Personnes at Monumenta 2010 in the Grand Palais, Paris
A common denominator in Boltanski’s work is memory – spanning childhood and personal memories, memorials and the history of humanity. The artist made an installation with 30 tons of clothes in memory of all the people who used to wear them, evoking the memory of their disappearance. ‘Personnes’ means both ‘people’ and ‘nobodies’ . The installation was supported by a deafening soundtrack of human heart beats recorded for the artist’s Archives du Coeur project.
Eight minute video.
Great art deserves a pilgrimage. We should travel to see it. Literalists might argue that this can hardly be avoided. But the long winter's journey to Paris is not just a necessity if you want to see Christian Boltanski's momentous new show: it is peculiarly apt. For when you get there, the journey continues.
An icy breeze shivers through the colossal emptiness of the Grand Palais, desolate, bare, its exit signs creaking. The structure rises high above the void, a gigantic birdcage of iron curlicues and struts in which pigeons clatter in hope of a perch. Stretching out before you is nothing but an array of floor-level encampments, each marked out by four rusting poles with a neon tube slung between them. The last light is away in the distance.
Sixty-nine camps, but there are no tents and no living people, only thousands of old clothes lying face down on the floor. Is this where they fell or where they were laid? The irresistible metaphor springs literal in the visitor's mind, as if clothes could have bodies or faces.
You walk, you look, you search for evidence among the mildewed raincoats and threadbare denim. Here is a corduroy jacket, almost new, and a faded gabardine; there is a baby's knitted cardigan. They were young, they were old, they were not ready to die, poor departed souls who leave nothing behind but shucked garments. Mown down, laid out in groups, they have all met a terrible end. This is apparent without a single bloodstain or name; Boltanski's evidence is both more and less than proof.
And as you walk, the sense is of honouring the dead, of trying to observe the details of each and every one. These grouped clothes may represent mass graves, or corpses arrayed for identification in the school gym, but they also constitute a kind of cemetery. For the experience is just the same: that there is nobody here and yet the place is crowded. Personnes, the piece is called: people, but at the same time no one.
The title is as characteristic of Christian Boltanski's art as the work itself, being perfectly judged and distilled. I cannot think of a single piece by this poet-artist that is not equally affecting and concise. It is no surprise that he has long been considered France's greatest living artist but, at 65, Boltanski has surpassed himself. The third in the Monumenta series – comparable with the Unilever Series in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern – is his most profound installation yet.
Boltanski has always been a maker of monuments and memorials. His medium is the human trace and the memento mori. In the 1970s, he used to exhibit the "documents" of his own life, letters, scraps, locks of hair, photographs of himself as a child (which were probably nothing of the sort). Later, he began to commemorate the lives of others.
The Dead Swiss, the Children of Dijon: these world-famous shrines were assembled from photographs cut from obituaries, heaps of secondhand clothes, biscuit tins that might, or might not, contain personal effects; false memories, so to speak, especially since the dead were always anonymous. But these objects and images, no matter their provenance, were inevitably powerful for the sympathetic mind can hardly help but reconstruct a life from the smallest and most trivial of relics.
Pawned brooches, lost umbrellas, dogeared telephone books with their intensely intimate yet resolutely impersonal listings: your mind would rush in, imagining all these other people in other places. It did not matter that the evidence was meagre, partial, perhaps entirely specious, because the objects themselves were real, had once belonged to real livings beings.
That their owners were unknown equated very precisely with the universality of the evidence – a watch, a coat – and the poignant truth that one could only mourn the unknown through an act of the imagination.
This was an art that spoke so clearly and simply that a child could understand it and so it is, to some extent, with Personnes. The austerity of the scene is overwhelming, compounded by the booming heartbeats that seem to emit from nowhere and yet all around – time being measured out by human life.
But what makes this work – this experience – different is that it does not depend upon reality in quite the same way. You do not imagine these clothes to be those of murdered people so much as humanity en masse, flattened like biblical crops. And the metaphor climaxes in a towering mound of clothes, above which a five-fingered claw hangs from a crane, occasionally moving towards the pile, hoisting a random garment and then, just as arbitrarily, letting it drop.
You were in a necropolis, now you are in purgatory: balanced between heaven and hell, witnessing the hand of God. Except, of course, that you are in a freezing, cacophonous place surrounded by secondhand clothes and probably eager to be gone. That is the exceptional achievement of the piece. All its elements are frankly simple and apparent, you see how they combine, how it all works. Yet none of this stifles its resonant truths, that in the midst of life we are in death, that man's inhumanity to man continues beyond Auschwitz, Srebrenica, Rwanda.
Boltanski keeps you there, looking and thinking, walking through the work instead of standing before it like a picture. And then he asks you to record your own heartbeat in a supremely pointless but utopian project. All the world's heartbeats stretching out until the last syllable of recorded time: that should stand against oblivion. Or so it seems, listening to their rhythms filling the Grand Palais – a sound fearful to some, joyful to others, heralding one's release back to life from this premonitory vision. The choice, as in life, is all yours.- Laura Cumming, January 2010, theguardian.com
Résistance, 1993
Cropped photographs from original German mug shots of
captured Reistence fighters.
captured Reistence fighters.
The Haus der Kunst is one of the most important art museums in Germany. The building in Munich’s Prinzregentenstrasse was opened by Adolf Hitler in 1937 amidst substantial fanfare.
Originally dubbed the “House of German Art,” the museum promoted art which reflected the National Socialist understanding of the so-called master race.
The building’s sinister past made it a symbol of the censorship of “degenerate art” as well as the persecution of artists during the Nazi’s reign of terror. In recent years the museum has made concerted efforts to challenge and confront its history.
The Haus der Kunst was constructed by the Nazis in 1937.
Photo: weltenbummlermag.de
No comments:
Post a Comment