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Ashes & Snow
| Date: |
12 July 2009 07:00 |
| Producer: |
Victoria Cullinan
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| Presenter: |
John Webb
Bongani Bingwa
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| Show: | Carte Blanche |
Man: What if there was a place that expressed our awe of nature, a place where the elephants watched over you, where whales lullaby you to sleep?
Gregory Colbert (Artist): "The label they put on me now is a Category Breaker'. They say because I'm working as a storyteller in the fields of film and photography using dance, music, light and architecture..."
Canadian artist Gregory Colbert has exhibited all over the world. Millions of people have flocked to experience an extraordinary combination of film and huge photographs in a specially designed exhibition hall.
John Webb (Carte Blanche presenter): "Gregory's Ashes and Snow' exhibition has attracted over 10 million people, making it the most attended exhibit by a living artist, ever."
"Ashes and Snow" explores interactions between humans and wild animals in their natural habitats; an interaction that he believes has been lost by modern generations.
Gregory: "Every culture was expressing its human faces, but also its animal faces. It can be an eland for example for a San or it can be a crow for the American Indian. We are a generation that doesn't have an animal face. But in the end you cannot change something so fundamental to who we are. This idea that it's our dominion and we're here to dominate it - so we became a species that wasn't very empathetic and it's our Achilles' heel, because we see things, often in a hierarchical way. And therefore we want to be the dominant, and we want to be the dominant species and we want to exclude somebody, either in another race', in another religion or in another species. And I think the expression of Ashes and Snow' is to say, No'."
It started 17 years ago. Gregory was an award winning documentary filmmaker and photographer. In 1992 he gave it all up and disappeared for 10 years.
Gregory: "You'd probably put me in a straight jacket if I told you I was going to start project and I said, I don't know how long it's going to take...'"
For a decade he travelled the world, visiting over 30 countries to capture extraordinary moments. He used dancers as well as ordinary people to play with the animals.
John Webb (Carte Blanche presenter): "How much say do you have on how they behave in any particular environment?"
Gregory: "It's a collaboration, but what I'm trying to do as much as possible is try not to get in the way. That may sound really strange - a conductor, he's got a really amazing orchestra, he's not out there trying to pluck all the instruments that the musicians are playing. [I try to] create a climate where they can play together. Nothing is more exhilarating to me than process; to be in the field - the moment when something happens and you think that the cameras might explode, just by the very nature of what has just gone onto that piece of film, because it seems so [gestures with hands]."
Not all the animals were used to humans - some were completely wild and potentially dangerous, like the sperm whales that danced with Gregory himself.
Gregory: "I said I was going to do one shoot with the whales and ended up doing it for two-and-a-half years and I was in front of the camera for one reason: I had zero volunteers of people that were willing to go on film with a sperm whale. So, I can't breathe under water. I don't have the capacity of a sperm whale or a humpback and I need air, I need to go back up. But I knew if I felt as if my lungs or my heart or my body were going to explode, but what was going on was so intense that I could transcend that sensation, then I knew I must have been on the right track."
John: "There's the absence of colour in your work - the sepia tone. There is also quite a bit of mystery around your technique. Do you like the fact that people don't quite get how you do what you do?"
Gregory: "You look at it, when you're watching, you go, Well, is it staged?' or worse, Is it actually a computer trick?' It's not a mathematical process that I'm doing. The only way that you are going to be able to collaborate with them, in my case, is in an organic way and to work with them over time."
Using specially composed music and poetry narrated by actor Lawrence Fishbourne, Gregory created his artistic narrative by combining film and photographs. In 2002 he held his first "Ashes and Snow" exhibition in a massive 12th Century shipyard warehouse in Venice, Italy.
Gregory: "Usually when you go to an exhibition, it's about the cult of the object and explanations - then we have precious frames and glass cases, and dates and explanations. I'm explaining. There's no explanation when you walk into the exhibition, there's no dates. There are some things you cannot articulate and are not meant to be explained. I'm all for figuring things out, but that's not my job. My job is to sing, and there are songs in nature and that's what I'm trying to sing along with or have them sing through me."
100 000 people visited the installation. The Rolex Institute bought out the entire photographic collection and became the official sponsor.
In 2005 Gregory fulfilled his dream and designed his own exhibition space, one that he could dismantle and rebuild - he called it the Nomadic Museum.
Gregory: "There should be a humanism' in architecture. I know we have a lot of star-chitects, and very famous architects doing these incredible luxurious sculptures around the world, and these beautiful forms - then we go inside, and [think], Is this an afterthought, did you know that humans have to actually inhabit this space and walk through this space?' I would think that people would be lingering, that something affects you profoundly - you want to prolong that experience. But I see a body language and I see people feeling these structures. Or kids: Just get me out of here.' And so the idea for the Nomadic Museum was completely enveloping, and that you walk in and it almost should be startling."
John: "The 1st Nomadic Museum, made out of shipping containers, was constructed on Pier 54 from the Hudson River in New York. That's where the Titanic was supposed to have docked."
Gregory called on Avante Garde Japanese architect, Shigeru Ban to help him design a structure that could travel the world. Made out of 148 shipping containers, it took two months to build.
John: "Gregory, your exhibition is really about the total experience, isn't it? It's about the space that it's in; it's about the music, it's about what people are seeing?"
Gregory: "You don't distinguish between the architecture and the music and the film - there is a unity. And the threads that are created during the process, those entities can be created. There is a sort of cross-pollination, shall we say, for that experience. And the senses - you use all of your senses. It's not possible to rely on just one medium - you really want to cast all your nets."
400 000 people visited the New York exhibition. Over the next two years the museum travelled to California and Tokyo. In 2008 it went to Mexico where the containers were clad in bamboo - making it the largest bamboo structure ever built.
Gregory: "In Mexico, unlike Tokyo and New York, the exhibition has to be free, there's no way that the people who'd want to see this are going to be able to pay."
This meant that over eight-and-a-half-million Mexicans were able to see the "Ashes and Snow" exhibition.
Gregory: "If I was to say with pride or the show that I loved the most, it would be to say what happened in Mexico, because [you saw] a farmer next to the wealthiest man in the world, next to the people from the street - it was really a cross section of what the country was and what the city was."
Gregory: "People spend a long time in the lines, some of them even four to five hours. By the time they get inside, you can see the spots, the marks that they had - it just looks like water washes over their faces. And you look at the faces come out...and I just go, Gosh, that's my job'."
Gregory's photographs sell for up to $1-million per series, but only to select collectors like designer Donna Karan and some top Hollywood stars.
Gregory: "We are all complicit in the system that's really about the marketing and buying and selling of art. And it's so unimportant. And whatever work I have sold or will sell, I see myself as Robin Hood and my studio as Sherwood Forest and I happily have my collectors come. But they are collecting so that I can create spaces and structures and do work whereby people come and visit and 99% of those people will never be collectors. The important thing is you finish a body of work and then you share it with everybody, it's not about possession."
Next year Gregory hopes to bring "Ashes and Snow" to Cape Town.
John: "Your project is continually evolving. Do you ever feel overwhelmed because it is quite a daunting task - especially when you consider that ultimately, you may never finish?"
Gregory: "The finishing? That would be tedious and boring. It's very much a circular evolution. It doesn't have a linear destination. Of course it will be a work in progress. I'll be dead and gone - it will always be working. If I can make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, then I say I've proved a point...I'm worthy of whatever gifts I've been given."
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:While every attempt has been made to ensure this transcript or summary is accurate, Carte Blanche or its agents cannot be held liable for any claims arising out of inaccuracies caused by human error or electronic fault. This transcript was typed from a transcription recording unit and not from an original script, so due to the possibility of mishearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, errors cannot be ruled out.
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