Anyone even mildly familiar with the art scenes in New York, Paris or Berlin will have heard of Colette (now known as Colette Lumiere) \u2013 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 \u2013 like Cindy Sherman, Keith Haring and Jeff Koons, and \u2013 as well as fashion and pop culture, from Madonna to Lady Gaga.\u00a0Although she\u2019s 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.\u00a0Her art defies categorisation. It\u2019s too diverse, too fluid to fit into any one movement or medium. Colette resists definition \u2013 much like love, or a woman \u2013 with many names and many faces.<\/p>\n
All that\u2019s 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 \u2013 when hardly anyone had heard of street art\u00a0and the graffiti movement had not yet been born,\u00a0Colette\u00a0was out at dawn in SoHo, painting vast diagrams on pavements and leaving cryptic messages on buildings in her own \u201cmagical\u201d alphabet (she calls it her personal hieroglyphics<\/i>).\u00a0She felt an affinity with conceptual art, but its representatives (mostly men) rarely took her seriously \u2013 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\u00a0created living environments, where she embodied roles like the rag doll, the sleeping beauty, the porcelain figurine, the femme fatale \u2013 and every woman who, as the object of male narrative, has appeared throughout the history of art: from\u00a0Liberty<\/i> Leading the People<\/i>\u00a0and Madame R\u00e9camier to Olympia and Ophelia. These characters, as tableaux vivants<\/i>, 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\u00a0the Clocktower (Real Dream<\/i>, 1975\/76), where she slept\u00a0nude\u00a0for weeks, like a figure nestled inside a luxury chocolate box. Her life became\u00a0an\u00a0ongoing\u00a0performance, and her legendary Manhattan apartment-studio transformed\u00a0into her iconic living environment, which\u00a0Arturo Schwarz once likened its softness and intimacy to a womb.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
In the art world,<\/i>\u00a0being a female artist wasn\u2019t the only barrier to recognition. It\u00a0is 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\u00a0The Last Stitch<\/i>\u00a0at the\u00a0Whitney Museum.\u00a0Justine was the first of many personas Colette has taken on since. Justine professionally took over the management and promotion of Colette\u2019s legacy (Colette is Dead Co<\/i>.) and fronted the band\u00a0Justine & The<\/i> Victorian Punks<\/i>, which released the album Beautiful Dreamer<\/i> (1979). She also took her art to the legendary clubs:\u00a0The Mudd Club, Danceteria and Studio 54. In 1979 she launched\u00a0the Deadly Feminine line\u00a0<\/i>(1979), installed as a work of art in Fiorucci’s boutique windows.\u00a0But when she noticed her style began to appear in fashion and pop culture\u00a0(not least through Madonna in 1984 when she popped up with a new look in Like a Virgin<\/i>),\u00a0Colette declared she would start plagiarising herself (Ripping Myself off<\/i>, Victoria Falls boutique, SoHo NY, 1978) and posed in windows as Joan of Arc (Paranoia Is Heightened Awareness<\/i>, 1978).<\/p>\n
In 1984 Justine left for Berlin\u00a0invited by the DAAD to live there for a year. She \u00a0arrived there as a new persona Mata Hari<\/i> and\u00a0the leader of the band\u00a0Mata Hari &<\/i> The Stolen Potatoes<\/i>. She later lived in Munich as\u00a0Countess Reichenbach<\/i>, became\u00a0Olympia<\/i>\u00a0in the 1990s, and after 2001 transformed into\u00a0Maison Lumi\u00e8re,<\/i>\u00a0<\/i>which was \u00a0renamed \u00a0Laboratoire Lumi\u00e8re<\/i>, \u00a0after the demolition of her legendary atelier,\u00a0 and more recently merged all her personas into\u00a0People of Victory<\/i>.<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 when\u00a0these 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 \u2013 well before those terms were widely used.\u00a0 She was quick to recognise that in the society of the spectacle, famous artists function much like entrepreneurs \u2013 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. <\/i>That\u2019s why Colette is Dead Co<\/i>.\u2013 as an artistic strategy \u2013 functioned much like Andy Warhol\u2019s\u00a0Silver<\/i> Factory<\/i>, even if their intentions were different.\u00a0Johnathan Crary in the Arts magazine <\/i>(1983) commented as follows: \u201c<\/i>Colette\u2019s 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\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
Colette was ahead of her time in her approach to feminism,\u00a0as well. While undoubtedly a feminist, in the 1970s she preferred to describe her work as\u00a0f\u00e9minin<\/i>\u00a0rather than feminist\u00a0– arguing, that\u00a0<\/i>women\u00a0should embrace their femininity as a natural source of empowerment.\u00a0In 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<\/i>, among others). Colette referenced music and fashion in her work \u2013 and vice versa: fashion and music drew on Colette\u2019s world. She used the commercial world as her medium and labelled the series Reverse Pop<\/i>, <\/i>incorporating music,\u00a0fashion and design\u00a0in her work.<\/i> But her influence did not stop then. When, in 2011, Lady Gaga designed shop windows for the luxury department store Barneys in New York \u2013 strikingly similar to Colette\u2019s 1970s living environments \u2013 that was the last straw. Colette picked up a brush and signed the display on the street in white paint: \u201cColette the Artist\u201d. Although the documentation of this performance went viral, this did not stop the pop star\u00a0from\u00a0renting the Guggenheim Museum to sleep in an installation to promote her perfume.<\/p>\n
The exhibition of Colette\u2019s work at Monopol Gallery marks the artist\u2019s first-ever presentation in Warsaw.\u00a0<\/i>The show focuses on the more conceptual side of Colette\u2019s artistic practice.\u00a0<\/i>The series Records from the<\/i>\u00a0Story of My Life<\/i>, (1978- till now) designed in the format of vinyl record sleeves, presents Colette\u2018s\u00a0various personas and her\u00a0layered identities where the boundary between private and public selves \u2013 and between the real and the fictional \u2013 begins to blur.<\/p>\n
During her Bavarian Adventure<\/em> (1986-1991) the art world itself is also a subject of Colette\u2019s subversive actions. The series\u00a0Dial C for<\/i> Scandal,<\/i>\u00a0or No Money \u2013 No Art<\/i> (House of Olympia 1990s), she offers a critical commentary on the mechanisms behind the commodification of art.<\/p>\n One of the highlights of the exhibition is a large-format photograph documenting the\u00a0installation and performance\u00a0The Wake of Madame R\u00e9camier\u00a0(1974\/1975), from the\u00a0tableaux vivants\u00a0series. In it, Colette, posing as Madame R\u00e9camier from Jacques-Louis David\u2019s painting, lies asleep\u00a0in one of her ruched costumes,\u00a0beside 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\u2019s gaze has full power over the sleeping artist\u2019s 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 \u2013 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\u2019s 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\u00a0satirises cultural stereotypes: from the boudoir and Lolita, to the femme fatale and punk.<\/p>\n Monika Branicka<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"class_list":["post-7413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bez-kategorii"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/galeriamonopol.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/galeriamonopol.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/galeriamonopol.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galeriamonopol.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galeriamonopol.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7413"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/galeriamonopol.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7413\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7436,"href":"https:\/\/galeriamonopol.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7413\/revisions\/7436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/galeriamonopol.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galeriamonopol.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}