cannot help but become self-reflexive, revealing his own lack, his own failure to fill Manet's absence, to make Manet fertile. "There is something else appearing in discourse here, and leaving behind the visual/written signs of its passage; repetitions and redundancies, falterings, false and real silences, misrecognitions, illogic, unintentional comedy (especially when the subject is sex)." (T.J. Clark with changes) "But of course he [Manet/Clark] did not; he [Manet/Clark] seems to have worked instead to discover and exacerbate inconsistencies in his [Manet's/Clark's] subject; teasing out the anomalies, letting in the blanks, having them dictate the picture's/book's order." (T.J. Clark with changes) The mirror in Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère is not behind the barmaid but in her cat-optric gaze. The barmaid's face does not reveal "the presence of the signifier, the absence of the signified." (Clark) Instead, it reveals the presence of interpretation and the absence of Manet, the inability of interpretation to fill Manet's absence, the ability of Manet to consume interpretation, exposing the interpreter's cat-atonic presence, the interpreter's attempt at intrusion, at cat burglary.
It should be remembered, however that "these are remarks about Manet's/Clark's practice, not his own theory of it; and they are not meant as an argument that Manet/Clark did not look hard at his model Victorine Meurand/the paintings of Manet." (T.J. Clark with changes) Instead, Clark/Manet in looking at Manet's paintings/Victorine found an absence/presence that Clark/Manet attempted to fill/emptied with his own presence/absence.
This act of self-reflection, self-inscription, the insertion of the self into Manet's absence, the insertion of a cat-heter to try to release Manet's discharge, is not limited to Clark. Charles Bernheimer's text also seems infused by the author's own presence and Manet's absence. " 'One does not know nowadays if it's honest women/art historians who are dressed like whores/post-structuralists or whores/post-structuralists who are dressed like honest women/art historians.' " (Bernheimer with my changes) Bernheimer's concern with his own text's place within the field of art history saturates his text. "At the end of the decade, Maxime Du Camp/CAA found that the mode in fashion was actually being set by the hussies/post-structuralists who had come to town." (Bernheimer with changes) Bernheimer's text reveals Manet's absence and places the presence of theory within this space, focusing on the work of Sartre and Benjamin. Yet, Bernheimer's concern for theory exceeds his discussion of Sartre and Benjamin, and is often found underlying his text and his choice of other texts.
'Paris/art history, a bordello for foreigners/post-structuralists,' complained the Goncourts/conservative art historians in 1863/1989. 'There is no longer a single woman/writer kept by a Frenchman/art history...It's an 1815/1968 of the phallus/theory.' (Bernheimer with changes)
Alexandre Dumas/the conservative art historian declares that French society/art history is headed toward 'universal prostitution/dissolution of the field'...He/the conservative art historian looks back nostalgically to the femme galante/Panofsky...The ranks of venal women/art historians were subsequently increased by grisettes/Meyer Schapiro, who had the merit of being productive workers...Now, however, the love of luxury/theory and the frantic quest for pleasure/chaos have transformed corrupt women/writers into mere market commodities. (Bernheimer with changes)
Recognizing, or perhaps unable to avoid, Manet's absence, Bernheimer rarely invokes Manet's name. Yet, in the face of this absence, staring into the absent gaze, I must reconsider what my paper is about.
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