Christian Boltanski’s Bonfire of Humanity - what an extraordinary exhibition

James Ewing/Courtesy Park Avenue Armory Christian Boltanski, “No Man’s Land,” 2010.

Clothes may perform as fashion statements but that’s hardly all they’re good for. On a live body they also shelter and expose, enhance and diminish, challenge and flatter, instantly telegraphing taste, class, style and sense of self. Discarded garments tell another story — especially when 30 tons of them are tossed willy-nilly into a twenty-five-foot high, bonfire-like pyramid surrounded by a mass grave of 60,000 pieces of apparel in every size, shape and color. Then they speak for the dead.

Christian Boltanski

That is just what they are doing in “No Man’s Land,” a formidable reclamation of lost souls created by the French artist Christian Boltanski for the Park Avenue Armory’s cavernous Wade Thompson Drill Hall. To enter it, visitors must skirt a 66-foot-long wall of rusted biscuit tins labeled with numbers, suggesting an old crypt of anonymous remains. Speakers mounted on vertical steel beams that define 45 rectangular plots of clothes spread across the hall’s 55,000-square-foot expanse emit a roaring soundtrack that Boltanski culled from 45,000 recordings of human heartbeats he has assembled over the last several years.

Sixty play in a syncopated rhythm that varies like footfalls, tripping over one another or colliding as one moves across the floor. Every now and then there is a loud boom. It’s eerie. Overhead, meanwhile, the bright red talons of a construction claw suspended from a crane slowly descend to the mountain of clothing at the hall’s center, opening wide to clutch a clump of the forlorn garments and then ascending back up like a carnivorous bird with its prey. But as soon as the claw reaches the ceiling, it drops the clothes back to the pile, only to begin its descent once again.

“It’s like a symphony,” Boltanski said when I visited, adding that the heartbeats I was hearing were all from Swedes. As we watched the claw approach the pyramid, it clapped its jaws as if licking its lips before moving in for the kill. “I love when the clothes drop,” Boltanski said. “Because then they are free.”

In his installations of found photographs, books and documents derived from prodigious research, Boltanski, 65, has made a career out of reviving personal histories lost to time and collective amnesia. Though he has archived the names of artists who exhibited in a hundred years’ worth of Venice Biennales (most forgotten now), his memorializing art more often relates to the Holocaust. The reference to death camps is unmistakable in the random scatter of coats, sweaters, dresses and suits lying on top of each other in “No Man’s Land.” But they just as easily call to mind the catastrophic effects of natural disasters like the recent earthquake in Haiti, or the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001.

As it happens, the only disaster that brought these particular clothes to New York was economic. They came from a bulk supplier in New Jersey stuck with tons of stuff no one wanted. (At the exhibition’s end, they’ll go back there.) When Boltanski erected a different version of the work at the Grand Palais last January, he ordered the clothes from a flea market. It looked more like a jumble sale there, he said. Being French, maybe the clothes were more stylish. In New York, they only suggest the spirits of the very recently departed.

Yet the exhibition is more poignant than it is depressing. First of all, the wall of biscuit tins is quite stunning, the way ruins can be. And the heartbeats add a living pulse that only becomes more personal when spectators enter a room where a clinician records their own heartbeats through a stethoscope while they listen through headphones. After that it becomes impossible to distance oneself from the installation and the steady pace of its random selections.

One might think Boltanski is obsessed with death. But dying remains a fact of life as well as art. For the surprisingly jolly Boltanski, it is ever-present — not because he is ill but because he has bet against it with a Tasmanian collector and gambler, David Walsh, who is paying him a handsome stipend to film every moment he spends in his studio until he dies. If he expires in less than eight years, Walsh will pay the artist’s beneficiaries a discounted price. If Boltanski lives longer, the collector will pay through the nose for the footage, which is currently being transmitted daily to a cave the collector owns in Tasmania.

“Art is not meant to give pleasure but to ask questions and make people think,” Boltanski said when we talked. All the same, for the 2011 Venice Biennale, where he will represent France, he intends to make what he called a happy piece, because, he said, “Life is also beautiful.”

Death can come at any moment, that’s for sure. Fortunately, the Park Avenue Armory has a lot of exits.

“No Man’s Land” is at the Park Avenue Armory through June 13.

via tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com

Posted via web from Siobhan O'Flynn's 1001 Tales