Colette: a living icon of the 70s drowned by the male gaze of the art world
Why the hell don't we hear about Colette when we talk about 70s/80s art?
Compared with her contemporaries Richard Serra, Carl Andre, and Robert Smithson, where is Colette?
Where is Colette's massive retrospective in Tate or MoMa?
Where is Colette in the art history books?
Why is Colette's body of work not being cataloged and preserved?
Well, her hyper-feminine persona and kitsch aesthetic might have something to do with her absence - since these characteristics in women are often associated with futility and superficiality. We know that the male gaze is almost always the dictator of what is relevant or not and that a woman who is not afraid to show the glitter, the irreverent, the drama, the red lipstick, and to put a strong personal and violent charge on everything that she does, is certainly something to be feared.
Although there are currently micro-discoveries of her work, how is it that in 2022 Colette's art still remains in the shadows?
"Colette is a pioneering artist whose vast and enduring body of work has both innovated and defied the categories of installation, performance, photography, and painting from the early 70s through the present. Beginning with her self-transformations and use of personas, in which she would embody historical female heroines in striking tableaux vivants, Colette’s allegorical performances have explored gender cliches, self-commodified sexuality, and the power of beauty as they coexist in the private and public realm. Her enfant terrible street-painting performances, for which she was frequently arrested, were a direct precursor to the likes of Keith Haring; her staged photographs & references to kitsch have had an undeniable effect on artists from Cindy Sherman to Jeff Koons, and her singular coquettish and blithe aesthetic has perennially surfaced within mainstream visual culture since the 80s."
“I dress up for them in whatever costume I may feel appropriate at the time and usually execute them at dawn not only to avoid traffic or police harassment but also because of the associations attached to those particular hours of the day the hours when most people are just about waking from their dreams, in other words, when everything that is real appears to be unreal.” - Colette
Some of her works and what she says about them:
The Transformation of the Sleeping Gypsy (1973):
The first very public performance of her.
"I used sleep frequently as a metaphor in my work. It was a way to explore the line between dreaming and reality."
Femme Fatale (1977):
"I slept on the streets in a blue satin box. It was for a gallery show on my street works and "personal hieroglyphics," titled It Reappears. The gallery was on the street level and had large windows, and I was sleeping there, so guests at the opening could view me from inside the gallery, but the performance was also available to people walking by on the street. After the opening was over, the box went inside the gallery."
Ancorra Tu (1977):
"I created an environment that resembled my living space, with all my personal belongings and clothes and everything, and I lived there for six days."
The Last Stitch (1978)
"In 1978, Colette died at the Whitney. It was in a white room, a reconstruction of my living space of that time. And a few days later I was resurrected, as Justine and the Victorian Punksin an art rock concert at PS1. Everyone had become used to these soft environments, but now I appeared as punk and was destroying everything! And there were art critics and collectors in the audience and I was throwing art history books. That was shocking for a lot of people, but that was my revolution. That was my statement for the art world. I’m not going to wait until I’m dead!"
Olympia Practices Being in Two Places at One Time (1991):
"I slept in a glass cabinet at Rempire Gallery in 1991, as part of an installation. That installation actually had references to retrieving my own history. The sleep performance was Part II of that piece, but during Part I, I sat in a white chair, very still, staring at a large photo of my first performance in 1970: Liberty Leading the People. It was after the Delacroix painting. I was posing as Lady Liberty, which was a very important statement to me because it depicted a woman leading the people who also not afraid of showing her body in a very natural way.
“I was interested in experimenting with space outside of the canvas. I would use the streets as my canvas, my home as my canvas” - Colette
Here are some articles about Colette:
Colette, iconic artist of 70s NYC, on saving her most important artwork by Thom Waite for Dazed
The Iconic Colette Lumière on her Numerous Personas and her influence on Pop Culture by Katie Peyton for Bomb Magazine
ETERNALLY COLETTE: The Artist On Living, Transformation, and Timelessness by Coco Romack for SSENSEHow I Made This: Reconstructing Colette Lumiere’s “Living Environment” by Meca Boyle for ARTnews
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Ver tudoPublished in Artforum, New York, October 1972. Museums, like asylums and jails, have wards and cells – in other words, neutral rooms...
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