Monumenta

Art

/ Temporary Exhibitions

Created on Tuesday, 19 January 2010 23:00

Published on Tuesday, 19 January 2010 23:00

Written by Heidi Ellison

Christian Boltanski's Monumenta exhibition at the Grand Palais evokes the Holocaust and concentration camps. Photo: Didier Plowy/Monumenta/Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication

It is always exciting to see how another artist will cope with what must be the very intimidating task of filling the cavernous spaces of the Grand Palais – with its glass dome high enough to accommodate a full-sized Ferris wheel – for the one-man (no woman artist has yet been invited) show entitled “Monumenta.”

For Anselm Kiefer, the first to attempt it in 2007, it was no problem: he was already building gigantic installations on a hilltop site in the South of France. A year later, Richard Serra rose to the challenge brilliantly, erecting five huge rusty steel plates that were almost but not quite identical, placed in a row at slightly different angles. While it didn’t look like much at first sight, the installation created mysterious, menacing presences that exerted a strange fascination and became almost interactive in spite of their massive solidity as you moved among them.

This year, it is the turn of Christian Boltanski, considered by many to be France’s leading artist. Boltanski, whose works are always haunted by death, the Holocaust and the idea of absent people, has created a simple installation he calls “Personnes,” although it includes no images of human beings, only ghostly representations of their absence in the form of used clothing and disembodied heartbeats.

On entering the Grand Palais, visitors first come up against a wall of rusty stacked tin boxes – a recurring motif in Boltanski’s work that conjures up images of a columbarium in a cemetery or of old records (of Holocaust victims?) neatly filed away.

Visitors must make their way around this obstacle to see the rest of the installation, which consists of three long rows of neatly laid-out squares of used clothing spread on the ground, each square demarcated by two poles between which a fluorescent light bulb is suspended on a string. On the poles are speakers, each one emitting the recorded heartbeat of a different person, from Boltanski’s “Archives of the Heart” project, which records and saves the heartbeats of individuals (the archive will open to the public in July 2010 on the Japanese Island of Teshima; visitors can have their own heartbeat recorded for posterity upstairs in the Grand Palais). The whole building throbs with sound from the heartbeats and from the amplified noise made by the building itself. As visitors stroll among the rows the sound varies, since each individual’s heartbeat is amazingly different.

In the back of the building, under the dome where a Ferris wheel stood a few weeks ago, is a mountain of used clothing (see video at bottom of left-hand column), which immediately brings to mind the mountains of human hair or shoes collected by the Nazis from their victims. A claw suspended from a crane repeatedly picks up a bunch of clothing, rises toward the ceiling and then drops the clothing it has picked up back onto the pile. According to Boltanski, the claw is based on the claws in amusement park games in which players try to pick up a prize; it is meant to represent the arbitrariness of life and death.

Boltanski has also created an installation called “Après” at MAC/VAL, the contemporary art museum in the Paris suburb of Vitry-sur-Seine. Unlike the show at the Grand Palais, which is bathed in natural light from the glass ceiling in the daytime, this installation is set up in an enclosed space in near-total darkness filled with black room-sized cubes that cannot be entered but whose heavy black plastic walls move mysteriously. The only light comes from headless stick figures with white fluorescent tubes for arms. When visitors approach them, a movement-activated recorded voice asks such questions as “Were you frightened?”, “Did it happen in the hospital?” This is the afterlife as conceived by Boltanski, who says he is a non-believer. The back wall is covered with shiny, semi-reflective blank rectangles of different sizes.

All this sounds interesting on paper (or computer screen), but while Boltanski’s concerns and intentions are certainly laudable and his humanism undeniable, his work is strangely unaffecting. Shouldn’t the figures from beyond the grave send a chill up the spine when they suddenly speak to you? They don’t. Shouldn’t the mountain of limp, wrinkled clothes – symbols of the departed – create a shock of horror? It doesn’t. Maybe a lifetime of seeing shocking images has made these representations of them seem too mild.

Boltanski is very articulate in explaining the meaning of his works. It reminds me of when I was studying photography long ago. We were asked to take a photograph illustrating a theme and then explain the image in an accompanying text. The teacher read my text aloud to the class and praised it, but then looked at my photo and said, “Too bad the photo doesn’t say that.”

It’s the work that counts and, unfortunately, although I want to appreciate Boltanski’s work, it doesn’t speak for itself. As I heard a well-known French artist say at the MAC/VAL opening about Boltanski’s installation, “Ça ne me chavire pas” (“It doesn’t knock me out”).

Heidi Ellison

Grand Palais: Avenue Winston Churchill, 75008 Paris. Métro: Champs-Elysées-Clemenceau. Open Monday and Wednesday, 10am-7pm; Thursday-Sunday, 10am-10pm. Closed Tuesday. Admission: €4. www.monumenta.com (see Web site for info on related cultural programming).

MAC/VAL: Place de la Libération, 94404 Vitry-sur-Seine. Métro: Porte de Choisy, then bus 183 (get off at the MAC/VAL stop, marked by a monumental Jean Dubuffet sculpture). Tel.: 01 43 91 64 20. Open Tuesday-Sunday, noon-7 p.m., Thursday until 9 p.m. Admission: €5. www.macval.fr

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