Clothes-ing Time for Christian Boltanskis No Mans Land
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(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.
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