Speculative Taxidermy

THE END OF THE DAYDREAM149

FOUCAULT’S TAB LE AU - OB J E T AND THE EVENT

Two more concepts from Foucault’s analysis of art will become useful in
this chapter: the tableau-objet and the event.^36 The concept of the tableau-
object was theorized by Foucault in a series of lectures on Manet’s paint-
ings that he gave in Tunis and of which fragments have been gathered in
the posthumous book titled Manet and the Object of Painting. It is a much
undervalued concept in Foucault’s body of work and has more recently
come into alignment (although it remains ignored) with the current phil-
osophical preoccupation with objects and their agency.
Foucault further expanded the notion of quattrocento painting as in-
troduced in The Order of Things and This Is Not a Pipe. He argued that
classical painting deliberately relied on forgetting the materiality of painting
itself, inviting the viewer into a daydream.^37 In opposition, the tableau-
objet is a type of painting that reclaims the materiality of painting for the
purpose of making the viewer “conscious of his presence and of his posi-
tion within a much larger system.”^38 To the trompe l’oeil aesthetic intrin-
sic to quattrocento painting, the tableau-objet substitutes a deliberately
awkward flatness, as is visible in Manet’s Olympia, Déjeuner sur l’Herbe,
and A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. The solid structuring of interior lighting
in quattrocento painting, the element enabling the ordering of the world,
is replaced in the tableau-objet by the ever-changing, arbitrary illumination
of the room in which the painting is displayed.^39 These structural recon-
figurations prove defining in the physical positioning of the viewer in
front of the “object of painting” itself. The positivist, internal light source
of quattrocento painting simultaneously structures the image and ask
the viewer to stand right in front of the painted surface (fig. 4.4). This
vantage point produces a position of sovereignty situated at the center of
the representational world, like in a cabinet of curiosities; everything seen
is subordinate, pacified, and dependent upon the viewer. Thus, the physi-
cal interlocking established between viewer and painting in classical art,
vastly secured by the solidly prenegotiated bridging of realism, is col-
lapsed by the tableau-objet’s nonaffirmative aesthetics. One of the most
challenging statements proposed by the tableau-objet, however, lies in the
acknowledgment and self-confessed revelation of its representational value,
or what painting substantially has always been: a material circulation of
images—a flat board or stretched canvas upon which a picture has been