Sitting in her intricate swivel chair, the one in which she sits to have her makeup done, you become Marie Antoinette. You see the things she saw; the green gardens of Versailles, an opulent boudoir – the trappings of courtly life. But you also see yourself, sitting at the intersection of reality and fantasy, the projected image of your own body set inside The Petit Trianon. The private retreat Louis XVI built for his queen is now Nicole Cohen’s gift to you.
“Please Be Seated,” a video installation commissioned by the Getty Museum to reinvigorate interest in their permanent collection invites viewers to transcend time and space by using their bottoms. Artist Nicole Cohen worked with an LA based furniture designer to replicate 18th century chairs from the Getty’s French decorative arts collection. To contextualize the chairs in their original settings, Cohen traveled to France where she filmed period rooms at the Louvre, Versailles and Nissim de Camondo museums in Paris. Intercutting footage from the Getty’s period rooms with those in France, Cohen created distinct videos for each chair and set up a “whitescreen,” where surveillance cameras project the viewer into the photographed spaces when they sit down.
It’s hard to imagine any art exhibit having the power to transport the viewer to another time and place, but Cohen’s creation is surprisingly effective. By manipulating the environment, her work activates the viewer’s imagination. Perhaps courtiers have come to sip tea or dressmakers to fit you in fine silks. At once, Angelenos are permitted to enter rooms once reserved for royalty alone, and the contents of each space provokes fantasies of lifestyle and history. Cohen even filmed actors in some of the rooms, imposing contemporary reality onto historical past. The rooms are real but what of you in them? Are the actors more real or present than the viewer that steps into a live feed?
Where the visceral meets the virtual, Cohen’s videos challenge traditional assumptions about documentary technique, because her footage evokes an image that is “unreal.” But fantasy is fun, and this one’s also free. Instead of a round-trip ticket to Europe, take a trip to the Getty. Travel to 18th century France, sit in neoclassical furniture and envisage yourself in a stately palace room. Afterwards, if you’re feeling fantasy-full, there’s always the 405 for a big, fat dose of reality.
(All photos courtesy of the artist. Commissioned by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.)
