When looking at these Manet paintings, on a certain level I do think they're drag.
My name is Kalup Linzy. I’m a video and performance artist.
Because I get so many questions—about 'why is this art,' 'is it entertainment,' 'is everything art,' 'is everything performance'—I was drawn to these paintings by Manet. I just think it’s contemporary in terms of the artist’s process.
Manet was living in Paris, but he’s painting these bullfighters. He’s mismatching things—like, the cape wasn’t accurate. He was experimenting. These scenes were created in his studio.
The woman and the man are wearing the same matador outfits. I’m not sure if there were female bullfighters of that time, but to me it seemed like there is a play on gender. I just love the idea of him having the clothes in his studio, and the models would just come in and put them on and pose as the characters or the personas. That sounds so contemporary, because I have clothes in my studio that my performers come and put on.
It’s the same female used over and over again. She’s so disguised that you have to look really closely to even realize that. And once you realize, then you’re thinking that there was some performance, some role-playing going on. And you realize, “Oh this person was in and out of his studio and helping him create these performances that he painted.” And although it’s not kinetic performance where they’re moving around, it is a performance because they have to keep the pose. You have to look at the posture, the gestures as a scene.
And it makes it a little bit more real—not that he’s just in some isolated place in his imagination. There must be some type of dialogue and discourse or conversation going on.
When I see these I think about when I’m preparing myself to play a role and have to research the gestures to get body language down. I always—I don’t want to say 'wish'—but I imagine myself living in a different time period. So I tend to go into old paintings and imagine myself in those spaces.
RuPaul once said, “We’re all born naked and everything else is drag.” When looking at these Manet paintings, on a certain level I do think they’re drag, but I don’t know all the history of that particular moment.
Thinking about performance documentation, today we have more mediums to express performance, but he had to perform these as paintings on the canvas. I almost imagine what these would be like animated—like, how would this person move?
I always felt like entertainment was art’s bastard child. Me and my cousins grew up pretending like we were on a soap opera, but when you get to art school you imagine yourself playing the artist.
I think what makes a thing art is the fact that it does leave room for the viewer to imagine. It just leaves that space for you to process things in your own way.
