And the award for coolest friend in high places goes to...

...well, the answer is probably obvious: Junette. Since I really have only one friend in a high place, haha. But even if I had others, it would still be Junette, because she is awesome.

Junette's gallery, which has branches in NYC and Paris, represents Christian Boltanski, who was selected to be this year's "monumenta" installation in the Grand Palais. More info is available here, or the short version is that there's this really awesome building in Paris (called the Grand Palais, obviously), that serves as a temporary exhibition space. Sometimes it's more traditional art, sometimes it's performances. The last time I was there was in summer 2008 when a Canadian dance troupe was performing and I was pulled up on stage to freak dance with the group (haha). Needless to say, my associations with this building tend to be that noteworthy things happen here! Anyway, it's a huge open space, kind of like a ginormous greenhouse. The concept of this "monumenta" program is therefore that a prominent contemporary artist can do anything with the space. Last year's monumenta artist was Richard Serra, which must have been awesome too.

Anyway, because Junette's gallery represents Boltanski, she was able to snag 4 passes to the opening of the show for me. Yes!!!

So I invited Niamh, Ben, and Amanda to tag along. Fortunately I watched a brief interview with the artist on the above site (the interview is in French) and I noted the following exchange:

Interviewer: What do you want visitors to notice when they enter the building?
Boltanski: I want them to notice that it's cold. I asked that the heat not be turned on.

Ohhhhh. Needless to say I was glad to be warned, since the building is already pretty drafty. We therefore bundled up in our long underwear and extra socks, particularly since Paris is in a cold snap and it was in like the teens that night.

The show is called "Personnes," which is double-entendre in French that can both mean "people" and "no one." So it was apparently a meditation on identity and the fleeting nature of life, etc. This title did in fact make more sense to us when we saw just what the exhibit was. And yeah, we sure knew right away how French this exhibit would be...meditations on the emptiness of the human condition? Who invented that if not the French? HAHAHAHA. The only thing that could have made it this more French would have been to have a cafe with Sartre and de Beauvoir sitting there for hours whining about everything and nothing.

Anyway, so you walk into the exhibit and first you see a row of numbered boxes that kind of look like safety depost boxes in a bank. But you have no idea what's inside or what they're supposed to be. Then you get around the boxes and THIS is what you see:


It's a little hard to explain, but what you see there is a HUGE pile of clothes. Those are people standing next to it, just to give an idea of scale. Then there's this big claw that comes down and grabs a bunch of clothes and goes straight up, like in this pic:


Then when the claw reaches the top, it drops the clothes, which land back on the pile. Then the claw comes back down and grabs more and the process repeats over and over. Here are two more shots of this thing from other angles:


We agreed that it reminded us in a twisted way of those arcade things where you control the claw and are always trying to get a cool prize but it never works and either you end up with nothing or with something crappy. Considering how repetitive it is, it's kind of surprising how captivating it is, haha. But we stood there for a really long time, more or less entranced by the motion of the claw going up and down. It shifts slightly to take clothes from different places on the top, I guess to maintain the balance of the pyramid. So yeah, there's clearly some advanced engineering going on here, to keep it in the right form.

We debated whether the pyramid was totally full of clothes or whether there was something underneath covered in clothes, but we figured it was probably all clothes, haha.

Anyway, the rest of the space was filled by these square units of old clothes:


It was hard to get a decent picture because of the lights, but the squares were maybe 10 feet by 10 feet, and it was mostly old jackets laying open. We all agreed that it reminded of us a Holocaust memorial, particularly given that the clothes appeared to date from around the 40s anyway. It also kind of reminded me of the AIDS quilt, for no other reason than the geometry of it. I remember seeing portions of the AIDS quilt back in the day, how it travels in square segments. This is kind of the same idea. And as you can see, you can walk among the segments. That was a specific goal of the installation, that visitors are inside the work. Boltanski didn't want people passively standing in front of it, he wanted us in it.

Plus the use of clothes seemed really fitting. After all, these clothes had seen a lot of life, had gone many places. But now they were out of circulation, fixed in a specific spot. So you could sort of understand the play on words of the title of the exhibit, since they were both representative of the people who wore them and also generic to the point of not really meaning anything anymore.

Behind the big mound of clothes there is a staircase that served as a viewing platform, which you can sort of see in this pic:


So here are two more pics of the show, taken from this back staircase:



Another cool part of the show is that he wants it to be completely dismantled afterwards, which I guess won't be too hard since the clothes can go right back into circulation. So they go back to the "everyone" part of the title, after representing the "no one" in the show, I suppose.

Anyway, to close, I thought I'd quote the artist directly, from the program guide (my translation), since you can't get any more French than this:

"This installation is conceived to produce a powerful feeling of oppression. It's about having a hard experience and I'm convinced that visitors will feel a sens of relief when they leave."

I must say, we were a bit relieved to leave, mostly due to the cold. We couldn't feel our toes, and my fingernails were purple for at least an hour or two afterward. I'm not kidding! On the other hand, I suppose it's a sign of how captivating the show was that we put up with the cold for so long!!!