A Fleeting Monument at Paris’ Grand Palais

It could just be the gray chill of January, or the inevitable post-holiday blues (note: the “most depressing day of the year” is almost upon us) but death seems to be everywhere in art at the moment.

This week saw the opening of the third chapter of “Monumenta”, an ambitious series of large scale contemporary installations commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture. After Anselm Kiefer and Richard Serra, Christian Boltanski is the first French artist to take up the challenge of occupying the 13 500 m2 of the Grand Palais (he will be fulfilling a similarly large scale commission at Park Avenue Armory from May 12).

The Grand Palais, constructed in 1900 for the Exposition Universelle, is a monument to nineteenth century industry and design – an architectural marvel of iron, steel and glass. As such it is a particularly challenging space for contemporary artists, used to working in more neutral, white cube style settings.

Richard Serra, "Promenade", photo by Lorenz Kienzle, © MCC-Mounmenta 2010

Serra’s 2008 installation, “Promenade”, took advantage of the height and the light effects of the glass roof. Boltanski’s installation, “Personnes”, doesn’t have the same physical presence as Serra’s offering did, but draws instead on the atmospheric qualities of the space. Instead of the usual spring slot, Boltanski chose the winter and, to add to the chilling nature of the work, called for the heating to be turned off.

Part flea market, part memento mori, piles of old clothes are lined up to form a grid across the cold floor. These are dwarfed by a huge mound of clothes, over which hovers a mechanical claw. The claw picks up and releases garments at regular intervals – not unlike the cuddly toy machine at the arcade, which never quite manages to keep hold of that toy.

The amount of discarded clothes and the sheer scale of the piece are reminiscent of a mass grave or the glass cases of shoes at the Auschwitz museum. This is not a coincidence – Boltanski is from a Jewish background, his work haunted by the memory of the Shoah. Like much of his work, “Personnes” explores death, memory and the chance happenings in life. Even the title, which in French can ambiguously mean “people” or “nobody”, plays on the idea of presence and absence.

If the absence is communicated through the sorry clothes, presence is felt through the soundtrack, which envelopes the installation in muffled booming sounds – the chorus of hundreds of hearts beating. The soundtrack is part of an ongoing project, “Archives du Coeur” (“Heart Archives”), and visitors – the second important presence in the work – are invited to record their own heartbeats as a donation to the artist.

Christian Boltanski, "Personnes", photo by Didier Piowy, © MCC-Monumenta 2010

Like the clothes, the heartbeats will  come to represent absence, a reminder of what was once present. Boltanski’s work often contemplates death -  but in a reflective rather than morbid way, embracing the randomness and inevitability of it. “What drives me as an artist is that I think everyone is unique, yet everyone disappears so quickly” he said in an interview with Tate Magazine.  “Personnes” is a particularly appropriate proposition for the Monumenta series, the etymology of which denotes a burial place, a place to remember.

And then there’s the death of the art itself: Boltanski’s installation will be dismantled at the end of its run, the clothes will be given back to the clothes-recyclers and the Grand Palais will be ready to welcome its next event. Only the heartbeats will remain – on a CD that is.

It will be the second high profile installation to meet its end in recent months. The end of the Turner Prize exhibition in London saw the destruction of Richard Wright’s celebrated piece. The delicate gold leaf fresco was sanded down and painted over when the Turner Prize exhibition finished on January 3. This is the fate of most of Wright’s wall paintings, which he sees as transient entities. “The fragility of the experience is the hinge for me,” he told the Guardian.

In the same interview, Wright admits that he wasn’t keen on the idea of the Turner Prize competition but was happy to have had the opportunity to engage with the public (77 000 people visited the show). Boltanski has expressed similar views. He compares “Personnes” to theater, where the participation of the public is essential. Like a performance, the piece will cease to exist when the figurative curtain comes down on February 21.

These practices distance the artistic production from the market and the hype which surrounds anything “valuable”. The focus is on engaging with the art, rather than owning it. Made for the museum not the market, the institutional sanctification of these installations whiffs a little of death too. After all aren’t museums where art goes to become immortalized, great monuments to dead art?

But it’s not all doom and gloom. There’s something quite romantic about the idea of art having a limited life-span: a sense of renewal, of art being erased to make way for something new. Rather than the insalubrious fate that awaits other large scale installations -“Storage” – Boltanski’s and Wright’s works come to a natural end and live on in the memories of those that encountered them.

For those, however, who would prefer to wallow in seasonal melancholy, here are the top 10 recent death in art experiences:

“The Sacred Made Real”, National Gallery, London – blood, sweat and tears in seventeenth century Spain.
“Personnes” as part of “Monumenta”, Grand Palais, Paris – Boltanski’s chilling installation reflects on death and memory.
“Après”, Mac/Val – Boltanski’s second episode, an aesthetic manifestation of what might happen after death.
The Turner Prize 2009, Tate Britain, London – came to a poetic end on January 3 with the destruction of the laureate’s piece.
“James Ensor”, Musée d’Orsay, Paris – James Ensor mixes real with carnivalesque and a penchant for skulls.
“Deadline”, Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris – a selection of works produced by artists at the end of their life, exploring how the awareness of death effected their creative output.
“Soulages”, Pompidou Center, Paris – retrospective of French abstract artist Pierre Soulages. Not technically about death but obsessed with black.
“Royal Tombs of Anatolia, Alaca Höyük in the Third Millennium”, Louvre – as part of “Turkey Season”, the Louvre is showing rare archeological objects from royal tombs in Alaca Höyük.
“Claire Morgan”, Galerie Karsten Greve, Paris – Morgan’s lyrical installations are centered around taxidermy birds, as delicate as captured butterflies.
“Pop Life”, Tate Modern, London – in a savage turn of the tables, I died a little bit inside after seeing this all-singing all-dancing survey of art in a material world.