The Black Box theater at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMa) has a new tenant. Grosse Fatigue, a contemporary video artwork by French artist Camille Henrot, explores both oral and scientific stories of human creation on one screen in a square, pitch black room. The BMA is the first art museum in the U.S. to install Henrot’s piece. It was curated by Kristen Hileman and presented in conjunction with the Hopkins Center for Advanced Media Studies.
Grosse Fatigue in its entirety is certainly not simplistic. Henrot, winner of the Silver Lion award at the 2013 Venice Biennale, shows off her extremely sophisticated and refined artistic chops by compiling a creationist story and harnessing rhythm, science and technology, as well as other artistic media.
“In the beginning there was nothing but shadow and only darkness and water and the great god Bumba. In the beginning were quantum fluctuations,” says the narrator at the beginning of the film.
What sounds like an opening to a traditional tribal legend is cleverly accompanied by a series of overlapping images of life on earth, which individually look like desktop windows. A common thread in Grosse Fatigue is this juxtaposition of the traditional and organic against modern and scientific.
Each desktop window that opens onto the screen is like a new page in a history textbook. This repetitive motion is underscored by rhythmic hip-hop beats and the cyclic chanting of the narrator while he tells the story of Creation:
“In the beginning there was no earth, no water — nothing. There was a single hill called Nunne Chaha. In the beginning everything was dead. In the beginning there was nothing, nothing at all. No light, no life, no movement and no breath. In the beginning there was an immense unit of energy,” he explains.
With each sentence, a new window appears. The bright colors of the images not only stand out to the viewer in comparison to the all-black space of the Black Box, but also represent the immense diversity of life on earth. Namely, Henrot illustrates how beautifully rainbow-plumaged tail feathers of a tropical parrot mesh so harmoniously with the electricity and complex wiring of a computer.
One important question arises while watching Grosse Fatigue: How did Henrot manage to obtain video footage of what appears to be a museum vault? In certain frames, she features people who look like curators handling precious natural materials like ancient seashells and preserved animals.
Interestingly, Henrot was granted access to the private collections of the Smithsonian Institute Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Her amazing videos that are included in Grosse Fatigue explore the difference between telling a story of Creationism through museum artifacts and telling it via more contemporary means like a video.
Grosse Fatigue also utilizes other art media, such as sculpture, color photography, books and even colorfully manicured fingernails to illustrate the most complete story of earthly evolution. Just as the windows build on each other with each scene, these media are tied into one another:
“The stones that they threw became men, became women,” the narrator says of a mythical brother and sister.
The cycle of creation never truly ends, from cyclical organismic reproduction to the endless musical beat anchoring the entire piece.
The only element that would make the BMA’s presentation of Grosse Fatigue even better would be if the volume was adjusted and the overall space enlarged. The way it stands now, the video’s volume sounds muffled, and the acoustics make the narration pretty blurry. Perhaps better sound engineering and a more suitable room would better complement the video’s audio needs.
Even with these minor technical difficulties, Grosse Fatigue is a modern artistic feat that is important for everyone, especially millennials, to see. In an increasingly screen-and-speed-dominated world, how can people still remain in touch with the natural world and the steady flow of nature? By melding these two parts of the equation together into one video, Henrot forces her audience to consider both sides.
Grosse Fatigue is on exhibit at the BMA through June 15.
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