Interperformance: the live tableaux of Suzanne Lacy, Janine Antoni and Marina Abramovic - live performance artists

The affective power of live display is a key aspect of the nineteenth-century performative genre known as tableaux vivants, literally, "living pictures." Typically, performances would involve enacting masterpieces of sculpture and painting or the staging of moral and literary themes. Although the popularity of tableaux vivants waned in the early twentieth century, there are vital continuities and parallels with contemporary performance works. What persists in recent tableau performances are specific dimensions of living display as vehicles of affect, aspiration, and sensorial engagement. Yet there are significant distinctions as well. While the aesthetic staging of traditional tableaux vivants involved the unidirectional communication of symbolic representations, the contemporary tableau performances discussed here constitute zones of interperformance by which the terrain of fixed representation is transformed.

Although the genealogy of tableaux vivants has multiple trajectories, its populist form can be traced to performances in Italy at the end of the eighteenth century by Emma Hamilton, whose "attitudes" mimetically enacted the poses of classical statuary that were being excavated at the time. Her performances were described in the writings of Goethe and achieved great popularity as a result.(1) In mid-nineteenth-century America, the phenomenon of tableaux vivants evolved into two forms: erotic vaudeville, and a form of domestic entertainment and amateur theater, often under the direction of women.(2) In elaborate mise-enscenes, participants would mold their postures, holding their positions and emotional expression from two to twenty minutes. The performative technique of tableaux vivants became conventionalized following Francois Delsarte's method, a gestural vocabulary nuanced with Christian and moral themes, often depicting supplication, blessing, or appeal. Populist sentiment was frozen in a "decisive moment" of moral talks, religious allegories, or classical myths [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED].

While the earnest idealism of such theatrics may appear platitudinous today, what remains compelling about tableaux vivants is that the locus of their performativity focuses on an identification as aspiration. In this sense they evidence an ethical practice or "aesthetics of the self" in the Foucauldian sense.(3) The themes of nineteenth-century tableaux were closely linked to the prescriptions of manuals of etiquette - the self-help books of the time - to instruct a growing middle class in the development of "presence": the cultivation of poise, carriage, and self-confidence. Just as important as the evidence of "taste" in the choices and appearance of individuals was the instruction of the performative dimensions of "grace and ease" in such everyday activities as "how to descend a staircase" or "how to board a train." It is in this sense that tableaux vivants - as practices performed on the self to transform the self - indicate both techniques of existence and an aesthetics of becoming.

This was to impinge significantly in the performativity of gender as well. The fin-de-siecle was characterized by simultaneous reactionary and revolutionary forces affecting women. On the conservative side, tableaux vivants sustained repressive Victorian concepts of womanhood.(4) The agency of women's self-display was often restricted to the "embodiment" ideals of Art, Justice, and Liberty, "standing in" for moral teleologies as living sculptures.(5) Yet, significantly universalist themes that ultimately "objectified" women coincided with more progressive representations of fin-de-siecle activism promoting women's suffrage. Shuffled among such idealist representations of women in the tableaux manuals of the time were examples of women as agents rather than objects: a liberatory "spinsterhood," "the female bicyclist," "the suffragette," "the college girl," and "the new woman."(6) At the turn of the century, tableaux vivants moved from the parlor into the public sphere, developing into civic theater and pageants. During a time of massive immigration, public events involving thousands of participants played a significant role in socializing recent immigrants as well as mobilizing the trade union movement. The aspirational aspects of these forms of self-display evidence important sites of both individual and collective social transformation.

Emerging around the time of photography and declining with the invention of cinema, tableaux vivants - which ostensibly mime the camera's ability to fix time - can be read as a profoundly visualist form. Yet an evening of tableaux involved another dimension of aesthetic experience, specifically the perception of the energies produced by the situated presence of the performers. These exhibition situations involving live display engaged not only the visual sense but other aspects of the sensorium as well. In particular, the foregrounding of "presence" implicates the haptic sense. Haptic awareness engages the ontology of a performative situation through a kind of "distal touch," which perceives the ways energies are galvanized to generate experience. Just as the haptic sense is engaged when the body is in motion, so too it is operative when the body is still. On the one hand, proprioception, an aspect of the haptic faculty, discerns spatial depth and the arrangements of objects. On the other hand, kinaesthetic awareness, another aspect of the haptic, gives a reflexive awareness of bodily comportment. But it is the even more subtle registers of the haptic that experience the resonance of affective climate.