Regarding Beatles’ CD covers, Jeffrey Roessner argues that by producing “such consumable imagery, the Beatles staged themselves in successive tableaux vivants: from the half-revealed photo on With the Beatles to the silhouettes of their spread-eagled leaps in A Hard Day’s Night , to the outline of their early stage set and their stride across the Abbey Road crosswalk” (Roessner, 2020). In connection to my work, I am again stressing the artist’s role as a curator of these existing (still) images, and that my curation activates the re-enactment of the Beatles’ CD cover, or a pedestrian’s crossing, as tableau vivants. These tableaux performers perform to their own phone cameras, and knowingly or inadvertently, the surveillance camera (and its live, global audience, as well as their audience on social media). 

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In Chris Ingraham and Allison Rowland’s analysis on Google Street View and performance (Ingraham and Rowland, 2016), the essence of street scenes to be captured as tableau vivants is further examined. They observe that the “audiences watch a tableau come to life as actors move into place, assume their positions, only to disperse again once their position is held static. The moment when the image most comes to life is the moment it ceases becoming alive. Once formed, when the performers finally hold their pose, coalescing in a materially produced moment of maximum verisimilitude, the living image dies.”  In connection to my work, regarding the pilgrims posing for the camera, or the pedestrians crossing the road, their images most come to life when these performers were “frozen” with the CCTV screenshots, becoming tableau vivants.

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Reflecting on the Beatles’ pilgrims, citing Ingraham and Rowland’s analysis, their underlying motive would be “a desire to be recognized as a subject, a desire to say, like a kind of curbside bathroom graffiti, ‘I was here. Here I am.’” And that “the novelty of such desire to be noticed would derive from its basis in a surveillance society that now sees all, and in seeing all, sees nothing—or, more precisely, identifies nothing, allowing no one to stand out as singular.”

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In response to all of the above, I develop the idea to stack these images to form an installation work. This method is resonated in Idris Khan’s work, of which he uses techniques of layering to arrive at what might be considered the essence of an image, and to create something entirely new. In my work, the act of stacking enables the postures of each individual, as a performer, to be concealed or revealed.