Synopsis: 

Artist Delaney Martin, a tableaux revivalist, founded the New Orleans Society for Tableau Vivant and invited guest curator Rosie Cooper (UK) to direct their inaugural performance.

Project Description: 

Tableau Vivant: A Wandering Retrospective, presented a selection of historic tableaux vivant alongside specially conceived tableaux by contemporary British artists.

Tableau Vivant translates literally as “living picture”; a costumed group or individual in a static and carefully arranged pose, usually accompanied by elaborate sets and props. Illustrating popular mythologies, famous paintings, or historic events, Tableau began as a parlor game for the wealthy and gained wide popularity in the 19th century only to fade away with the coming of radio and moving pictures.

Artist Delaney Martin, a tableaux revivalist, founded the New Orleans Society for Tableau Vivant and invited guest curator Rosie Cooper (UK) to direct their inaugural performance.

Cooper enacted a long distance exchange by delivering instructions from overseas artists for interpretation by the local Society members, who also created their own tableaux. Stage effects ranging from projection to fire accompanied the tableaux that were presented on a flat bed truck paraded slowly through various New Orleans neighborhoods.

Having a strong relationship to the still image, the tableaux vivant is a living thing perpetually situated in a morphological state between statue and movement. The impossibility of holding a certain pose for a long stretch of time means that the tableau vivant can never embody the stillness to which it apparently aspires – rather, is time stretched and slowed. Presenting this group exhibition as a series of live tableaux exposes its unstable state, and within this, it’s numerous ends.

Locating the project in New Orleans, a city ingrained with the composite histories of popular performance traditions including the Tableaux Balls of old Mardi Gras Krewes, Tableau Vivant: A Wandering Retrospective inhabits a space between the histories of high art and popular entertainment: illuminating the nature of the tableaux but also suggesting an alternative history for contemporary visual art performance.

Historical Tableau:

The Hal an Tow – British folk tradition /// Bruce McLean - Nice Style: The World’s First Pose Band /// Mistick Krewe of Comus – Scenes from Metamorphosis /// Pablo Picasso / Erik Satie / Léonide Massine - Mercure ///

Press: Pelican Bomb