Tableau

Definition

The tableau names the installation-art form that Meninato, following Duchamp's assemblages, identifies as "fundamentally a three-dimensional collage where the space or scene is transformed not by means of formalistic manipulations, but through the disparate displacement and combination of ordinary objects." Where the modernist tableau of the avant-gardes pursued abstraction and formal innovation, the tableau as interior-forming practice operates mimetically: space is made through the placement of existing things — furniture, advertisements, found objects, architectural fragments — whose significance "may be altered or modified depending on their placement in relation to the space and to other objects." In Osorio's variant the tableau operates "simultaneously as dioramas, spatial installations, or episodic fragments of interior design" — which is why Meninato can call the form a vehicle for interior architecture: it "offers a spatial platform for the assemblage of elements: walls, ceilings, doors, windows, and furniture," and conceiving space "through scenographic means obliges the viewer to think of interiority as the site of reassembling, whereby the open quality of displacement takes the place of unity." In the North American development (Kienholz, Osorio), the tableau became "a vehicle that facilitated exposing political or social issues" — war, racism, displacement, incarceration — giving the form a narratively and politically charged interior content.

Key Thinkers

• (Originators, not paged — see log: Marcel Duchamp, whose assemblages found "one of the artistic avenues that derives from Duchamp's assemblages was installation art"; Edward Kienholz (1927–1994), whose tableaux The State Hospital (1966) and Portable War Memorial (1968) are the chapter's voyeuristic and political exemplars; Pepón Osorio (b. 1955), whose installations he calls "social architecture.")
• Pablo Meninato — the concept's theorist in this wiki: the tableau as the alternative, non-formalist model for interior architecture's formation of space.
• Tim Gough — the ontological namesake to be distinguished from: the Deleuzian assemblage is an ontology of interplaying elements, while the tableau is an art-practice of scenographic displacement; the two senses meet in the insight that arrangement, not fabrication of new form, produces meaning.

Related Concepts

• Readymade — the tableau's unit operation: the displaced ordinary object; the tableau is the readymade generalized to scene-scale.
• Montage — the two-dimensional parent technique: the tableau is "fundamentally a three-dimensional collage," montage's spatialization; meaning from juxtaposition rather than organic unity.
• Narrative Space — the tableau as narrative instrument: Kienholz's war/lounge zones, Osorio's father/son rooms — space arranged to tell a story (diorama, "episodic fragments of interior design").
• Domestic Interior — the tableau's prime material: "an uncanny agglomeration of domestic furniture, consumer advertisements, and political posters" — the domestic interior staged, saturated, and estranged.
• Politicizing the Interior — the tableau as "a vehicle that facilitated exposing political or social issues" (Vietnam, racism, displacement, violence, incarceration) — the interior made political by scenographic arrangement.
• Voyeurism — the tableau's characteristic viewing apparatus: Étant donnés' peepholes and The State Hospital's barred window force the observer's body to the aperture ("the only option is to… spy").
• Appropriation — the tableau's tactic set: "displacement, rotation, fragmentation, or dislocation of ordinary objects and elements."
• Adaptive Reuse — the tableau as reuse's artistic model: significance altered by placement rather than by designing new elements; "interior architecture, like installation art, offers a spatial platform for the assemblage of elements."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Spatial seductions (Meninato 2018) — the defining source: the tableau defined as "a three-dimensional collage"; Kienholz's The State Hospital (the voyeuristic, hermetic box) and Portable War Memorial (the "space of war" vs. "business as usual"); Osorio's Badge of Honor (prison cell and son's room as "both the impediment and the link") and Lonely Soul (the tilted cart, crutch-columns, the wheel that "does not appear to turn"); and the transfer thesis — interior architecture and adaptive reuse adopting "tactics such as collage, displacement, fragmentation, or ready-made."

Open Questions

• Is the tableau a method interior architecture can adopt, or an art genre whose power depends on remaining outside use (a tableau is entered to be seen, not lived)? The chapter's "episodic fragments of interior design" suggests the boundary is itself the finding.
• Kienholz's tableaux are hermetic and voyeuristic, Osorio's saturated and inhabited-by-proxy — is there a typology of tableau-territories (the sealed box vs. the saturated room) for interior theory?
• The tableau produces meaning "through the disparate displacement and combination of ordinary objects" — how does this square with interior design's own sign-systems (Baudrillard's combinatory interior)? Is the tableau the interior's sign-system made critical, or only made strange?
• Can the tableau's political charge survive its transfer to built practice, or does "social architecture" (Osorio) name the moment the tableau stops being an installation and becomes a program?