A fashion of the Baroque era, the Wunderkammer, or “cabinet of curiosities,” was a wealthy patron’s collection of random artifacts from across time and space: animals, art, plant specimens, mechanical devices, religious relics. Bits of ancient Roman statuary were nestled next to conch shells, as portrayed in a painting by Frans Francken the Younger from 1636. The purpose of the collection was to be admired, the objects examined one by one as hints of the world’s unknowable breadth.
The French artist Camille Henrot’s thirteen-minute video-art masterpiece, “Grosse Fatigue” (“Major Exhaustion,” or, as a 1994 comedy translated the phrase, “Dead Tired”), is a Wunderkammer of and for the Internet era. Made in 2013, the piece is now streaming on YouTube until July 16th as part of an online exhibition called “Video Lives,” from the Museum of Modern Art. (Because video art is so rarely displayed in full online, it is something of a rare item in its own right.) “Grosse Fatigue” emerges from and dissects the endless archives we’ve created online. It’s somewhere between a video essay (that arcane format) and a supercut, collaging found archival clips, Henrot’s own footage, meme GIFs, and documentary shots from inside the Smithsonian, where Henrot developed the piece during a residency.
“Grosse Fatigue” depicts, more or less, the evolution of life on Earth, mashing up creation myths and scientific theories, art, poetry, and the human body, with a conspicuous lack of boundaries that recalls the seventeenth century, when all of those categories were thought to have more in common. The video takes place on a computer screen: on a familiar Mac desktop, with a hard drive labelled “HISTORY_OF_UNIVERSE,” a cursor opens a file titled “GROSSE_FATIGUE_.” Offscreen, the artist Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh recites an epic poem written by Henrot and the poet Jacob Bromberg, and a propulsive beat composed by Joakim Bouaziz plays in the background. File-browser frames pop up and close, nesting in one another, piling up. It’s a digital data binge in which resonance matters more than fact or logic.
“In the beginning, the universe was a black egg where Heaven and Earth were mixed together,” Orraca-Tetteh intones. Wikipedia pages scroll. Henrot paints a Zen circle in ink wash on a bright yellow background, symbolizing the state of an empty mind. A photograph of Jackson Pollock in the act of painting opens over a video clip of someone wearing galaxy-print pants on the subway, the splashes of paint resembling the stars. Orraca-Tetteh chants “coelacanth,” invoking the still-extant species of fish that might have gradually evolved into land vertebrates. Smithsonian conservators gently examine preserved bird bodies. There’s an element of “Grosse Fatigue” that seems akin to ASMR: when the artist’s hands peel a black-dyed egg or roll an orange like a ball of clay, the sounds and gestures get inside your brain, tickling nerve endings and accessing subconscious archetypes. It’s like a headier version of a TikTok compilation.
Henrot’s work has moved between drawing, sculpture, video, and installation, often collaging different media and subject matters together. Her themes are sprawling: hope, archives, classical myth, the way the detritus of the mind spills out into the world of objects. The format of “Grosse Fatigue” is particularly successful at illuminating the crush of information we face in the twenty-first century, daunting and confusing but also magical, infinitely recombinable. The seventeenth-century Wunderkammer gained its value because of a scarcity of knowledge, which is now obsolete—we can Google anything and see what it looks like. Henrot, working in a period of overwhelming accessibility, restores a sense of wonder and discovery, the epiphany of holding a mysterious specimen in your hands.
