The
Grand Palais at the bottom of the Champs Elysées, is currently hosting three
major exhibitions: one on Renoir, one on Istanbul, ‘de Bysance à Istanbul’ and
the annual ‘Monumenta’ installation in the main concourse, a space about as big
as the Turbine Hall in the Tate Modern but all late 19th century
glass and arched grandeur in architecture. Last year Richard Serra erected his
awesome slabs of steel in there. This year it’s been Christian Boltanski’s turn
to put the space to use.
I
knew little or nothing about Boltanski before I went along to see what he’d
done. I’d heard he has a thing for biscuit tins – I must have caught a fragment
on the radio about how he sees them as symbolic funerary urns or the sort of
box a child once used for his treasures and secret things. I think the biscuit
tins probably encapsulate as well as any of his other work what seem to be his three
lifetime interests: his childhood and childhoods generally, what people keep, and
death (his own and that of others).
One
of his 1969 pieces is called ‘Reconstitution d’un accident qui ne m’est pas
encore arrivé et où j’ai trouvé la mort’ [reconstruction of an accident which hasn’t
yet happened to me and in which I am killed]. The ‘exhibits’ include ‘la carte
sanitaire d’urgence trouvée sur la victime’ [the emergency medical card found
on the victim] and a drawing of the outline of a fallen body, marked ‘relevé
faite à la craie de la position du corps’ [outline drawn in chalk of the
position of the victim’s body]. Make of that what you can – a certain ghoulish
humour anyway, which you can find again in other creations by him.
However
there isn’t much humour in the work he’s set up for us to immerse ourselves in,
which he’s called ‘Personnes’. The hall is laid out with sixty-nine large rectangles
of clothes – only coats, jackets and jerseys, for reasons which I will explain.
All the coats and jackets are lain in orderly fashion, face down against the
floor. Each rectangle is lit by a small strip light strung across the middle,
and each rectangle has the recorded sound of someone’s beating heart pattering
or thumping steadily away. Behind the individual beatings is a deeper more
resonant roar, also of beating hearts but sounding more like a storm rising. You
can record your own heart beating for his collection, should the fancy take you
(it didn’t take me), and get a CD of it for 5 euros.
It
is cold in the hall and when you first enter you are confronted by a whole wall
of rusting biscuit tins, welded together into a single large barrier about 20
feet high. On the sides facing the entrance each one has a sticker with a
number printed on it. (The echoes of the Holocaust are very loud at this
point).You go round that and come face to face, but at the far side of the
rectangles, with an enormous – and I mean enormous – pyramid of clothing. Above
it towers the prehensile claw of an automated crane which lowers itself, grasps
a clawful of clothes then rises again to the maximum height and lets them drop
onto the pile once more. It is difficult to say whether the sight of those
tumbling clothes is more disturbing than the hundreds and hundreds of coats and
jackets, ‘face contre terre pour symboliser la mort’, as the young men I spoke
to said. Nothing that covers the lower body has been used because this is about
the human heart, the beating heart and the still one, the present-absence of
the human in the materiality of his or her clothes, the crumpled, the smooth, the
new and the obviously old, and in the background the insistent sound of the
living heart thumping the blood round the body.
‘Chaque
élément’, by which is meant the clothes one supposes, will be recycled at the
end of the exhibition. Although this information is given as a footnote on the
leaflet about the exhibition, that prospective act seems to me to form an
integral, I’d even say essential, part of the rest. A bit like the 1969 accidental
death which Boltanski has yet to suffer, these are items which ‘already eventually’
give warmth to another human being.
He
says he wants to create a ‘puissant sentiment d’oppression’ such that visitors
will be glad to step back into the bustle of a Paris day. It didn’t have that
effect on me, although I found it very troubling. But I came home on the bus
thinking a lot about individuality and sameness - all those coats, all
different, all the same, all those different heart beats, doing the same job
for everyone….
Paris
is grey at present, not as cold as when I arrived a week ago but swathed in
January mist and early darkness. The clémentines and mandarines gleam on the
stalls. People are waiting, for ‘better days’, in every respect. The regional
elections are imminent. The ‘national identity’ question is still with us and
now the ex-colonies and the DOM-TOMS (Départements et Territoires d’Outre Mer)
are in the news as well. Like everyone else I’ve been following the Haitian
crisis, hearing over the days the change in tone, the defensive responses of
government spokesmen, keen to keep the Haitians where they are – to take the
aid and the doctors to them so that they don’t start making their way to the
USA or Europe. It was deeply depressing to listen to the evasions of Alain
Joyandet, Secrétaire à la Coopération, responding to an astonishing and moving outburst
from a young French-Haitian man on France Inter this morning. He’s lost all his
family except his sister. He wants to bring her to France to be with him. No
chance of that!
So,
not a lot of joy or sunlight in this start to the new year. But plenty to think
about and I guess that’s as it should be.
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