Tableaux: The Workshop and the Refuge

“Faites le plein d’idées!” the French arm of the Swedish home superstore Ikea’s enormous product range enthusiastically encourages the consumer. As one proceeds through the store, one is confronted by a series of stagelike tableaux suggesting different productive activities carried out in the home: writing, gourmet cooking, serious reading, and artistic pursuits. These are not the impossibly tidy, unattainably beautiful montages of highbrow interior decorating magazines. Rather, they are eminently democratic — attainable, unpretentious, and inexpensive. Now, there is no longer any need to actually be a painter, a sculptor, or an architect, when one can acquire the material rudiments of the studio at cost price — a distressed Provençal armoire suggesting an interior full of years of half-used paint tubes, an artist’s wooden model figure, or an architect’s table and a heavy pivoting professional-style lamp — and put them together in a pleasing configuration in one’s home. Likewise, framed prints by artists such as Mark Rothko or Robert Doisneau, heavy books on the coffee table featuring photographs of natives in exotic locales, and a cafetière and coffee mugs next to a cluster of open files crammed with magazines and journals invoke an entire life given over to erudite contemplation and sensitive global travel.

Not every model here evokes images of elite intellectualism. Another popular tableau consumers can construct with objects from Ikea is that of the urban farmer – cum – “serious” chef: Le Creuset – style cast-iron cookware, thick wooden chopping boards, and 1950s-inspired kitchen accessories hint at a longstanding expertise in gourmet cooking, while rustic pine furniture, brightly colored plant pots, and a watering can serve to craftily place the idea into guests’ heads that one grows one’s own vegetables. Transposed into the home, as these tableaux inevitably are, various intensifications or relaxations of their elements can lead one back toward the real world or, alternatively, into the realm of pure theater and high camp — as when a subject-consumer is truly “playing the part.” One might view the Ikea store as a kind of enormous prop room, where huge quantities of merchandise and low prices make creating constantly changing backgrounds and shifting identities in one’s home — an activity once necessarily restricted to the highest level of economic elites or the schizophrenic — an easy affair.

Although Ikea sells objects, the nexus of Ikea’s decorative power, the ultimate tableau, is one of minimalism, of nothingness. This pure, white space may consist of some colored lights, some Japanese-style furniture, or objects incorporating transparent glass.1 Whereas the tableaux above are workshops, this is a refuge. The inhabitant of this space, it might be imagined, is so engaged in productive, self-fulfilling activity in the workshop that he or she must seek a well-earned respite in a world of simple forms and relaxing colors. If from an aesthetic point of view, this type of room constitutes sophisticated (absence of) design, from a practical perspective, and an existential one, it is fundamentally unbearable. What does one actually do in such a room? How does one entertain oneself? Yet this is the ultimate articulation of consumption as difference (cf. Baudrillard 1968, Bourdieu 1979), and a rather sly way of circumventing that seemingly inescapable linkage between social position and material possessions and the tyranny of choice: there can be no empirical comparison of status between one consumer’s minimalist lounge and another’s Louis XIV– themed drawing room, in the sense that one cannot compare something to nothing. In the hierarchy of taste, minimalism always wins out because it cannot be “disproved.”

It is rather difficult to underestimate the global reach of this aesthetic of the workshop and the refuge, a function of the awesome worldwide presence of the Ikea store itself. Ikea’s 2006 facts and figures report reckons that 458 million people visited its stores in 2006 — a figure approaching that of the entire population of the European Union.² In France alone, Ikea was the second-largest supplier in all sectors of the furniture market in 2005, outdone only by the styleless, no-frills Conforama chain (Garnier 2006), and, at this rate, may well be set to achieve first place by the end of 2007. Ikea’s most popular product, the “Billy” bookcase, has sold 28 million units worldwide since its inauguration in 1978, a figure slightly more than the population of Iraq.³ The Swedish superstore was generating an annual income of some 17.3 billion euros by 2006,4 which has allowed farmer’s son Ingvar Kamprad, who founded the business in 1943, to become one of the richest men in the world.