Colette Lumiere, a French-born artist who lived in New York City in the 1970s and early 80s, was known for creating, performing in, and eventually living in spaces covered in ruched and pleated fabric. Her most famous achievement was the transformation her downtown New York loft into an art work entitled Living Environment (1972–1983), was recently re-created for an ExhibitionCompany Gallery, New York.
Living EnvironmentIt all started organically. “I saw someone had a parachute in their house,” Lumiere remembers, “and I thought, ‘I really like that fabric.’ And that’s how it started.” She began adding layers of white and off-white fabric until her loft was covered from floor to ceiling.
In its earliest stages, the environment was more installation than living space, with Lumiere’s scant furnishings concealed behind draped silk. Lumiere fell in love with Baroque aesthetics after a trip to Italy. When she returned, “I just kept transforming it like the painter who paints a picture on the same canvas because they don’t have another canvas,” she says.
Lumiere started layering fabric. She used metallic textiles like metallic leather, satin, and artificial leather. She also added soft pinks to her palette. “I worked with rags,” she says. “I went to Canal Street, where you could find all kinds of things.”
The artist started performing in the space as a living sculpture. Her costumes were inspired equally by the punk fashions of the New York City club scene, Victoriana, French Romantic painting, and punk music. “I started wearing orthopedic corsets and bloomers,” she says. She would take photographs of herself within the installation, and then put them in light boxes that were placed on the walls.
For decades, the elements of Lumiere’s installations and performances were scattered among storage facilities. Kenta Murakami, curator of Lumiere’s installations and performances, initiated a Kickstarter campaign to help fund continued storage. Living EnvironmentAfter hearing that the artist was considering destroying her early work, I was shocked. From that campaign, a retrospective of Lumiere’s work was born. Under Murakami’s direction, the exhibition at Company Gallery centered on a partial reconstruction of the environment, surrounding it with artwork, ephemera, and documentation of some of Lumiere’s other projects of that period.
“The material was in a state [such] that a curator like myself or conservators would have been unable to do anything with it without Colette present,” Murakami notes. “It really required the artist herself to be a part of restaging it.”
Works sampled by the exhibition included images of early gallery installations featuring Lumiere sleeping nude in fabric-swathed rooms that visitors would pass through; wall fragments from a 1978 performance at the Whitney’s downtown branch for which Lumiere staged her own death, materializing days later at PS1 as Justine, front woman of the band Justine and the Victorian Punks; and clothing from the artist’s Beautiful Dreamer Uniform (1981–82) collection. “I was interested in experimenting with space outside of the canvas. I would use the streets as my canvas, my home as my canvas,” she says.
Initially Murakami and Lumiere considered including the artist’s new work. They decided that it was important to dedicate their Company show to the era. Living EnvironmentTo preserve the legacy of Lumiere’s work and to provide an entry point for a new generation.
One thing was certain: There needed to be a representation of Colette, whose physical presence was integral to the environment’s original iteration. “There was that challenge of how to recognize that there are things that don’t exist within the objects and don’t exist within the archive. They are ineffable, and all you can really do is sort of point to them,” says Murakami.
Lumiere worked with sculptor Cajsa von Zeipel to create a life-size wax figure of herself—an appropriate project for the artist, who often dressed like a doll for her performances. Von Zeipel created multiple iterations of the wax sculpture until both artists were satisfied, after which it was dressed in a gown from Lumiere’s archive.
Then there was the matter to repair pieces that were damaged. “It was a whole process,” says Lumiere. “For one thing, there were a lot of pieces. Some had to be altered and fixed, and some were beautiful as they were.” One of the lamps on display, for example, had been almost destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. Lumiere chose to leave the lamp in its damaged condition rather than trying to restore it to its original glory. “It was beautiful destroyed too,” says Lumiere.
“There’s a German word, Lebenskunstler, that means an artist of life,” says Murakami as he searches for a way to describe Lumiere. “At that time, every gesture she made was an artwork.”
