Walking, and Other Such Actions

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by Jahaira Rios Campos y Gálvez
edited by Beláxis Buil

4/12/2020


A few years ago I took an action I often neglected very seriously: walking. I decided to consider it during a long walk with some time to reflect. I’m not sure if it was necessarily on that day I chose to take it seriously or if it was that I consciously asked myself- ‘Why do I walk'? I had to lay out those reasons and based on those reasons decide if my question was worth making a commitment.  So I did. I decided to make a serious commitment to walking.


My resolution was: first, I'd walk for my health, second, for the love of my battered knees (and occasionally inflamed heels), and finally, as a way to honor my family. To this day my battered knees (and inflamed heels) serve as a painful reminder of wrongfully running on pavement nor understanding the concept of form for athletes. On top of all that there’s the many years of dancing on concrete floors (because I’d practice in the back room of my church with a hard concrete floor). There wasn’t an appropriate room where I could practice. It was all cold, hard concrete flooring- not even an inch of carpet was to be found. So, I beat my knees (and heels) pretty bad. But now I try giving my lower extremities the love they so deserve. 


Then when I was a very young child I was told that I had ‘ugly’ feet- and because my feet were so ‘ugly’ I wouldn't be able to wear sandals. And maybe (just maybe) I would need surgery to correct my ‘unsightly’ curved big toe problem: because after all, as a woman I should not have ‘ugly’ feet. I don’t know why but between God’s compassionate grace and my inclination to prove others wrong, I pushed all the negative comments away. Thankfully my resiliency helped me to not become psychologically scarred or affected by any of the negative comments I received as a child. Today I wear sandals to let my feet walk in their natural glory (letting the whole world see and know that they have arrived!). Despite what was said, I encouraged myself to display the lovely shape and dexterity of my feet. And yes!- I am one of those individuals that can pick up all kinds of oddities with my feet. SOOO!- yes, my feet kind of look like hands. Anyone who is put off by that can just stare at them a little longer!



Another reason I chose to walk is to not use my car unnecessarily. It seems that Miami's lifestyle culture and city planning infrastructure can influence us into thinking ‘it's way too hot’ to walk a few blocks to the market. Realizing that these points of view are so different than the views my family has back home (in Nicaragua), only gave my reason to walk more value. I think of my family back home as the real seeds that planted and nourished  my love for walking. I have moments where I envision my grandmother walking through towns to get some milk or pick up some detergent for the clothes she used to hand wash in her pila. The people in town  paid for her laundry service. She’d walk long distances just to pick up items for work. I also picture my cousins visiting the town plaza to play in the evening, or simply venture out on a walk to the plaza just to spend time with other family members. Their lives were free and mobile, unlike my sentiments about freedom and mobility in Miami.  Walking in my family’s hometown was an activity used to connect with others. It was social and signified a way to connect with family (and others) in a way that went beyond the way I think of it in a big city. Just thinking about how far my family lived from an ‘ideal’ urban setting (not as privileged or convenient as to my own location) means so much when I realize the great distances they walked every time they needed something, had to go to work, or wanted to have fun. Now when I take a walk I imagine my whole family joining me. And during these walks I pray for their well-being, that their basic needs be met- and acknowledge my privilege when I look up and see my  ‘North Star’. I mean, how lucky am I knowing that I can walk a short distance from work to my house to prepare a hand-made tortilla dinner for my family- in no time?


I walk to remember where I came from, where I’ve been, and where I am going. I walk to breath in fresh air, clear out my lungs and welcome in thoughts of new beginnings. I walk to honor my family I left behind in Nicaragua and my ancestors who have walked this earth for many, many generations before myself. I walk to connect with God through nature and enter into one harmonious breath of  life: one that surrounds me. I envision myself as an abuela (hopefully, many years from now ) walking to the marketplace to buy some milk. You might see me then, as the abuela wearing a Mayan shawl, a  silver braid hanging to my hips or wrapped around my head with my feet girded in sandals (so my feet can get all the attention they want!). I’ll smile all the way to the marketplace knowing that my ancestors- and especially my grandmother- would be proud of me for taking on the tradition of our family’s long walks. And for them, I’ll  show my feet, keep my head up high and walk in pure joy.

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                                       ORIGIN OF THE WORLD



For a talk that will focus on two of the most notorious nudes in art history, I would like to begin by recalling that for the nude to constitute a provocation, society must prefer its concealment. But the nude as a form constitutes the overwhelming master narrative of art history; therefore masterpiece-status nudes have been approved by the cultures in which they were exhibited and by the subsequent centuries.  Western culture, starting specifically with ancient Greek culture, posited a mathematically perfect nude based on Pythagorean and Vitruvian theories of harmony.  The perfect hand, the perfect wrist, chin, breasts, ass, constituted an artificial whole designed to represent the image 4th century BCE wanted to have of itself.  The great statues of Greece had no models, which is why they came to define a universal concept of beauty.  A female nude leans on one leg, extending the curve of her hip upward to meet the curve of a breast while an opposite curve indicates the ribcage between them.  Classical beauty unfolds in the shape of  an ess (S).  The still body evokes undulation, subtle motion, in effect, sensuousness, but a desirability frozen in space, enhanced by statues of Aphrodite holding their draperies away from their bodies for the viewer to admire them.  Mathematical proportions established the erotic identity of the desirable woman.  Conformity made the classical nude a desirable image of woman because, despite her sensuous and curvaceous appearance, she was literally unavailable on earth.  The classical Greek nude is impersonal -- that is her allure.  Put on a pedestal, raised above the viewer, the classical figure is gazed up at from below, a statue that has no openings or orifices.  In other words, the beautiful nude female retains her interior mystery--perfectly proportioned, anatomically inaccessible, embodying the unattainable, what some call the divine.  As a result, the ancient Greeks used to say that the Trojan War must have been fought over a statue of Helen, not the world's most beautiful flesh and blood queen because only a statue, a composite of parts, could have been perfect enough to send armies across the seas and to keep them there, dying, for a decade. At any age, an artist who wants to freeze and frame a moment of erotic recognition acknowledges by doing so the inherent loss of the object, which is why it has often been said that Greek statuary nudes have the look of constantly being looked at and never touched.
The elaborate history of the female nude in art is really the province of what art theorists have come to call the male gaze. It is an overarching history because of the longevity of the form, which we owe to both the male artists who drew, sculpted and painted female nudes, and to the men who wrote the history of their attempts to do so for several hundred years.  The gaze per se, as we now mean it, is a psychoanalytic construct posited by the 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.  (Lacan's name will reappear in this talk as an art collector who serendipitously happened to own the famous Courbet painting on which I'm going to focus.)  For now let me say, in an absurdly abbreviated summary, that Lacan formulated a theory of child development based on Freud, and one of his central themes is the concept of the gaze; the gaze symbolizes the child's narcissistic need for others in order to unify itself as a being in the world.  By seeing itself in a mirror, the child first sees itself as something other than a self, and delights in seeing itself as an object for others to admire.  The gaze unconsciously organizes our narrative of social development.  The understanding of oneself as an image in the world for others enables each child to fulfill narcissistic needs even as it integrates those into a wider understanding of the need for others in the world, as well as the inevitability of others. In part, Lacan's concept of the maturing gaze is influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre, and the inevitability of others that causes the human gaze to mature can be understood via Sartre's famous statement:  "Hell is other people."
Elaborating from this concept of the gaze, in 1975 Laura Mulvey introduced the concept of the male gaze in her article "Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema."  She argued that a film audience can only read a film by identifying with a heterosexual male protagonist as he comes to desire a leading female figure in the story. With that generalization, Mulvey intends to emphasize that an overwhelming number of films, and virtually all master narratives in film, are made by men with men's money for the pleasure of men, who earn the income to form an audience that includes their wives and girlfriends, who might become more like the wives or girlfriends seen in the movies if they watch the movies.  A director directs our vision to the protagonist's vision as he scrutinizes, evaluates and judges a woman in the film to be an object of his desire.  If he falls in love with her, so do we -- or we have misread the movie, or the director is incompetent, or the director is out of the mainstream.  Laura Mulvey's point was that, for the most part, the audience must identify with the male gaze to work its way through the film.  In reply to the numerous articles taking exception to her theory, in 1981 Mulvey revised her argument to suggest that the only way a female audience member could read the male gaze was either by "a masochistic identification of the female object" or by an act of aesthetic transsexualism, by becoming a faux purveyor of the male gaze.  By now the concept of the male gaze, and the vocabularies attending it, have become standard in critiques of culture, and nowhere more useful than in discussions of the female nude in art.    
Applying the concept of the male gaze to visual art in general, the scholar Griselda Pollock suggests that we know a male gaze is present when a nude female in a work of art is objectified. The male gaze expresses the psychosexual longings of the artist and his male viewers first by insisting that the female body exhibits its otherness from the male.  The artist is always telling the story of the female's mystery, even as he places her in surroundings that frame his desire of her -- brothels, dance halls, boudoirs, bathtubs, woodlands, even artist's studios, and often in front of mirrors so the female other can display the vanity that makes her mysterious to the artists who want to paint her, and paint her vanity, perhaps especially her vanity.  So tonight I want us to look at works that comprise masterpieces of the female nude not only because of their greatness or importance, but because the way each of these paintings implicates the viewer in relation to the nude tells us much about how art works in general, how cultures differ and change, and how our expectations influence what we see when we see art.  The theme of the history of the nude is first and foremost the story of the viewer's response to nudity, itself a changing subject from culture to culture and era to era, so that the viewer is never the same even though the viewer is always positioned as every other viewer who came before.
The history of the nude, which may not be distinguishable from the history of writing about the nude, is primarily occupied with defining or dedefining beauty.  This consistency alone determines that there is no beauty without its decay and death.  For a form as obsessive within each culture as the nude has always been, its fate must be linked to a collective sense of self as surely as national pride.  Are we looking for an adequate representation of ourselves to ourselves?  Are we adequately representing the failure to represent a collective, the way Greek art was sustained by a collective definition of self?  Who are we when we represent ourselves and each other to ourselves and each other?  In short, who is the gaze for if not for me?  Who is being seen when I look at a nude if not myself?
  To answer these questions, I'm now going to tell the story of the most notorious painting in Western art, the painting Robert Hughes has called "the most transgressive work of the 19th century."  In order to do it justice at all, I want to place it in the context of a few famous nudes that preceded it, paintings that established and revised the tradition.  If we look for a moment at Titian's Venus of Urbino, painted in 1538, we see a modest woman, confident in her beauty, casual about her nudity, whose servants are rifling a trunk in search of her clothes.  She holds a nosegay of flowers, a gift from a suitor perhaps, and has her dog -- a symbol of loyalty -- asleep at her feet.  She reclines on a daybed of red that has been covered with linen, a daybed placed behind a screen that has itself a green drape across it. Titian's Venus is in a secluded spot in her palazzo with the sun going down outside her window. Though she is surely someone's lover, her frank gaze at the viewer is disarmed by the modest hand that covers her private parts.  What speaks to the past in this painting is the perfection of her body, its golden hue of youth, the grace of her hands and feet, the roundness of her breasts -- in short, she is elegantly--classically--proportioned.  What puts the painting in the Renaissance, and what makes it among the great nudes of all time, is the humanity of her facial expression.  She has the eyes and mouth of a contemporary, not a mythic figure and not a painted sculpture.  In a sense, the casualness of her hair against her radiant perfect body resolves the tension concerning what she is preparing for, who she is expecting.  Titian establishes one of the ironies in the painterly tradition of the female nude, namely the viewer's concern over how the figure looks out of the painting at her audience.  This painting already turns us toward modernity by its frankness, though it preserves the idea of perfection.  This Venus is not a natural nude, but her confidence acts as if she is.
If we look now at Velasquez's Venus at her toilet, otherwise known as the Rokeby Venus, painted in 1651, we find that the simple perfections have been complicated.  This Venus gazes at us from her mirror, where she has been gazing at her beauty.  We see her reflected face, and we see her vulnerable S-shaped backside, which she cannot see.  She can see, if she adjusts her mirror, the full frontal nudity denied the viewer.  From our vantage that sees her face in reflection, the reflection seems to be looking at her, thereby establishing the vanity and narcissism of which Velasquez is critical, without however suggesting that Venus is anything but beautiful.  And the confidence of the painter deliberately exceeds that of his subject, because he provides the viewer with a wide horizon of beautiful backside.  His Venus enjoys her reflection almost as much as the reflection enjoys her, but only we can judge what she cannot see. Velasquez uses the grammar of the nude against itself, by showing the insecurity of this vain Venus.  If she were confident, says the painting, she would be facing us, as does Titian's Venus, so Velasquez raises the stakes regarding the nude by addressing the tradition of facing the audience. He acknowledges the fourth wall, as if his Venus knows people are looking – which is one of the reasons art theory refers to the viewer as the beholder and the spectator.
I want now to conclude my concealment of the main attraction by considering two famous works that are contemporaneous with it:  Manet's Olympia and his Luncheon on the grass, both painted in 1863.  The Olympia ironically refers to the goddesses of ancient Greece, who resided on Mt. Olympus.  Manet's goddess resides on the same daybed, before the same screen and even the same green drapery as Titian's Venus.  What is different and new here is that the female nude has opened her gown and removed it while she meets our gaze directly, which is the gaze of the suitor who has brought the bouquet of flowers.  The flower in her hair, the ribbon at her throat, even the slippers still on her feet, speak not of a confident or even an amorous nude as the ones we have seen before, but of a commodity—a concubine.  It is also true, I believe, that with Manet the nude does not gaze at us so much as stare, pointedly.  At the time the painting appeared in 1863, it was castigated for Manet’s use of paint as loose and haphazard, in itself an implicit criticism of the loose woman at whom the viewer may not be gazing at so much as staring in return, probably in shock.  As for the nude herself, she was viewed as a short-legged "gorilla," because of a line of hair running along her belly as well as inexplicable shadows along her thighs.  The candor of her expression is not one of pleasure, or even interest in the beholder, and, unlike the modesty we expect in the traditional nude, Olympia does not cup her hand to cover her genitals; instead, her short, clubby fingers are spread open, in invitation, and the right hand still holding the gown is apparently responsible for opening it to the viewer, just as the fingers of the right hand direct us to the thick long fringe of the gown, itself more like human hair than the pasted, pinned hair on Olympia's head.  Is it the displaced or concealed fringe we can expect to find under the open hand?  Does it allude to her pubic hair? Contemporary critics of the painting wondered why anyone would want to see such a lowly ‘ape-like creature.’  Manet's realism was more social than psychological: even in the appearance of a black maid at the vanishing point of the painting, Manet refers us to a modern and alienating eroticism.  This is no palazzo, and that is not a lady in love or an ardent mistress--she is a common displayed prostitute available to anybody.  In fact, her frankness is her strength; she owns her body because she sells it.  She hasn't married it away. She is capitalizing on it. 
At a different register, the nude female in Luncheon on the grass is comfortably, confidently nude in the company of the dressed men beside her.  She meets our gaze with her chin in hand, casually but thoughtfully, as if interrupted during an intellectual conversation.  Even more shockingly, she is outdoors, lying naked in public, and that is her provocation, because her nudity among dressed men could otherwise be said to resemble the artist's studio on any given day.  Again Manet's audience was outraged, this time by the intelligence in the woman's face, and by an utter indifference to public mores, similar to the indifference we find in Olympia, though we discern a hardness in the prostitute.  The freedom of the nude causes the provocation. Manet used the same model for both nudes, his sister-in-law Berthe Morisot, who is today among the most celebrated painters of the 19th century, perhaps due to her association with Manet and the dearth of women artists in that era, though her own paintings depict domestic scenes, full of interiors and quiet moments among women and children. I wonder if she wouldn't have wanted to paint nudes of her own, perhaps even her brother-in-law, who is the man next to her at the picnic.  One thing we can discern from the reception of nudes in history is that the more natural the nude, and the more human the expression, the more anger and derision culture mongers have expressed; which brings us to Gustave Courbet.
Already in 1844, twenty years before Manet's Olympia, Courbet had staked his claim, where the nude was concerned, in his painting Bacchante, which depicts a sleeping maenad having drunk too much, having frolicked too much, and therefore having passed out, not in a mythic or generic woodland, but on a vibrant red blanket or cloak surrounded by the trunk bases of enormous shading trees. She lies deeply hidden from the rest of nature. What separates this nude from those that have come before it is, first of all, the foreshortening, which affords the viewer a revolutionary vantage of her body, by which I mean not only are we at an angle we would be at if we were coming towards her while she sleeps, say to take advantage of her nudity abandoned thoughtlessly in nature, but we are at an angle that affords us the best view of her full-bodied curvaceousness from head to toe.  She is nothing but curves--head, shoulders, arms, breasts, ribcage, hips, belly, thighs, knees.  This angle even allows us to consider her heavy eyebrows and strong chin without at the same time thinking her masculine.  The critic Michael Fried has written that this painting is suggestive of a "post-coital aftermath," I believe more in the form of a sleeper's memory than in the aftermath of a recent sexual encounter. The painting's title certainly refers to more than getting drunk in the forest.  The red cloth, which we will see elsewhere, surrounds the nude with liquefaction, and while it may refer us to sex itself, it separates this so-called maenad from her mythic counterparts.  Her face and body are contemporary in their sturdiness, though in the way they are lit we are put in mind of masterwork techniques, as we are by the brush and palette-knife work, a decision we see time and again in Courbet's nudes. The artist showcases his mastery of his medium flamboyantly but disdains the traditional effects of those techniques and instead utilizes them to subvert aristocratic elegance and to showcase republican realism.
As with most of Courbet's eroticized nudes, his Reclining Nude of 1862–this was the decade of the great nudes for him--is also asleep and available, in effect spied upon by the viewer who sees she has fallen asleep with her stockings on, a slipper on one foot, and wearing an earring.  Her shawl or chemise has fallen open so that we see the full glowing big-bellied and big-thighed body thrust forward against the dark brocade draperies beside the window.  Her arm across her neck thrusts her breasts toward us, and reveals the hair of her underarm.  Courbet has taken a traditional setting for the nude and turned it into a provocation by showing us misplaced stockings and shoes and hair where we are not accustomed to finding them.  They rub against the innocence of the sleeping nude, suggesting a grammar of male fetishes even as they beg the questions, why are the stockings there, why are they partially rolled down, why the shoe, where has the other earring fallen?  What kind of siesta preparation is that?  Why are we seeing the hair of an underarm--is it the displaced or misplaced pubic hair this nude nearly shows us, as the Bacchante nearly showed us, as Manet’s Olympia a year later nearly showed us?  Sleep makes Courbet’s nudes safer for the male gaze to peruse, objectify, take its time with, and eroticize. As in all Courbet's major nudes, his shocking decision to light provocative material the way Caravaggio lit biblical scenes may have a simpler explanation.  Many of Courbet's nudes were copied from photographs that got their photographer, Auguste Belloc, arrested.  The lighting that places this reclining nude so starkly against her background reminds us of the garish lighting used in the daguerrotypes on which he relied for his paintings.
Sleepers, painted in 1866, the same year, and for the same client who commissioned Origin of the world, reiterates not only the erotic sleep of the female nude but also offers direct evidence that we have arrived too late to see the sexual adventure.  The two lesbian lovers are asleep in each other's arms and legs--again, there are curves everywhere--and beside them on a table are a wineglass and a carafe.  The right hand of the dark-haired lover touches the dark pink, labia-like, inside fold of the coverlet, which directs our attention to the broken strand of pearls, whose missing two can be found, beside a barrette, at the bottom of the sheet next to the lovers' feet. The pearls evoke vaginal fluids. This has been a passionate encounter between beautiful young bodies of different hues.  The pearl necklace that has been broken during the encounter is the proof of sexual bliss, why the redhead holds the calf of the voluptuous brunette in her hand--so that she will not slip away, so that they can feel each other's flesh and pulsing blood in their sleep.  As with other erotically charged Courbets, we are presented the afterglow of sexual encounters, sexual reveries, and even masturbation. By 1866, Courbet was viewed as a dangerous man by both government and the church, and his exhibitions, for which he charged a fee, were monitored by police.  Despite the known eroticism of his nudes, until 1866 Courbet had maintained one feature of the long tradition by concealing the female genitals, instead alluding to them elsewhere in his paintings, or positioning his figures so that modesty was irrelevant, and indeed, as in the paintings we've just seen, the concealment retained for the works a lyricism for which Courbet was admired most in his landscapes and portraits, and of course in his most famous self-portraits of despair and madness that began his mature work.  Until Origin of the world, neither Courbet nor any other serious Western painter chose to combine the idea of transgressing against society at the same time as he viscerally challenged our sensibility.  And even Courbet only did it for a private party.
The private party was Khalil Bey, a wealthy Turkish diplomat living in Paris, who commissioned Courbet to paint an erotic work that would only be seen in private by him and a few friends.  Courbet painted it for a large unknown sum, and, out of fear of the authorities, he did not sign it.  Khalil Bey kept the painting, which measures 18" by 21 1/2", behind a green veil in his apartments, in windowless rooms called toilet rooms that adjoined his dining rooms.  To show it, he would remove the veil and announce, like a master of ceremonies, "It's a Courbet."  The guests who saw it never forgot the experience and often described being utterly “stupefied by the debauching life-size frontal-view filth” they were confronted by. Most wrote a version of the following description of it: “No, I would never say what I saw behind the veil.” Poems were written about it, and I quote a couple of lines from one such, titled “On a Picture from the Khalil-Bey Collection”: “Do not lift the curtain/ that hides this image from your eyes. ..It’s this that makes you stop before your time,/ turning your hair from black to white. /It’s this that eats away your teeth, /..All hail from miles around,/ all bow down.. /for, to our shame, alas, /it’s this that make the world go round.” Critics like Maxine du Camp, who attacked Courbet in his anti-Commune tirades in Les Convulsions de Paris, took great objection to the contemptible action of painting such an unseemly canvas of a French woman for a Muslim, and equated obscenity with political disorder. When Courbet refused the Legion of Honor in 1870, “the little monstrosity hidden behind a little curtain” was repeatedly attacked in the press. 
Two years later, in 1868, the extravagant Khalil Bey went broke, and his collection of some 80 paintings was auctioned, except for Courbet's Sleepers and Origin of the world which went to unidentified private buyers. 
The Origin resurfaced in January 1889  in the shop of Antoine de la Narde, a gallery owner specializing in Far Eastern art, who showed it to the famous critic Edmond de Goncourt, who had despised Courbet, by now dead for eleven years, having died at the young age of 59. By then the Origin was hidden behind another Courbet, a mediocre painting of a chateau in winter called Chateau de Blonay. La Narde unlocked the painting with a key, lifted the outside panel that showed a village church in the snow, and revealed the hidden panel that showed the dark prominent mons veneris. Now Courbet was hiding Courbet.  Upon seeing Origin, still notorious despite having disappeared for twenty years, Goncourt said he owed Courbet an apology, for the belly in the painting was the most beautiful belly since Correggio, though which Correggio we don't know.  
The double painting resurfaced 24 years later, in November of 1912, when the Gallerie Bernheim-Jeune bought it from a Mme Vial who had inherited from Emile Vial, a scientist and collector of Japanese art who had purchased it from La Narde. In June 1913 the dual acquisition was sold by the gallery to Baron Herzog who kept the chateau in winter and sold the Origin to his friend Baron Ferene Hatvany, a Hungarian Jewish industrialist and a painter himself who also owned Reclining Nude as part of his 800 piece art collection. When the Nazis invaded Hungary 30 years later, the Baron hid the best of his collection in bank vaults in banks specifically not owned by Jews, in order to protect the art.  He guessed correctly that the Nazis would only steal the art and jewelry they found in Jewish-owned banks and homes.  However, in February 1945, the Soviet Army found the Courbet and the rest of the Baron's collection in the Hungarian Commercial Bank in Pest, and began to transfer it to Moscow.  Wanting to save at least Origin of the world, the Baron persuaded his friend, Raoul Wallenberg, the heroic Swedish diplomat who had saved as many as 15,000 Jews during the war, to intercede with the Soviet general in charge.  The Baron paid a bribe and the Courbet left Hungary for Paris, as did the Baron.  Wallenberg was arrested within a week for unknown reasons.  He was imprisoned in Moscow and two years later was shot on Stalin's orders, again for unknown reasons.  He was thirty four years old.
In 1954, after the Baron's death, the painting was sold to the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and his wife Sylvia, who had previously been married to the novelist and erotic philosopher Georges Bataille.  Housing the painting in a separate building at his country estate, Lacan wanted to protect it from both thieves and the police, so he had his brother-in-law, the painter Andre Masson, draw an abstract landscape of large strokes vaguely reproducing Courbet’s open thighs and Courbet’s grotto landscapes on a brown background painted on a thin plane which was placed in a heavy gilt frame.  Lacan would announce to his select guests, “I am now going to show you something extraordinary,” slip the thin panel out of the frame to reveal the detailed, magnificently executed close-up of a plump woman’s genitals, and say, “It’s a Courbet”. As he learned of the painting's history of concealment, starting with Courbet's refusal to sign it, Lacan also wrote a seminal lecture titled "The function of the veil," where he states the concept that "the curtain placed in front of something, or the veil in front of the body, enables us better to imagine the importance of love of the object."  The veil reveals the invincibility (not invisibility) of society’s cloaking of the nude in countless inventive ways. The curtain's presence symbolizes our desire to love, and therefore to idolize the image it conceals. The more hidden and taboo the object of our love, the more it can become a subject and deserve our respect. Love is easier to give than respect. As the prime thinker and mover in the concept of the gaze, it seemed appropriate that Lacan own and protect the most notorious challenge to the role of the spectator and viewer in the history of Western art.
I'll pick up the history of the painting soon, but for now let's focus on the work itself.  This is the painting that the official history of the female nude scrupulously avoided for centuries.  Courbet's "headless torso" supplants the tradition of the classical nude with the body part that has been displaced and symbolized for thousands of years; therefore it must be the body part that most instills desire and fear—which was Aristotle’s definition of the “awe’ produced by a true artistic masterpiece--and of course reiterates the history of the nude as the history of a male preoccupation.  For Courbet to paint the forbidden subject elegantly only enhanced the taboo.  Even his detractors respected his talent, so that for Courbet to paint the great male mystery, in effect the cultural mystery of all time, was to risk transforming muted desire into open disgust.  In case you think I'm overstating this, it was not until 1995 that the French government, which by then owned the painting through a gift from Lacan's widow, placed Courbet's painting on permanent display at the Musee d'Orsay, at last rendering the painting into an artwork that nothing could render banal.  Up to then, it was publicly shown only once, in Brooklyn in 1988, at the instigation of Linda Nochlin, for the first time officially restored to its creator, to test the waters of public outrage outside France. 
The painting was quarantined for 130 years, consistently concealed, and yet never destroyed.  The issue of its obscenity has never been severed from its extraordinary quality; it is its brilliance that has tested people's nerves, and, because of it, it can not be ignored or destroyed.  The strategy of placing nothing but the most extreme and therefore absent anatomical part in the history of painting in the viewer's face, if you will, brings to the fore all the issues of audience, painter and subject that have been discussed since the first nude female smiled from a fresco.  In her work on pornography, Linda Williams has come close to explain the prolonged discomfort so many viewers have felt in the presence of Courbet's painting.  She has described "the history of pornography as the history of visual strategies to overcome the anatomical invisibility of the female orgasm."  This is relevant to the Courbet insofar as the gossip surrounding the painting in its time, rumors by satirists who had not seen it, was that Courbet's realism had extended to being able to paint the female orgasm, and that since the model had had an orgasm for Courbet to paint, she must have been a prostitute.  In fact, as was his common practice, Courbet painted from a photograph, which we have.  There doesn't seem to be an orgasm anywhere.
Though we can recognize Origin of the world as the culmination of decades of progressively more modern nudes, it is clearly most disturbing because its matter-of-factness equals its lyricism.  John Updike has referred to the pubic hair in the painting as a Rorschach blot, and the modern art critic Roger Scruton has called the painting "a lower portrait."  The social context shouldn't be lost.  There were courtesans of great renown, called les grandes horizontales, one of whom, for instance, served herself to her richest clients on a large silver platter.  These were the subjects of most erotic art at the time, and to some extent are reflected in Manet's Olympia.  On the other hand, there were common prostitutes who often modeled for artists--known as lunettes, or mooners, because their buttocks were often unusually round and large, evoking faux classicism or Renaissance fecundity.  Courbet worked among these nude outsiders, the low culture society fears most.  What makes Courbet's Origin even more provocative than its subject is our angle of incidence, meaning we view the open legs of the nude as an approaching lover would.  As with Bacchante of 1844, Origin's vantage is that of a voyeur, so that we are violating the privacy of this genitalia, just as we violated the privacy of the sleeping nudes, as we did not violate the privacy of the nudes who stared straight back, or who invited us to violate their privacy.  As a result, Origin is the most intimate nude ever painted, despite the absence of facial expression, the position of hands, the accoutrements or furnishings of real life or artistic tradition. While it does not depict the invisible female orgasm, as its contemporary attackers claimed, it depicts the site of one.  It shows its audience not merely the arena of sexual pleasure, and where babies come from--it presents a realized and resolved sexual image that is as lyrical and desirable as the fantasies it evokes.  That is, Courbet did not paint a gynecological study--though later a playful forgery and exact copy appeared in an obscure obstetrical journal--he painted the sexual longing of the voyeur and the lover, one of the reasons why Michael Fried sees the painting as Courbet's most courageous attempt to merge artist, subject and viewer into one.  He demystified the mystery at the heart of painting the nude.  The opened thighs are an invitation, a picture plane where artist, image and viewer touch each other.  This is not a "touchy-feely" heart-opening experience, however; as all acts of dramatic revelation, which literally means unveiling, this is an act of aggression, of transcendence, and, lest you assume Courbet wants to mingle with his audience, by painting this piece he meant that “the only place we can meet is inside my artwork.”
Though Courbet did not sign the painting, and it is from the study of it and its history that we know it is by Courbet, the painter did acknowledge it once at a dinner party, shortly after its owner began showing it to friends.  A dinner guest had seen it, and noted to Courbet that Khalil Bey said that he, Courbet, was the artist, at which point Courbet excitedly exclaimed that Titian, Veronese, Raphael, even he himself, Courbet, could not imagine doing it.  He then remarked that the painting should be referred to as Origin of the world.  As to its meaning to Khalil Bey, we can only guess, but some historians have noted that its pornographic association might have been muted by the fact that Khalil Bey had contracted a very noticeable and deteriorating syphilis, so that whenever he saw the painting he must have seen not only the breasts and belly and thighs of an anonymous woman, but the source of his deadly illness as well.  It was suggested that the painting had been an ex-voto, a magic talisman, acquired to thwart the malady. It was at this time that the governments throughout Europe began to warn citizens of health hazards associated with the poor and the social outsider, so that Courbet's painting speaks not only to sexuality but to the constant socially-sanctioned efforts to censor and control it, fearing sexual chaos could cause social revolution. In a sense, by fetishizing the hidden female genitalia, Courbet transgresses against realism itself.  The exposure is spontaneous, voluntary, willful, stubborn and in-your-face—empowering the nude female over the male viewer.  It is a pudendum that has the look of being looked at.  There is no facial expression, but the image gazes back at the beholder.  The source for the painting is less the photograph, and his previous nudes, and more his numerous grotto and cave paintings, in which the hidden and dark interior opens out toward the viewer in waters that flow only in his direction. In fact, all of Courbet's seascapes and caves and grottos depict water coming toward the spectator, possibly alluding to female ejaculate, and, where the caves are concerned, they are always buttressed at left and right by thigh-like hills or mountains. So the source of the most notorious nude in history is a series of forgettable landscapes.
Is the painting beautiful? Erotic? Is it cold and analytical?  Is it insulting and sexist?  We are reminded that it is easier to have strong opinions about art when art refers to things outside itself.  Nothing is more urgent in most first-time viewers’ judgment than their sense of violation or shame, their moral indignation.  It is amusing that professional viewers have noted that Origin is anatomically incorrect, that in fact Courbet left out the labia and concealed the clitoral hood.  They account for these decisions as the artist not wanting the viewer to think of anatomy but of effect, not of realism but of sensuality.  Critical viewers at the time said Courbet forgot the small bits because the once incredibly beautiful young painter had become a hermit by 1866 whose obesity made him odious to women.  In fact, he was being consistent in his aesthetic: by obfuscating a few details that would force us to remain outside the painting, Courbet's lyricism invites us inside.  Voyeurs and lovers don't take inventory.  Courbet wants the effect of realism: look closely, he says, it's just like being there!  Is it possible that the painting is an instance of the ‘sublime’?  That it is not about beauty, per se, and therefore it disquiets us with a sense that the painting implies more than the image should be able to bear?  What causes a beholder to suffer an experience of the sublime is a spontaneous recognition of the force of a pure presence, mostly found in wild nature. The sublime strikes like lightning, overwhelming us with its instant of arrival.  The sublime menaces us because it is absolute, excessive and formless.  Nothing in nature or art is inherently sublime, said the philosopher Immanuel Kant who first introduced the concept, but we involuntarily attach an idea to something that creates a sense of danger, and of ambivalence, because we do it to ourselves. Kant said the sublime presents to us "delirium" as well as "finality"--what he considered together as "transparent, immediate tumult."  We suffer the experience of forgetting boundaries, we undergo anxiety, even vertigo.  The world loses its frame when we recognize the sublime, which in early Courbet, for example, we can find in his self-portraits and homages to Romanticism The Desperate Man and Man driven mad by fear, of 1843.
When the painting was in Jacques Lacan's possession, many notable writers and artists saw it.  They all watched him ceremoniously lift the drawing by Andre Masson to reveal the infamous little painting behind it. The unveiling act echoed the intimate ritual of undressing a lover before a circle of voyeurs.  One of the visitors actually reproduced the painting from memory, so that his own guests could see what the Courbet looked like.  You weren't seeing the Courbet, but you were seeing what you would be seeing if you were seeing the Courbet through this specific viewer’s eyes. The artist was Rene Magritte.  (It was one of his many copies of the erotic painting that was reproduced in the obstetric and gynecological journal.)   
It was considered a great honor to be invited to see the Courbet painting, and not being invited was a way for Lacan to let people know how he felt about them.  Dora Maar, Picasso's mistress, saw the painting, but not Picasso--because Lacan, who was Dora's psychoanalyst, knew of the damage Picasso had done to her.  After all, Picasso had brought Dora to Lacan, complaining that she was no longer the masochist he had fallen for.  
Among the guests to Lacan's country house was Marcel Duchamp, in 1958.  Duchamp had begun a secret art project 12 years before, one that would take him 20 years to complete, and would not be shown until after his death in 1968, when he was 81.  By the time he saw the Courbet, which he of course knew about, he had made a small plaster cast of a woman's body -- an homage to a Brazilian sculptor he loved from the early 1940s until his death, though she ended their affair in the early 50's, returning to Brazil with her husband and children, after her career in New York fizzled.  Whether the plaster cast was taken from an actual mold of Maria Martins' body is not known, but Duchamp was sexually obsessed by her for the rest of his life. 
In his playful subversive effort to attack the very notion of the art museum, Duchamp constructed throughout his working life 300 items he called La boite-en-valise (Box in a Suitcase), 300 separate wooden cases that opened up and out, and included drawings, sketches, notes, and postcard reproductions of works by Duchamp.  The owner of a box had a portable Duchamp museum, or, put another way, as Duchamp did, you’d find Duchamp in every possible "box," referring to the slang in both French and English for the vagina.  As with the mustache Duchamp had painted on his perfect reproduction of Leonardo's Mona Lisa, or the public urinal which he signed R. Mutt and placed on exhibit, the Box in a Suitcase series demonstrated his restlessness with the boundaries and nomenclatures of publicly acceptable art.  He created an alter ego in drag that Man Ray photographed, calling himself Rose Selavy: Rose That's-life.  One of his exhibitions consisted entirely of a chess match, in which he played opposite a voluptuous nude woman, challenging both the chess-lover’s and the museum-goer's capacity to focus, to know what was important, to tell nature from art, to define art.  The whimsy of his aesthetic belies Duchamp's visceral discomfort with limits and with permanence.  He feared that, if galleries and museums decided what was and was not art, they would become the same oppressive authority he had fled in France. In speaking against the tyranny of museums, Duchamp became the great anti-authoritarian authority and therefore an icon by the 1960s.  His critique of culture extended to the 1942 Surrealism in Exile show in New York City.  His contribution was to entangle the entire show in a mile of string, so that guests could not view the works without navigating his obstacle course.  
When he began the Box in a Suitcase series, Duchamp lived out of a suitcase in Nazi-occupied Marseilles. In the disguise of a traveling cheese salesman, Duchamp trained back and forth from Paris for two years, carrying photos and brochures regarding cheeses mixed in with the reproductions of his art, which had been banned by the Vichy government.  Eventually he filled numerous suitcases with his reproductions and fled France for New York, taking a safer route than the critic Walter Benjamin, who committed suicide at the Spanish border, and whom I mention only because his most famous essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, gave Duchamp the origin of his aesthetic that reproductions such as postcards and magazine photographs and film posters could be placed in contexts that made them art in and of themselves.  The suitcases that became a series of 300 portable museums were autobiographical miniatures including detached souvenirs of Duchamp's identity and life.  They embodied his aesthetic of mobility, transience, a life without borders.  
In the case of the Box in a Suitcase he made for Maria Martins, before it went on display at the Menil Foundation in Houston in 1988, the curators were unable to discern what material he had used as a priming ground for an abstract painting he made as an inlaid cover to the wooden suitcase.  The FBI office in Houston agreed to test the material, which proved to be entirely composed of his own seminal fluid, which Duchamp had painted over.  In short, his sexual obsession with Maria was absolute, beginning with drawings, maquettes and the first molds of her nude torso in 1946, and ending twenty years later in the wire and painted leather of the show he called Etant Donnees--Given. (The title can refer both to what is a given and what is given freely to the artist and then to the viewer.)   
After seeing Courbet's masterpiece in 1958, Duchamp conceived the framework of his last, greatest, and most provocative, work, as his homage to Courbet, who after all had painted the first portable "box" when he painted Origin of the world.  Because the blunt vaginal display might be shocking to those who recognized it as ‘pornographic’, the painting had always been closeted, framed and displayed as if it were a guilty pleasure. It was the combination of its blunt imagery and compulsive concealment that provided Duchamp the framework for his final spectacle and statement.
First of all, Duchamp insisted in elaborate notes found after his death--which was the first time anyone saw the completed “boxed” project--that the assemblage could only be shown in a public museum.  He left page after page of instructions on how to disassemble and reassemble the exhibit.  He left specific instructions on how the exhibit should be displayed: the viewer enters a room, seeing a door of bricks, wood, and iron across the way that is built into a brick threshold.  At the door, the viewer finds that there is an opening within it, once the latch is lifted.  By opening the latch one sees another section of brick wall a few feet away, but that a section of brick has been jaggedly removed so that the viewer can see beyond the peephole a woman's nude hairless body made of leather on metal wire lying on an artificial bed of grass and twigs.  Beyond her there is an artificial wood and an artificial waterfall.  In her left hand she holds a small gas lamp that illuminates the scene, enabling the viewer to now realize that the body is partially dismembered.  The genitalia are stylized and gaping.  Museum-goers who see Given for the first time are shocked, many are disgusted, in part because it is a Duchamp, and he was not a threatening or violent artist.  The sense of shock turns quickly into embarrassment, because the viewer is being observed by the next viewer politely waiting in line to look through the peephole.  The suddenly shocked and embarrassed viewer realizes he or she has been made self-consciously ashamed to be viewing such a macabre sexual scene in public.  This experience, for Duchamp, duplicates the great existential moment, first found by Jean-Paul Sartre, which is the recognition that you are an Other to others--a source of shame when you realize that someone is watching you look through a keyhole—and in this case, a public peephole.  Suddenly, the innocent museum-goer becomes an object of other people's scrutiny--all the others waiting in line who look to judge the viewer by the viewer's response to what he or she sees through the peephole.  In his seminar on the Duchamp homage to Courbet, the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard says that Duchamp placed the viewer in the same position as the viewed.  What was a private violation of a woman's vagina for Courbet becomes in the 1960s in America a public spectacle for Duchamp, and a posthumous statement about the definition, or de-definition, of art.  As Lyotard says in his lecture, "the beholder suddenly realizes he is the vagina everyone's looking at."  In effect, Duchamp's assemblage both recreates and comments on the museum-goer's discomfort with Courbet's painting, but, by including the viewer as part of the spectacle, finds a way to merge image, artist and spectator that Courbet would not have considered when he was trying to shrink the distance between the image and its observer. Duchamp updated the discomfort and the unmasking of the viewer that Courbet initiated. Duchamp considered all of his art "a game between I and me."  Whether Courbet would have divided his identity as easily is doubtful, nor would he have accepted the premise of art for art's sake, but in the ambiguity of his nudes with regard to their observers, Courbet did grasp the revolutionary tendencies inherent in the female nude from the beginning.  After all, he was the first artist to show us what the entire history of the nude was hiding under gowns, bed linens and tactfully placed hands.  Neither Courbet nor Duchamp would have satisfied Kenneth Clark's characterization of the nude as the "civilizing" of the flesh, when he wrote in his famous study that "a mass of naked figures does not move us to empathy, but to disillusion and dismay."  For both Courbet and Duchamp, the female nude is the source and also the solution of dismay, of disillusion, and of illusion itself: the alpha and omega of why we keep making art.

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