Colette Lumiere…Artist Reborn
From Outer Space
Almost half a century ago, the Tunisia-born artist Colette landed in New York City — from outer space, she claimed, to anonymously paint the streets with mysterious signs and symbols that she received from her far away cosmic home. She made a quiet feminist statement by sleeping nude on an outdoor Carl Andre sculpture and abandoned herself to her dreams in store windows and museum vitrines. Every aspect of her life was transformed into art: her clothes, the characters she embodies and, most famously, her living space. colettetheartist.mystrikingly.com
Maison Lumiere
Out of the blue one day in August 2007, the doorbell at Maison Lumiere on Pearl Street rang with utter urgency: the five-story house from 1831, along with its two slightly older neighbors, had suddenly been deemed unsafe, and Colette was told — “Gestapo style,” she recalls — to leave immediately. A crack in the facade running from the basement to the roof had been widening almost imperceptibly for decades, but more importantly, the three remaining dwarfs at the feet of the Financial District’s glass towers had just been bought by developers with tall ambitions — not even the landmark-worthy birthplace of Herman Melville on what was once known as Great Queen Street would be spared. For Colette, the instant eviction — police officers escorted her outside— did not just mean the loss of a home but the destruction of the already legendary art environment that she had inhabited and continuously transformed for almost three decades: it had evolved from a “minimal baroque,” furniture-free incarnation without furniture and walls covered in white parachute fabric to a Rococo cave created from frilled, ivory-colored silk satin: a sensuous “soft space” gently illuminated by lightboxes that were integrated into the fabric.
“ There’s a Mermaid in the Closet ”
Three months after having been thrown out, Colette was granted “quick entry”— the bureaucratic term for salvaging essentials within a single hour. “Things flew out of my fourth-floor windows,” she says about her frantic rescue effort. “My whole life was on the street.” When the three buildings were demolished soon after, Colette performed daily mourning rituals at the void left by the three houses, wearing different costumes each time. Once, six years earlier, when the nearby World Trade Center towers had fallen and toxic clouds were hovering over the neighborhood, she had already been barred from her residence — almost as a prelude to her final expulsion. Driven by the urge to protect and to be with her art, she ignored the fumes and the barricades and hid in her refuge near the smoldering rubble: “People thought that I had been killed in the attack.” And indeed, the artist —who had died at her own hand and then resurrected herself with a new mission and a new name several times in the past —rose from the ashes of 9/11 as Colette Lumiere.
Leo Castelli & MoMA/PS1
A sense of fragility had always invaded her Pearl Street cocoon: harassed by her landlord from the very beginning, she had already embarked on a rescue mission for a large segment of her opulent boudoir in the early 1980s — at the time, Leo Castelli had almost succeeded in brokering a permanent arrangement with a Swedish museum to house her signature work — ever since that deal fell through at the last minute, Colette’s mythic period interior has mostly lived in storage, along with newer iterations of her ever-changing living spaces that have gone on exhibit — as, for example, in the case of her major installation titled “There’s a Mermaid in the Closet” at MoMA/PS1 in 2020 — a place where Colette had shown her work at the onset of her career.
Jeffrey Deitch & Löwenpalais
The remnants of her original environment, along with the elements of all her other, often large-scale projects, have resulted in what Colette calls her “storage tribulations.” “I have moved some of these objects for decades, feeling like Atlas, sometimes wanting to burn it all — but it is still the nucleus of my art.” This ever-increasing ballast stands in contradiction to her nomadic desires and long term stays abroad, as in Munich (where she was inevitably likened to the flamboyant King Ludwig); or in Berlin, where the multi-media artist-in-residence instantly converted her suite at the Löwenpalais — a turn of the century villa in Grunewald — into one of her “colettisized” abodes. “I create a landscape and become part of it, so even when I appeared in public as a sleeping nude in one of my sceneries, I felt safe, like a bird in a nest.”
When Hurricane Sandy swept through New York in 2012, it unexpectedly flooded many galleries in Chelsea — and Colette’s storage space. She spent her days salvaging damaged drawings and objects, though not entirely distraught over the wounds inflicted by the water: “Ruins have been a theme in much of my oeuvre, and I have quite often distressed my works on purpose, like partially burning them. Sandy was a disaster, but some of its traces were beautiful —I always like markings of time.”
Richard Prince & Jeff Koons: Company Gallery
There is a nine-minute video by the cinematographer and photographer Robert Polidori that preserves the Pearl Street loft in its youthful, almost pristine state during a 1978 party and playful performance — Colette appears in her own version of aristocratic finery with Jeff Koons and Richard Prince, friends from her earlier days as a more conceptually-oriented artist. The surviving contents of that environment have now been liberated from their long obscurity in storage to appear, along with other art objects, at Company Gallery at 145 Elizabeth St. in a show titled “Notes on Baroque Living – Colette & Her Living Environment” proudly revealing its age and all it has been through, its aura intact. The show will run through January 22nd, 2022. companygallery.us
