픽쳐의 확장: 크림프의 ≪Pictures≫부터 ‘타블로 형식’과 타블로 비방(tableau vivant)까지

Abstract

This paper examines the possibilities in which a number of different mediums of painting, performance, and photography can be viewed in terms of pictures or tableau in the age of new media. Instead of limiting the medium specificity, pictures include aesthetic potentials that are explained in the new cultural milieu of images or tableau. In this paper, I discuss two different scenes of theatrical stages or cases which deal with “pictures” in a different critical momentum; what all have in common is employment of “picture/tableau” to encompass a new medium or method of expression of the contemporary from a critical perspective. Using this method, I hope to open our vision toward embracing different mediums such as painting and photography rather than insisting on the specificity of each medium. At the same time, this paper explores the way contemporary painting could be expanded through the name of pictures. The first chapter analyzes “Pictures,” which was organized by Douglas Crimp at the Artists’ Space in the alternative space in SoHo, New York in the fall of 1977. New and emerging artists of that period participated in this exhibition. Two years later, the curator published an article in October, scrutinizing the works of Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, and others. Resisting modernist criticism of painting, Crimp used the term picture ambiguously and ambivalently both as verb and noun. The article was more open to the cultural phenomenon of pictures or images in postmodern currents. Photography, performance, and installation caught his critical dimensions. The second chapter takes an opposing view of pictures from that of Crimp by looking at renowned modernist art historian Michael Fried’s pictures and his new analysis of “tableau form.” The tableau form has been used in his critical perception of contemporary photography, which is in line with Jean-François Chevalier. In his Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, Fried explains the monumental size of contemporary photography functions as tableau (picture) because the pictures are hung on the wall, rather than being put in books as illustrations. The monumentality of size “confronts” the viewer in a new aesthetic way, which he terms “tableau form.” This critical tool is optimum for discussing Jeff Wall, Thomas Struth, Thomas Demand, and some others. But this analysis is highly criticized by postmodernist writers for its insistence on painting, more or less proposing a return to the medium of painting. Despite the polemical critical situations, both the Douglas circle and the Fried circle employ the terms picture or tableau. The last section of this chapter deals with tableau vivant to discuss living painting as a performative tableau, which uses reenactment of preexisting narrative. Jeff Wall and Vanessa Beecraft rhetorically use reenactment to reframe traditional paintings for “realist dramatization.” This third scene of tableau vivant, given the nature of employing real models or actors, is more theatrical and performative based. By looking at the two different phases of picture, tableau form, and tableau vivant, this paper explores the very Janus-like cultural phenomenon of modernist and postmodernist explanations of the terms. Since new media and cinematic medium have been important in contemporary art, the expansion of pictures attempts to include diverse mediums. In the two cases, the new mediums of our age ―photography and performance―collaborate with tableau/painting.