Tableau vivant (plural: tableaux vivants) means still image The term describes a striking group of suitably costumed actors or artist's models, carefully posed and often theatrically lit. Throughout the duration of the display, the people shown do not speak or move. The approach thus marries the art forms of the stage with those of painting/photography, and as such it has been of interest to modern photographers. The most recent hey-day of the tableau vivant was the 19th century with virtually nude tableaux vivants or "poses plastiques" providing a form of erotic entertainment.
Occasionally, a Mass was punctuated by short dramatic scenes and tableaux. They were a major feature of festivities for royal weddings, coronations and Royal entries into cities. Often the actors imitated statues, much in the way of modern street entertainers, but in larger groups, and mounted on elaborate temporary stands along the path of the main procession.[1]
Contents |
Before radio, film and television, tableaux vivants were popular forms of entertainment. Before the age of colour reproduction of images the tableau vivant (often abbreviated simply to tableau) was sometimes used to recreate paintings "on stage", based on an etching or sketch of the painting. This could be done as an amateur venture in a drawing room, or as a more professionally produced series of tableaux presented on a theatre stage, one following another, usually to tell a story without requiring all the usual trappings of a "live" theatre performance. They thus 'educated' their audience to understand the form taken by later Victorian and Edwardian era magic lantern shows, and perhaps also sequential narrative comic strips (which first appeared in modern form in the late 1890s).
Since English stage censorship often strictly forbade actresses to move when nude or semi-nude on stage, tableaux vivants also had a place in presenting risqué entertainment at special shows. In the nineteenth century they took such titles as "Nymphs Bathing" and "Diana the Huntress" and were to be found at such places as The Hall of Rome in Great Windmill Street, London. Other notorious venues were the Coal Hole in the Strand and The Cyder Cellar in Maiden Lane. In the twentieth century London the Windmill Theatre (1932–64) provided erotic entertainment in the form of nude tableaux vivants on stage. Such entertainment was also to be seen at fairground sideshows (e.g.: seen in the film A Taste of Honey). Such shows had largely died out by the 1970s.
These "tableaux vivants" were often performed as the basis for school nativity plays in England during the Victorian period. Today, the custom is now only practised in a single English school - Loughborough High School (the oldest all-girl school in England, founded in 1850). Ten tableaux are performed each year at the school carol service: including the depiction of an all-grey engraving (in which the subjects are painted completely grey).
In the early years of the 20th century the German dancer Olga Desmond caused scandals with her “Evenings of Beauty” (Schönheitsabende) in which she posed nude in "living pictures", imitating classical works of art.
A tableaux vivant-style production called the Pageant of the Masters has been held in Laguna Beach, California every summer since 1933 (with the exception of four years during World War II). It involves hundreds of volunteers drawn from the surrounding area and attracts over a hundred thousand visitors annually. The festival recreates famous works of art on the stage. It has a different theme each year, but always features a recreation of Leonardo Da Vinci's "The Last Supper." The only time Da Vinci's "Last Supper" did not appear was when the festival's theme was Salvador Dali, in which case Dali's "Last Supper" filled the void.
Yet another tableaux vivant-style production called the Pageant of our Lord has been held in Rolling Hills Estates, California every spring since 1985. This production differs only in that its focus is exclusively on the life of Jesus Christ as told through religious works of art. Like the Pageant of the Masters, this production relies on hundreds of volunteers from the surrounding area and has attracted over two-hundred thousand people. It has featured art pieces such as Michelangelo Bounarroti's Pieta, Claus Sleuter's The Well of Moses, De L' Esprie's Coming Home, and many others.
Jean-Francois Chevrier was the first to coin the term Tableau in relation to a form of art photography, which began in the 1970s and 80s in an essay titled The Adventures of the Picture Form in the History of Photography in 1989.[2] It must be noted that the initial translation of this text substitutes the French word 'Tableau' for the English word 'Picture.' However Michael Fried retains the French word of 'Tableau' when referring to Chevrier's essay, because according to Fried (2008), there is no direct translation into English for the French word Tableau. Picture is similar, however “…it lacks the connotations of constructedness, of being the product of an intellectual act that the French word carries.”[3] Other key texts are Chevrier‘s (2006) The Tableau and The Document of Experience. In Ed. Weski, T. Click Double Click: The Documentary Factor. And Jeff Wall’s (1998) Marks of Indifference: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art. In Ed. Janus, E. Veronica’s Revenge: Contemporary Perspectives on Photography. Clement Greenberg’s theory of Medium Specificity is also important to its understanding.
The key characteristics of the contemporary photographic tableau according to Jean-Francois Chevrier are, firstly:
"They are designed and produced for the wall. summoning a confrontational experience on the part of the spectator that sharply contrasts with the habitual processes of appropriation and projection whereby photographic images are normally received and "consumed."[4]
By this Chevrier notes that scale and size is obviously important if the pictures are to 'hold the wall'. But size has another function; it distances you from the object. It makes you stand back from the picture to take it all in. This confrontational experience, Fried (2008) notes, is actually quite a large break from the conventional reception of photography which up to that point was often consumed in books or magazines.
The tableau has its roots in pictorialist photography (see Alfred Stieglitz) and not the Tableau Vivant. Pictorialism, according to Jeff Wall (1998) could be seen as an attempt by photographers to unsuccessfully imitate painting:
"Pictorialist photography was dazzled by the spectacle of Western painting and attempted, to some extent, to imitate it in acts of pure composition. Lacking the means to make the surface of its pictures unpredictable and important, the first phase of Pictorialism, Stieglitz's phase, emulated the fine graphic arts, re-invented the beautiful look, set standards for gorgeousness of composition, and faded."[5]
Pictorialism failed according to Jeff Wall because photographers lacked the means to make their surfaces unpredictable. However Photography did have the ability to become unpredictable and spontaneous. This was achieved by making photographs, related to the inherent capabilities of the camera itself. And this Jeff Wall (1998) argues was a direct result of photo-journalism and the media/culture industries.
"By divesting itself of the encumbrances and advantages inherited from older art forms, reportage, or the spontaneous fleeting aspect of the photographic image pushes toward a discovery of qualities apparently intrinsic to the medium, qualities that must necessarily distinguish the medium from others and through the self-examination of which it can emerge as a modernist art on a plane with others."[6]
The argument is that unlike most other art forms photography can profit from the capture of chance occurrences. Through this process - the 'snapshot,' the ‘accidental’ image - photography invents its own concept of the picture. A hybrid form of the Western Picture or pictorialist photography and the spontaneous snapshot. This is the stage whereby Jeff Wall (1998) argues that photography enters a 'modernist dialectic.' Wall claims that unpredictability is key to modern aesthetics. This new concept of the picture, which Jeff Wall proposes, with the compositional aspects of the ‘Western Picture’ combined with the unpredictability that the camera affords through its shutter, can be seen in the work of many contemporary photographic artists including Luc Delahaye, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth and Philip Lorca-Dicorcia.
The Tableau as a form still dominates the Art Photography market. As Michael Fried in 2008, notes:
"Arguably the most decisive development in the rise of the new art photography has been the emergence, starting in the late 1970’s and gaining impetus in the 1980’s and after, of what the French critic Jean-Francois Chevrier has called "The Tableau Form."[7]
However their appears to be only a handful of young, emerging artists working within the Tableau form. Good examples include Florian Maier Aichen, Maxim Kelly, Matthew Porter and Peter Funch.
For a piece of art to qualify as tableau it must be produced for the gallery wall (large print), must be pictorial (beautifully composed) and must take into consideration the intrinsic qualities of the camera (chance). Digital manipulation is often a prominent technique used in the creation of work within the Tableau Form, since photography is often said to lack human agency and one of the salient qualities of the Tableau is that it must be an object of thought.