When we look back at the popular cultural practices prevalent during the lockdown period the home tableau reproduction of famous paintings will stand out as among the most creative, witty and challenging. As an art practice it is not new, and has become a part of how we engage with visual culture, a kind of homage through imitation, representation being the major theme of Western art for several centuries. However, the particular aspect of the present practice is the choice of items used, enforced by lockdown - we dress up using the items to hand, we use modern processed food and domestic items to imitate the seventeenth-century still-life and the fifteenth-century portrait, we sometimes go for deliberately bad imitation, using references of shape and colour but not the status of the object. We have fun with it, but we take it seriously. It is widespread enough and sufficient creativity is employed to make it worth asking some questions:
Is it more than just fun?
Why do people put so much work into it?
What is its relation to the selfie?
What governs which paintings people choose?
What does it tell us about how we locate ourselves culturally?
What does it tell us about how we evaluate particular art objects?
Does it have anything to do with not being able to visit art galleries? In fact, what would we find if we asked an individual or a group creating a live tableau reproduction of a famous painting, ‘when did you, or were you last able to, last see that painting in real life?’
Is this being done with any art that is not found in major galleries of western 2D art?
What do the people doing it get out of it? Is it competitive, and if so, how is success or failure judged?
While it may be proposed that what makes people do this is a mixture of boredom, fun, and following a wave (imitation of imitation, or indeed in terms of representational art, imitation of imitation of imitation), the over-riding questions that may provide the most fruitful thinking are ‘why these objects?’ and ‘what do we want from it?’
There is an undeniable sense of wit and ingenuity involved in the hockey-stick used in place of the staff of office, the dog standing in for the infant Christ, the garden chair used in place of Venus’ shell in the Botticelli painting, the saucepan and earphones used in place of headware. These replacements do not represent, for the saucepan does not represent the hat, it pushes it aside, it debases, domesticises and mocks the original, at the same time as acknowledging its importance. It uses similarities of colour and form to downgrade the original without upgrading the replacement; it resonates and represents while speaking its own difference. Despite the longevity of the portrait, it addresses the original with the challenge of similarity: in the current circumstances it says ‘for all your finery you are as mortal and as fragile as we are’.
What governs the choice of paintings? This presumably includes the point that the picture may be a favourite, may be easily reproducible, the subject may resemble the person or people, there may be sudden flashes of similarity between a prop in the painting and an item in the person’s home, or the idea of the challenge may give rise to absurd incongruities, such as the saucepan on the head. And why famous works of Western representative art? Is it because they are unchallengeable? They have already been turned into scarves,ties, tea-towels, food-trays, wrapping-paper, so why should representing them with ourselves be any different? Or are we saying, this is who we are, how we choose to be represented for our seconds of fame, as we hope to go viral?
A structure for this was provided by the Getty Museum, as reported by John Crace in The Guardian6 April 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/apr/06/how-i-became-the-duke-of-urbino-getty-museum-recreate-masterpiecebut the blog acknowledged that this was a case of major art institutions catching something that was happening already, in itself noteworthy. A major art institution appropriating something that might be seen as mocking high art could devalue any mockery, and announce, ‘this we can take, because we are unassailable, and this gentle mummery highlights the superiority of high art’. The Getty Museum blog labels the activity ‘recreating’, and recreation it is – the practice is directed towards fun rather than art, the offerings are described as ‘creative interpretations of iconic artworks’ and ‘ingenious and hilarious’https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/getty-artworks-recreated-with-household-items-by-creative-geniuses-the-world-over/ Despite the status of Arcimboldo’s imitations of portraiture using fruit and vegetables, despite Sturtevant’s work using reconstruction from memory, despite the prescient work of Nina Katchadourian http://www.ninakatchadourian.com/photography/sa-flemish.phpand Hendrik Kerstens https://www.ifitshipitshere.com/with-his-daughter-as-muse-photographer-hendrik-kerstens-emulates-flemish-paintings/, they are not ‘art’.
At art school I collaged myself into photocopies of famous paintings (scalpel and glue in those days) for a laugh, and later made serious work using recreative photography to understand through recreating an eighteenth-century family portrait. I have thought about recreating a painting and seeing what my ingenuity might achieve. But I would be more tempted to recreate with domestic objects cultural artefacts that are found beyond the National Gallery, a Sepik River mask from Papua New Guinea, an Indonesian shadow puppet, or an Ice Age sculpture; Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Weddingin the National Gallery in London is part of what made me me, but I would want to go beyond affirming the worth of western visual mimesis. However, stepping outside western art would be cultural appropriation taken into a frame of digital competence, the wit, ingenuity and mockery suddenly becoming uncomfortable. Would I dare to dress up (undress up rather) as the Willendorf Venus, as the statuette of Zeus hurling a thunderbolt, or downgrade into something from British folk-art – a toby-jug, a flatback Staffordshire pottery figure? Now the wit becomes self-mockery, pointless, missing the joke, and pointing out that it is primarily a joke.
As we examine the choices being made we see the boundaries that are implicit, and how they turn us inwards; Western art being played with by western people (and if you look at the reporting of this activity on https://www.businessinsider.com/at-home-recreations-of-famous-artwork-during-coronavirus-quarantine-2020-4?r=US&IR=T#-to-edvard-munchs-the-scream-from-1893-on-toast-12and the Getty’s own selection, as on 16 May 2020, what do you notice about the skin colour of the participants?) A lockdown within the lockdown.
