World of Interiors

What could be easier than to write articles and to buy Persian cats with the profits? But wait a moment.¹       

—Virginia Woolf

The kitchen in the image is, of course, beautiful. It is modern, neat, bright, and fitted with every contemporary appliance of the times. Light streams in from large windows, catching on a shining white porcelain coffee cup left on the breakfast bar. It must be late morning. There are well-placed houseplants and a fresh bouquet of tulips on the counter in a glass vase. There is a woman, a mother, standing at the kitchen sink. She is reaching forward, towards the tap for something but looks back, behind her, at a child, who is sat on the floor, playing with a dog. The woman is wearing a white shirt and a pencil skirt, and high-heeled strappy sandals. But wait a moment. Those are evening shoes. And what’s more, her back foot is very precisely pointed, like a professional dancer’s, a strange detail that tugs at the coherence of the image. The woman smiles a bright white smile in the direction of the child, yet they seem to regard one another, estranged. Are you my mother? No, she is not. She has the bearing of an actress, a performer. The two of them are frozen in place. And now we can perceive that they have been posing in the same position for too long, the toe pointed just so, the twisted position and the bleached smile aching. It is a little cold, this emptiness that is suddenly there. Something has gone missing, a message has become unmoored, some funny dialogue that was supposed to provide relief has gone unspoken, some bigger problem has now gone unsolved. 

This image, titled Maisons Françaises, une collection n°MJ198305P163 (2025) features in an ongoing series by the artist Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, in which she extracts images from vintage copies of French interiors magazines, including Maison Française. As an artist, Badaut Haussmann has an interdisciplinary practice which often spills into discursive endeavors and the creation of extensive archives, though her most enduring preoccupations circulate expressions of gender, sexuality and socio-cultural norms in architecture and design. When she acquired her late-grandmother’s collection of magazines from the 1970s and 80s, she moved them into her studio, where she slowly began to review their contents, treating them as a kind of evidence of para-architectural material mostly targeted at women (though its readership would have certainly included a substantial contingent of gay men and queer people, and other readers). As ‘evidence’, however, Baudaut Haussmann found that what was contained in the magazine ads was often surprisingly surreal, threatening, and strange, and what began to reveal itself to her was a picture of a shadowy, circumscribed zone of feminine existence. 

To draw out the subtexts of her material, Badaut Haussmann scanned a number of original advertisements and digitally removed all of the text and graphic design work, leaving only the image. She then subjected each picture to a unifying grayscale treatment, giving the images a dark, receding quality, a peculiar glamour that occurs when images of gleam and polish are also treated with a muted, monochromatic aesthetic of refined understatement. Some of the files were printed as photographic images at their original scale, while others are blown up to the size of posters or even billboard-scale images which cover an entire gallery wall. Some are unspeakably seductive: a shiny alligator purse with all its contents spilling out—compact mirror, cigarette lighter, pens, wallets, credit card—has been seemingly thrown down casually on a surface with a denim garment and an Issey Miyake-style pleated scarf, depicting an image of luxurious disarray. 

And yet, in contrast to Marlboro Country, the world that Badaut Haussmann reveals through Maisons Françaises is a noirish shadow-realm that is constricted, feminized, and haunted by fears of mistakes, accidents, and violent events. As Laura Mulvey has written on the relationship between the cinematic genres of the Western and the melodrama, the emotional reverberations and gender specificity of the latter are “derived from and defined in opposition to a concept of masculine space: an outside, the sphere of adventure, movement, and cathartic action in opposition to emotion, immobility, enclosed space, and confinement.”³ While Mulvey was writing in 1992, a period in which photographic appropriations such as Prince’s were still being metabolized in critical and art historical writing, Badaut Haussmann’s work appears during our current, more revisionist phase. Here forensics, and even the psychic excavations that connect architectural interiors with interior life, seem to play a part. Indeed, works from the Maisons Françaises series were shown in 2018 in the living and working space of a Paris psychoanalyst, alongside sculptures by the artist such as a tumbler spilling cubes of ice over a fireplace.⁴ 

To be a woman is to be just one class of person whose limits have historically been highly circumscribed: until relatively recently in the West, women were legally designated as a form of property that would change hands from father to husband. In Maisons Françaises we can sense just how recent this change is, because there, on full display, are the historical limits and psychic terrors of the marketplace: projections of the dreams and nightmares of women, who have not yet fully escaped the logic of property themselves. (Extending further into the realm of domestic terror, Badaut Haussmann has recently created another research archive, Domestic Gore (2025), made of printed stills from decades of horror movies that show feminized domestic interiors as besieged by threat—torn up sofa cushions, blood splattered on a shower curtain. To exhibit them, she affixed a selection of the prints to a silver folding screen, a domestic room dividing system that does not truly provide privacy.)

As a form, the Daybeds emerged out of research that the artist conducted during the Pavillon Neuflize OBC artist-in-residence program at Palais de Tokyo in 2011-12. There, she discovered that Perriand had been commissioned to make forty museum benches for the institution (in one of her designs named Tokyo), which were subsequently distributed among a number of other museums, as well as becoming a voguish item of furniture for many Paris galleries. In the present period, the artist realized, there are almost no benches in contemporary art museums or galleries except in front of long video installations, where they are often placed discreetly, one might say, begrudgingly. The fashionable aesthetics of major contemporary art spaces have shifted far from the fully furnished interiors of galleries and museums from a century ago, and are now often built from scratch to resemble the post-industrial factories and spaces that museums such as Tate Modern appropriated, or malls, where hostile interior design encourages bodies to keep moving, even when they are fatigued. As Diana Fuss and Joel Sanders have written in their essay An Aesthetic Headache: Notes from the Museum Bench: “modern museums and art galleries themselves have been largely indifferent, if not overtly hostile, to the demands and desires of the spectator’s body. Perpetuating a Western bias that dates back to the Renaissance, art critics view the spectatorial body as hardly a body at all but more a disembodied eye, associated with mind, imagination, and vision—rarely an actual body.”⁶ To sit and rest, they write, is to be associated with passivity and submission, leisure: “all postures deeply associated, not coincidentally, with the taint of femininity and domesticity.”⁷ 

Badaut Haussmann recalled a text by Gertrude Stein in which she wrote about the depth of embodied insight that comes with falling asleep on a museum bench in front of a painting in order to wake up with it.⁸ With this in mind, she developed the first daybed of the series, titled Dear Charlotte and Maurice (2012), with a readymade bench borrowed from the Louvre, accompanied by a fragmentary text which was displayed on the daybed like a forgotten letter. Many more daybeds followed this one, though these were no longer readymades, but rather new forms designed from scratch. As sculptures, the Daybeds not only reintroduced a modicum of consideration towards an embodied person who might need or want to rest, but also enact a subtle revolt against museum and gallery spaces that have become increasingly entangled in the logics of speed, productivity, and acceleration that typify this age of labor and consumption. 

How has it come to this? When will it end? Wait a moment. But wait a moment. The only way to resist this relentless pace is to wait a moment, to consider the privacy of your own mind, and to try and find time to sit down and think. In “Professions for Women” (1931), Virgina Woolf memorably describes her first experience as a professional writer, in which she wrote a book review and was sent a cheque in the mail in return. With the profits, she writes, she happily bought a Persian cat. What could be easier? But wait a moment. She has missed imparting something else that happened while she was writing the review: a kind of murder. Because as she was writing, she kept feeling a powerful force pushing her to write in a way that will not displease anyone or make her appear unfeminine, unlikable, unattractive, undomestic. This force, which she names the “Angel of the House,” cast its shadow over her work, coming in between the artist and her writing, and had to be vanquished—"killed” in Woolf’s words—in order for her to be able to write freely and critically.

To take one final turn back to Maisons Françaises, there among the images we find Cat Lady (2025), a strangely glamorous image of a fluffy black Persian cat wearing a diamond necklace. What this picture originally tried to advertise, we don’t know. It might suggest that there is something about being a woman with a perfect home which is akin to being a prized pet, festooned with jewels, sitting pretty. It might be a joke about the figure of the childless woman, sometimes called a ‘cat lady,’ a specter invoked by rightwing politicians to describe a single woman who has resisted the conservative structures of marriage and family. But wait a moment. This particular cat, with its echoes of Woolf’s writing, also reminds us that behind this series is the eye of an artist, who is also a woman, making selections and edits to the material, and shaping a narrative. Even if the reference is an unintended accident, is it possible to reinscribe this Persian cat as an icon based on the one Woolf bought with her first paycheck? For then we might read this cat as a kind of public service advertisement pointing out our culture’s ambivalent, conflicted relationship with gender, labor, and art. After all, what seems like a straightforward trade—selling one’s work for money—might involve a consequential protest against dominant cultural norms, for which the repercussions can be severe, more severe than we may want to admit. But as a final thought, might the cat also be legible as an advertisement for something like intellectual luxury, the possibility of inhabiting the privacy of one’s own mind for hours at a time? Might it exist in some imagined space, like a comfortable museum, where thoughts can stretch out, like a Persian cat on a daybed? Today, it seems, amidst a culture of frenetic, broken attention spans and anxious engagement, sustained experience of serious thought is becoming vanishingly rare, and so we might desire it, as a form of genuine opulence.