Victorine Meurent was my M.F.A. thesis performance that I performed in a 19th-century gallery space in the National Gallery of Canada, in 2009.
Victorine Meurent is a performance piece designed to tell the story of the white model, Victorine Meurent, in Édouard Manet’s once-notorious painting Olympia. The black woman who also appears in the painting as a maid was by my understanding working as a slave in the Manet’s household.
In the performance I investigates the symbolism of the semi nude model, a sex worker figure through the use of personal narrative. In art history the term, “odalisque” is still used. I am now aware of its orientalist underpinnings and I do find the term hugely problematic. Sexism, homophobia and racism are so embedded into the European and North American cannon of art history making it a difficult terrain to navigate. The “odalisque” figure is usually a woman, or girl, lying on a couch or bed, and is traditionally assumed to be a mistress, prostitute or concubine of a wealthy man.
This performance allowed me to tell a story about Victorine Meurent. Meurent was Manet’s model for this painting, and many other of Manet’s most celebrated works, but she was also a painter herself and she exhibited in a 19th-century salon as a painter but had to have a man accompany her to the exhibition opening because at the time women were not allowed to go to Paris Salon by themselves. Nudity, ironically, was thought too much for women to experience. In the performance, I attempted to inhabit and animate the life of a nineteenth century queer artist while investigating my own experience living as a queer woman in 2009.