Colette’s Storeroom of the Imagination
Alan Jones
All that is ever stored, placed in safekeeping, or shored up against the elements and against time, has already inevitably entered the realm of the fragment. For the onlooker the occasion of art most often occurs in the formal context of gallery or museum, or more exceptionally through the studio visit. More rare is it for the interloper to penetrate into the nether region of the storage room.
Recently I had such a chance to explore this "back stage" world during a visit to the New York storage space of the multimedia artist Colette. I found myself in a place where chronology encounters a unified accumulation of fragments in a sort of time-warp defying rational cataloging, an otherworldly zone where the conventions of display do not apply, like the nocturnal sequences in the haunted antique shop in Ingmar Bergman’s film Fanny and Alexander.
From the threshold I had the feeling of having somehow arrived in the basement workshop at Joseph Cornell’s house on Utopia Parkway, or having entered an unplundered Egyptian tomb, or of witnessing the bringing to light of the intact contents of a time capsule. This beyond-the-stagedoor atmosphere was reminiscent of Max Beckmann’s jam-packed claustrophobic interiors.
Colette’s unique approach to the life-practice of art vividly announced itself in the topography of the room in which I found myself. In her work hybrid objects and materials locate themselves in combinations whereby the subject pushed to extremes. These objects and materials undergo constant metamorphosis as the same elements re-emerge time and time again in new guises, new combinations, "translated" from genre to genre in a sort of retour eternel, from performance enactments to installation, from objets d’art to tableaux (themselves more often than not "combines" of painting, photo, fabric and object), only to reappear once more where one least expects it, scavenged for ulterior actions, or in the extended collage of manipulated photo and video: a realm of fragment that undergoes the endless process of recombination, juxtaposition, transformation.
Thus the spectacle that greeted my eyes did not resemble the depository of either painter or sculptor, nor was it a warehouse of theater props, nor was it another obsessive case of parallel collecting such as Warhol’s mania for cookie jars. Instead I found myself behind the scenes of an extended work-in-progress, back-stage at a Gesamtkunstwerk in the making.
The accumulation of personal phantasmagoria has always been central to Colette’s creative endeavor. This involves the recovery and conservancy of her own intimate narrative: a Proustian undertaking in which memory is made manifest by materiality instead of by means of the written word. Yet the common goal is the shoring up of emblematic artifact, remembrance caught in amber or under Plexiglas.
As I took in this hoard of art works, the work of Henry James came to mind, particularly The Spoils of Poynton, a novel in which a collection of art treasures appears in the role of prime protagonist, or again the array of bibelots which appear throughout The Portrait of a Lady, or the flawed chalice itself which lies at the heart of the momentous happenings in The Golden Bowl: quite literally a fatal deus ex machina sitting on the mantelpiece.
The visitor to Colette’s storage-room finds himself surveying the raw mechanics of her imaginative process, finished works, fragments, recent tentative arrangements: the impact is like entering into a writer’s formative thoughts as past accomplishments collide with new narratives in the instant of crystallization. The floor-to-ceiling stockpile would have given much for Maurice Rheims, author of The Strange Life of Objects, to mediate upon.
An anthropologist could doubtless confirm that the act of preserving and conserving is a task delegated to the domain of women’s work, essential to the cult of shelter, burrow and nest: the careful folding and storing of precious lace and linens, the polishing of silver heirlooms, the "putting up" of preserves and foodstuffs through canning and drying: chest, box, jar, ribbon and sealing wax. The trousseau. Throughout Colette’s oeuvre, the feminine is given a constant but never strident emphasis. This aspect of her agenda is immediately apparent even in the manner in which she has warehoused the heterogeneous components of her storage space.
Every artist is inevitably the foremost curator and collector of his or her own work; Edgar Degas hated nothing more than parting with one of his creations. Given the particular nature of Colette’s far-reaching enterprise, this truism becomes an especially apt one, as certain of her installation works themselves seem to amount to a sort of "inventory taking" conducted in public, or a ritual display of relics to the light of day.
This impulse to recapitulate is encountered in Marcel Duchamp’s key work, the compilation-on-canvas entitled Tu m’, in which his major themes to date are ranged in a single work, or again in the large canvases making up Warhol’s anthological Reversals series. And throughout the actions of Joseph Beuys there runs the leitmotiv of repeated use of material as well as gesture.
In 1995, Colette presented an installation (one of several storage-related)* entitled "My art was never meant to hang on wooden walls," at the Kunsthalle Reimchigen, in Germany. Seemingly a random placement of diverse works in basso relievo against the wall, it was composed of a vast cross-section of works from various periods of production, panels of rusched fabric, photo works of all dimensions, rolled paintings stood on end and wrapped as if awaiting shipment, a mannequin in gloves and evening gown, a lone hatbox.
Similar in composition to the apparently random marshalling of objects in a Louise Nevelson bricollage wood relief-sculpture, the Reimchigen installation resembling nothing as much as Colette’s own storage room itself. Repeating motifs and recycling objects and materials, which play cameo roles performed before, refashioned now to new sequences, Colette builds up a resonance similar to that of a musical refrain, a crescendo of accumulated associations.
Through organized chaos, exuberant clutter, the embracing of an aesthetic of willed imperfection –part baroque, part minimalist– Colette forces us to confront the Sturm und Drang of vying forces of the anarchic and the utopian: it is like walking in unexpectedly on the "room" in Jean Cocteau’s Enfants Terribles.
"Not long ago I had a vision, to exhibit the storage just as it is," Colette recently said. "It’s an on-going private installation, a modular one. It’s my Noah’s Ark. I move a piece, sell another, replace it with something else. It’s open-ended. At the same time it covers very great distances, layers of history and areas in time… different dishes by the same cook."
When, in the late Sixties, Leo Castelli’s artists actually began preferring to do shows at the Castelli Warehouse instead of at his conventional uptown gallery, a very important shift had taken place in the way art is formally displayed. The gallery paradigm had changed for good. If Colette’s store-room can be said to constitute an extended work in itself, it is one that is made up of individual units, each a finished work in itself: paintings, sculpture, light works, fabric works, photo-based works, audio, video, and –just occasionally– one of those objects that defy all categorization. In this, it brings to mind Ben Vautier’s Magazin, once a functioning shop in downtown Nice and now one of the most-visited attractions in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou.
I look back, as the door closes behind me, and pause before re-entering banal reality. Where in the world, I ask myself, is the museum that will dare exhibit this treasure trove: this store-room of the imagination?
*List of various storage theme installations:
1977 Clearance Sale, Paris, Gillespie Laage Gallery;
1977 "Ancorra Tu", Cologne Art Fair, Installation of the Living Environment
1978 The Last Stitch out of the House Exhibition, Whitney Museum
1979 Justine’s Special Christmas Gifts, Elizabeth Weiner Gallery, New York
1981 Persona at the New Museum, "Justine Properties of her World", New York
1985 Art on Stage, Stadtische Galerie Nordhorn, West Germany
1990-2000 The House of Olympia (Retrieving my History),
1990 Visits to the Normal World, Carole Johnson Gallery, Munich
1992 The Storage, Reempire Gallery
1995 My art wasn’t meant to hang on wooded walls, Reimchengen, Germany
1997 Bon Voyage and Au Revoir Olympia, 8th Floor Gallery, New York
1997 Colette is Back in Town, Dirty Windows Gallery, Berlin
1997 La Salon de la Refusee, Gershwin Hotel, NYC
2002 "Installation of Maison Lumiere", 3rd Montreal Bienalle
