Anyone even mildly familiar with the art scenes in New York, Paris or Berlin will have heard of Colette (now known as Colette Lumiere) – or perhaps even met her in person. Colette is both an artist and a living work of art. She’s also a 1980s legend, whose influence extended beyond the art world to other artists – like Cindy Sherman, Keith Haring and Jeff Koons, and – as well as fashion and pop culture, from Madonna to Lady Gaga. Although she’s arguably the most iconic figure of the 1970s New York avant-garde, Colette remains something of a mystery. Her real name? Unknown. Her date of birth? Also a mystery. Despite being exhibited in the collections of the Guggenheim in New York, MOCA in Los Angeles, and Museum Ludwig in Cologne, a quick search will more likely lead you to a French author, while Wikipedia gives up after just a few lines. Her art defies categorisation. It’s too diverse, too fluid to fit into any one movement or medium. Colette resists definition – much like love, or a woman – with many names and many faces.

All that’s known for certain about the real Colette is that she was born in Tunisia and grew up in southern France. In the late 1960s and early 1970s – when hardly anyone had heard of street art and the graffiti movement had not yet been born, Colette was out at dawn in SoHo, painting vast diagrams on pavements and leaving cryptic messages on buildings in her own “magical” alphabet (she calls it her personal hieroglyphics). She felt an affinity with conceptual art, but its representatives (mostly men) rarely took her seriously – except, perhaps, as a lover. Already earlier she had begun to flip the script: instead of fighting her marginal status as a woman in the art world, she embraced it and moved to a meta-level, taking apart pop-cultural ideas of femininity. She created living environments, where she embodied roles like the rag doll, the sleeping beauty, the porcelain figurine, the femme fatale – and every woman who, as the object of male narrative, has appeared throughout the history of art: from Liberty Leading the People and Madame Récamier to Olympia and Ophelia. These characters, as tableaux vivants, inhabited boudoir-like spaces draped entirely in pink frills and fabrics. She installed such dreamlike settings not only in New York shop windows, but also in museums and galleries, including at the Clocktower (Real Dream, 1975/76), where she slept nude for weeks, like a figure nestled inside a luxury chocolate box. Her life became an ongoing performance, and her legendary Manhattan apartment-studio transformed into her iconic living environment, which Arturo Schwarz once likened its softness and intimacy to a womb.

In the early 1970s she began to proclaim herself a work of art while creating her living environments in which she became a sculpture within a sculpture. Unlike artists who clearly separate the creator from the creation, Colette the artist gradually merged into Colette the persona; and vice versa: Colette the persona we see is the creation of her invisible super-ego: Colette the artist.

In the art world, being a female artist wasn’t the only barrier to recognition. It is still often easier to become iconic after death, so Colette decided to wait for the right moment and sped up the natural course of things. When she realised she had entered the mainstream, she staged her own death in 1978 and announced the birth of her next incarnation, Justine, with a performance titled The Last Stitch at the Whitney Museum. Justine was the first of many personas Colette has taken on since. Justine professionally took over the management and promotion of Colette’s legacy (Colette is Dead Co.) and fronted the band Justine & The Victorian Punks, which released the album Beautiful Dreamer (1979). She also took her art to the legendary clubs: The Mudd Club, Danceteria and Studio 54. In 1979 she launched the Deadly Feminine line (1979), installed as a work of art in Fiorucci’s boutique windows. But when she noticed her style began to appear in fashion and pop culture (not least through Madonna in 1984 when she popped up with a new look in Like a Virgin), Colette declared she would start plagiarising herself (Ripping Myself off, Victoria Falls boutique, SoHo NY, 1978) and posed in windows as Joan of Arc (Paranoia Is Heightened Awareness, 1978).

In 1984 Justine left for Berlin invited by the DAAD to live there for a year. She  arrived there as a new persona Mata Hari and the leader of the band Mata Hari & The Stolen Potatoes. She later lived in Munich as Countess Reichenbach, became Olympia in the 1990s, and after 2001 transformed into Maison Lumière, which was  renamed  Laboratoire Lumière,  after the demolition of her legendary atelier,  and more recently merged all her personas into People of Victory.

Whenever one of her personas gained popularity, Colette would immediately shift to another. In everything she did, she was more than a decade ahead of her time. Her work was shown in major institutions like MoMA, PS1, and the New Museum – when these places were still in the process of building their reputations. She engaged with gender and camp in art long before they became fashionable. Her practice made use of environments, appropriation, staged photography, and living sculpture – well before those terms were widely used.  She was quick to recognise that in the society of the spectacle, famous artists function much like entrepreneurs – not unlike pop stars or media figures. One result of this shift toward celebrity artists was the blurring of the line between the artist and their work, and a collapse of the distinction between the elite, unique artwork and the mass-market commodity. That’s why Colette is Dead Co.– as an artistic strategy – functioned much like Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory, even if their intentions were different. Johnathan Crary in the Arts magazine (1983) commented as follows: “Colette’s art, like Warhol is bound up with the idea of uninterrupted performance, so that her physical presence itself becomes a kind of signature, a trademark. Both of them have experimented with various ways of integrating art making and commercial production, playing with the ironies of that intersection and with the reduction of the artist to commodity status…”

Colette was ahead of her time in her approach to feminism, as well. While undoubtedly a feminist, in the 1970s she preferred to describe her work as féminin rather than feminist – arguing, that women should embrace their femininity as a natural source of empowerment. In her art, she replaced the dominant male gaze with a female one. This shift in perspective went beyond art: she surrounded herself with attractive men, affectionately referring to them as her harem. At the time, her lover was the then-unknown artist Jeff Koons (who appears in her 1979 film Justine and the Boys, among others). Colette referenced music and fashion in her work – and vice versa: fashion and music drew on Colette’s world. She used the commercial world as her medium and labelled the series Reverse Pop, incorporating music, fashion and design in her work. But her influence did not stop then. When, in 2011, Lady Gaga designed shop windows for the luxury department store Barneys in New York – strikingly similar to Colette’s 1970s living environments – that was the last straw. Colette picked up a brush and signed the display on the street in white paint: “Colette the Artist”. Although the documentation of this performance went viral, this did not stop the pop star from renting the Guggenheim Museum to sleep in an installation to promote her perfume.

The exhibition of Colette’s work at Monopol Gallery marks the artist’s first-ever presentation in Warsaw. The show focuses on the more conceptual side of Colette’s artistic practice. The series Records from the Story of My Life, (1978- till now) designed in the format of vinyl record sleeves, presents Colette‘s various personas and her layered identities where the boundary between private and public selves – and between the real and the fictional – begins to blur.

During her Bavarian Adventure (1986-1991) the art world itself is also a subject of Colette’s subversive actions. The series Dial C for Scandal, or No Money – No Art (House of Olympia 1990s), she offers a critical commentary on the mechanisms behind the commodification of art.

One of the highlights of the exhibition is a large-format photograph documenting the installation and performance The Wake of Madame Récamier (1974/1975), from the tableaux vivants series. In it, Colette, posing as Madame Récamier from Jacques-Louis David’s painting, lies asleep in one of her ruched costumes, beside an enormous bouquet of irises. Sleep and dreaming are central motifs in her artistic practice. Since the 1970s, Colette has included sleeping in her performances, allowing audiences to watch her. The viewer’s gaze has full power over the sleeping artist’s body, which shifts from active subject to passive object. Without the tension of visual confrontation, the observer assumes the safe position of an unpunished voyeur. But this is a carefully set trap: Colette is not merely sleeping – she is also dreaming. Her passivity is only apparent (after all, she permits the viewer to watch her), and her active self is elsewhere, beyond the viewer’s control. In doing so, she reverses the roles of victim and predator, of the observer and the observed. This logic extends to her entire artistic strategy. Those who scoff at the artist for her love of frills and glamour often miss the point: through the use of her fictional performative personas she is the producer, the actor, the director as well as the script writer of her own play, who satirises cultural stereotypes: from the boudoir and Lolita, to the femme fatale and punk.

Monika Branicka