What we call a centre table the French refer to as a table de milieu. The prosaic English, or Park Avenue American, term describing a round or oval table placed in the centre of an entry hall and displaying, say, an outsize floral arrangement, is far less intriguing than the French, intimating as it does the foyer of a Parisian hôtel particulier, with the table a useful surface for, well, a milieu, the gaggle of objects, sometimes linked by a common theme or purpose- or interesting in their accumulation precisely because there is no apparent linkage.
What put me in mind of this was a conversation I had with Diane Dorrans Saeks, whose new blog will explore disparate influences in style and design. That, of course, was the primary focus of our discussion yesterday, with Diane pointing out that the fact of disparate influences is the essential defining element of style. As usual, Diane hits the nail directly atop its obvious head.
With the decline in interest in so-called mid-century modern design, it becomes apparent that what might masquerade as style is more often an adherence to an aggregate of clearly recognizable period motifs. While the Aristotelian phenomenon of mimesis makes the recognizable initially pleasurable, its repetition without variation ultimately yields an aridity that results in the desirable quickly becoming passé. This is hardly a modern phenomenon, with Winkelmann arguing furiously in the middle of the 18th century for the abandonment of the international rococo style, and a return to the aesthetic purity of classical antiquity. Of course, Winkelmann’s well-reasoned, archeologically accurate neoclassicism itself survived in popular culture for only a couple of decades.
Style that is less trapped in time is paradoxically astylar. ‘Eclecticism’ we typically call this collection of motifs culturally and temporally disparate. I would maintain that, by and large, those whose outward expressions of style match their personal experience tend to provide us with the aesthetic equivalent of the table de milieu. Let me develop this notion over my next few blog entries. Diane, your experience is certainly broader than mine and I look forward to your wading in.