Artist Christian Boltanski loves to shop at Paris flea markets. “I go,” he says, “I see a jacket that I like and I say, 'Take me, I’m yours!' I bring the jacket a whole new life, because love always gives life.”
Boltanski is discussing the impulses behind "Personnes," his new installation at the Grand Palais. "Personnes," which means either “people” or “nobodies,” is this year’s offering from Paris’s annual Monumenta exhibition. Every year, Monumenta gives a single artist access to all 145,000 square feet of the nave at the Grand Palais. Boltanski’s amazing piece has utterly transformed the space—and visitors to it become part of the spectacle.
Entering the vast hall, you first confront a monster wall. It’s made out of rusted biscuit tins, the kind used to hold family photographs or children’s treasures. For Boltanski, these tins have become a signature object—a symbol of our desire to remember. Walking around the wall, you enter a dreamlike vision. The huge floor holds a colossal field of empty clothes, spread flat into 69 giant squares. At the corners of each square are audio speakers on pillars, and each square booms out a real (recorded) heartbeat, echoing through the chilly air, amplified by the concrete floor. The show’s center is a towering mountain of secondhand clothing. Periodically the scarlet claw of a crane descends, wrests a bunch of clothes from this pile, then lifts those items to the top of the grand glass ceiling.
There they are released, to float slowly down through the air and back to the heap. The squeal and whine of the crane blends with the synchronized heartbeats until their strange music (as well as the cold) envelops you. Seen over and over, the moment of random free fall is stunning—simple clothing suddenly seems like souls, falling bodies or spirits.
This is not conceptual art, where you have to “get the idea." It is an absorbing and strangely delicate experience. Someone stands beside you, listening intently to the same heartbeat, mesmerized just like you by the acres of clothes whose sleeves seem to gesture. The silent sense of sharing is powerful.
Boltanski says he wants all his art to reach everyone. “I place objects in relation to the subject—you. I also try to work with things that mean everyone knows what I’m doing," he explains. "Good art is like a machine where everything is useful. I try to be useful, not to make 'beautiful things.'”
At once truly spectacular and poetically simple, "Personnes" evokes surprising depths of feeling—thoughts about one’s family or about Haiti, the Holocaust, 9/11. Boltanski, whose own family was scarred by the occupation of France, says he strives to commemorate individual identities. “Because the big memory is already there in books. It’s the small memory that interests me: knowing the best place to get cake or knowing a certain joke. Those kinds of memory are the most easily lost. Each person is so important but, also, so fragile.”
To emphasize his point, all the elements of "Personnes" will be recycled when it concludes. The piece will be staged again this May in New York. But, says the artist, “we are sending nothing. It’s like a piece of music that must be reorchestrated.”
“For me,” he says, “exhibitions should function like musical scores. Tell your stories with light and sensations—then let the visitor finish them.”
"Personnes" is on view at the Grand Palais through February 21. Mon and Wed, 10 a.m.–7 p.m.; Thurs–Sun, 10 a.m.–10 p.m. Closed Tues. To answer questions, multilingual specialists are stationed throughout the space.
Ed. note: You can download a free Grand Palais app for your iPhone that tells you all about the landmark in either English or French. Interviewees include designer Karl Lagerfeld and artist Daniel Buren.
Après Contemporary Art Museum of Val-de-Marne In tandem with Monumenta, Boltanski created this version of “afterlife" at the Contemporary Art Museum of Val-de-Marne. It is accessible by metro and bus or RER; the Grand Palais also provides a shuttle service.
The Inhabitants of the Hôtel Saint-Aignan in 1939 Museum of Judaic Art and History This fascinating museum (which includes artifacts of the Dreyfus affair as well as art by Chagall and Soutine) asked Boltanski to create its sole reference to the Holocaust. His permanent installation is in a small courtyard.
About the Artist
The son of a doctor and a novelist, Boltanski had a very strange childhood. During the Occupation, before his birth in 1944, his Jewish parents staged a quarrel, then divorced. Unbeknownst to his elder brothers—who thought their father had deserted the family—the doctor was living in a closet of their Paris apartment. Once the war ended, his parents remarried. But until Boltanski was 18, he says, his family was “ruled by a sense of instability”; every member slept in the same room (“for safety”). His mother, who had survived polio, used her sons as “canes” to walk—thus Boltanski was rarely at school. Instead he taught himself to paint and ran a small gallery. His real subject, installations that seek to rescue lost identities, emerged during the 1980s. Since then he has received many global awards and will represent France at the 2011 Venice Biennale. He is married to the French artist Annette Messager.
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“Love Gives Life”: Christian Boltanski at the Grand Palais
by Lamar C
Tuesday, February 09, 2010 at 11:00 AM
By Cynthia Rose
© Didier Plowy
Artist Christian Boltanski loves to shop at Paris flea markets. “I go,” he says, “I see a jacket that I like and I say, 'Take me, I’m yours!' I bring the jacket a whole new life, because love always gives life.”
Boltanski is discussing the impulses behind "Personnes," his new installation at the Grand Palais. "Personnes," which means either “people” or “nobodies,” is this year’s offering from Paris’s annual Monumenta exhibition. Every year, Monumenta gives a single artist access to all 145,000 square feet of the nave at the Grand Palais. Boltanski’s amazing piece has utterly transformed the space—and visitors to it become part of the spectacle.
Entering the vast hall, you first confront a monster wall. It’s made out of rusted biscuit tins, the kind used to hold family photographs or children’s treasures. For Boltanski, these tins have become a signature object—a symbol of our desire to remember. Walking around the wall, you enter a dreamlike vision. The huge floor holds a colossal field of empty clothes, spread flat into 69 giant squares. At the corners of each square are audio speakers on pillars, and each square booms out a real (recorded) heartbeat, echoing through the chilly air, amplified by the concrete floor. The show’s center is a towering mountain of secondhand clothing. Periodically the scarlet claw of a crane descends, wrests a bunch of clothes from this pile, then lifts those items to the top of the grand glass ceiling.
There they are released, to float slowly down through the air and back to the heap. The squeal and whine of the crane blends with the synchronized heartbeats until their strange music (as well as the cold) envelops you. Seen over and over, the moment of random free fall is stunning—simple clothing suddenly seems like souls, falling bodies or spirits.
© Didier Plowy
This is not conceptual art, where you have to “get the idea." It is an absorbing and strangely delicate experience. Someone stands beside you, listening intently to the same heartbeat, mesmerized just like you by the acres of clothes whose sleeves seem to gesture. The silent sense of sharing is powerful.
Boltanski says he wants all his art to reach everyone. “I place objects in relation to the subject—you. I also try to work with things that mean everyone knows what I’m doing," he explains. "Good art is like a machine where everything is useful. I try to be useful, not to make 'beautiful things.'”
At once truly spectacular and poetically simple, "Personnes" evokes surprising depths of feeling—thoughts about one’s family or about Haiti, the Holocaust, 9/11. Boltanski, whose own family was scarred by the occupation of France, says he strives to commemorate individual identities. “Because the big memory is already there in books. It’s the small memory that interests me: knowing the best place to get cake or knowing a certain joke. Those kinds of memory are the most easily lost. Each person is so important but, also, so fragile.”
To emphasize his point, all the elements of "Personnes" will be recycled when it concludes. The piece will be staged again this May in New York. But, says the artist, “we are sending nothing. It’s like a piece of music that must be reorchestrated.”
“For me,” he says, “exhibitions should function like musical scores. Tell your stories with light and sensations—then let the visitor finish them.”
"Personnes" is on view at the Grand Palais through February 21. Mon and Wed, 10 a.m.–7 p.m.; Thurs–Sun, 10 a.m.–10 p.m. Closed Tues. To answer questions, multilingual specialists are stationed throughout the space.
Ed. note: You can download a free Grand Palais app for your iPhone that tells you all about the landmark in either English or French. Interviewees include designer Karl Lagerfeld and artist Daniel Buren.
© Didier Plowy
Other Boltanski Works to See
Après
Contemporary Art Museum of Val-de-Marne
In tandem with Monumenta, Boltanski created this version of “afterlife" at the Contemporary Art Museum of Val-de-Marne. It is accessible by metro and bus or RER; the Grand Palais also provides a shuttle service.
The Inhabitants of the Hôtel Saint-Aignan in 1939
Museum of Judaic Art and History
This fascinating museum (which includes artifacts of the Dreyfus affair as well as art by Chagall and Soutine) asked Boltanski to create its sole reference to the Holocaust. His permanent installation is in a small courtyard.
About the Artist
The son of a doctor and a novelist, Boltanski had a very strange childhood. During the Occupation, before his birth in 1944, his Jewish parents staged a quarrel, then divorced. Unbeknownst to his elder brothers—who thought their father had deserted the family—the doctor was living in a closet of their Paris apartment. Once the war ended, his parents remarried. But until Boltanski was 18, he says, his family was “ruled by a sense of instability”; every member slept in the same room (“for safety”). His mother, who had survived polio, used her sons as “canes” to walk—thus Boltanski was rarely at school. Instead he taught himself to paint and ran a small gallery. His real subject, installations that seek to rescue lost identities, emerged during the 1980s. Since then he has received many global awards and will represent France at the 2011 Venice Biennale. He is married to the French artist Annette Messager.
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