The Way In and The Way Out: At the Nomadic Museum
Barbara Rosenthal
Gregory Colbert. Courtesy Ruder Finn Arts & Communications Counselors
Entering a vast, soaring, controlled space, quietly lit by warm rectangular spotlights and focused by eastern music, we feel our blood pressure lower, mood relax, judgment cease. We walk a colonnaded wooden aisle past suspended, uncluttered sepia photographs of closed-eyed, adolescent Buddhist monks leaning gently against kneeling, untethered elephants. Girls swathed in white Indian fabrics wade among elephants in a river. Naked African youths, eyes also closed, sit meditatively with African animals. A child is peacefully still as a hyena-like wild dog menaces nearby. The artist himself swims underwater with sperm whales.
We feel serene, and this is good. Finding a way to experience human harmony is a reason we seek art. But as the long, cathedral-like aisle continues, a new awareness begins to ebb beneath our tranquil state. We notice things: boys in sentimental photos replaced by similar girls, Asians by Africans, elephants by leopards, romantic rivers by romantic deserts. Then, near the end of the aisle, sepia stills are replaced by a sepia video, the source of the hypnotic music that fills the hall. And girl twirling for camera becomes suddenly just that, girl twirling for camera. Turning back into the aisle, we revisit the photographs on our way out. They’ve cooled; what they offered once, they don’t offer again. We remember these ravaged cultures, outside this marvelously clever temporary building, and our thoughts now ask loudly: where are we and how did we get here? How did this project come to be?
A Canadian travels to faraway places, photographs people. Intrigued by certain aspects of their lives, he poses them to reflect his vision. He acquires hand-made Japanese paper, has 200 pictures printed sepia, fairly large. He hires Japanese architect, Milanese interior architect, Catanian lighting designer, New York engineer, famous African-American actor, academy-award film editor, and huge public relations firm whose client list includes The Department of Homeland Security, to put together a one-hour 35mm film, traveling show, and gigantic structure incorporating one million pressed paper tea bags from Sri Lanka, etc. He intends, he says, to "depict a world that is without beginning or end, here or there, past or present," partly made possible, says his press release, by "the corporate patronage of Rolex."
Like most artists, Gregory Colbert produces imagery, not especially unique, but fairly nice to look at; unlike most, he hired a substantial crew to house, present, and publicize it to a degree that dwarfs the art. His occasional striking, enduring single image is outmaneuvered. In this era of museum-as-art, we have the case of an artist who has midwifed both by modulating reduction and excess.
