Clothes-ing Time for Christian Boltanski's 'No Man's Land'

(Photos: UnBeige) Today is the last day to immerse yourself in "No Man's Land," artist Christian Boltanski's monumental installation at the Park Avenue Armory, the palace-cum-industrial shed that is fast becoming one of the most provocative cultural spaces in New York. Boltanski, who has been reinventing found materials since before it was chicly "sustainable," transformed the Armory's 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall into a moving meditation on human experience: a high art version of Love, Loss, and What I Wore. All it took were hundreds of metal biscuit tins, thousands of pieces of used clothing, and a crane. Upon entering the hall, viewers confront a vast wall of stacked biscuit tins, all patinaed to a coppery green haze and labeled with a four-digit number. The associations start coming: an ancient card catalog, a cookie factory washed out to sea, safe deposit boxes, tiny coffins. "Everything [in the work] means a lot of things," said Boltanski, during his recent public conversation with writer and critic Luc Sante in the Armory's Louis Comfort Tiffany-designed Veterans Room (itself no stranger to patina). "The biscuit tin wall belongs to the palace and the factory. It's a minimal object and it's sentimental." All those oxidized, indexed, ominous containers also provide a visual palette cleansing for what follows. Beyond the wall, the wooden floor is covered in illuminated pools of used clothing. Garments of all textures, sizes, and colors are spread out in rectangles bounded by metal posts that are strung with raw fluorescent lights. "In my work there have always been a lot of photos of people, heartbeats of people—for me the clothing are people," said Boltanski. "Imagine the clothes as a body. Then within 'No Man's Land' there are more than six thousand people." The artist harvested the clothes from somewhere in New Jersey, he said, and had only one regret. "I was little disappointed, because the clothes don't smell." Toward the end of the hall stands a 40-foot mound of clothing that Boltanski describes as a kind of funereal blob. "In the mountain, everyone is mixed," he said. "There is no identity. Everybody is dead there." Every few minutes, the mountain is bitten into by the claw of an industrial crane. Garments at the top of the pile are grabbed, hoisted upward, and then released. For the artist, it's a redemptive gesture. "When the clothes are falling down, it's very optimistic. Like souls, they are free." And the crane? "For me the crane is destiny, the figure of God," said Boltanski, who was inspired by crane games, those staple amusements of carnivals and bowling alleys. "You lose all your money, but I always loved to try."

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Clothes-ing Time for Christian Boltanski's 'No Man's Land'

Stephanie Murg

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Stephanie Murg