o
mensch! christian boltanski, jean kalman, franck krawczyk: by ricardo bloch
French
artist Christian Boltanski has the uncanny ability to transform any object into
a relic, redolent of the past, and imprinted with the aura of the anonymous person
who once owned it. Viewers are forced to confront the mortality of the individual,
and the tenuous immortality of the soul. Whether he uses blown-up portraits, extracted
from vernacular sources -- transformed by scale and cropped into poster children
for loss -- or whether he displays collections of names or abandoned objects,
Boltanski fills us with sadness for time's ineluctable arrow, for the inevitability
of death, and even the futility of life. It would be fair to say that the French
artist's work most often leaves the viewer with a heavy heart, no small feat.
In
his recent environmental installation, O Mensch! Boltanski has collaborated with
lighting designer, Jean Kalman, and composer, Franck Krawczyk, to create a theater
of sound and light to be visited at dusk, entre chien et loup, that time
of day when we can make out objects but cannot fully distinguish them. Their spectacle
was a site-specific creation at Point P, a long barge-like anonymous concrete
structure by the canal Saint-Martin. Point P was built in the 1930s, and originally
intended as a kindergarten and playground for the children of the surrounding10th
arrondissement. It now lies like a beached bunker without a past between
the canal and the street.
Upon
entering, one finds oneself walking down a dimly lit, foggy, hallway, at the end
of which a brilliant klieg light blinds us while also transforming other viewers
(perhaps your friends or family) into shades, ghost-like beings. It is as if we
were suddenly on a journey down a long birth canal to the underworld, or to its
opposite, an afterworld mythologized as a blinding light at the end of a tunnel.
Feeling one's way by holding on to the walls, one feels as if one were entering
a Halloween haunted house, or perhaps an underground archeological expedition,
or undertaking a journey over a foggy mountain pass. And it is this ambiguous
and evocative resonance which makes it hard to leave O Mensch!, for one has begun
to feel a kind of comfort in its cold and diaphanous womb-like environment.
The
spaces we traverse are populated by objects, bathed in unearthly shadows or diffused
light, enveloped in silence or sound, and intermittently inhabited by various
performers. Both observers and extras in a theatrical loop, we traverse at our
own speed, as if gliding on a moving carpet. In one room a performer dressed like
a detainee of some generic gulag plays a miniature hurdy-gurdy, in another,
a hunched over accordionist (Franck Krawczyk himself) plucks delicate variations
on Mahler's 3rd Symphony while cradling his instrument as if it were a newborn.
Then, unexpectedly the sound of children singing (Friere Jacques in Latin)
lures us to the penumbra of an adjacent room. Eventually we break out of the darkness
and venture out to the damp night onto a long terrace enlivened by flapping white
sheets and occasional bursts of electric music. At the far end of the terrace
we descend, at our own risk, down a dark spiral staircase leading to a cast iron
gate giving onto the living street, and on which we can read Jardin d'enfants.
All our senses
are assailed throughout. We walk in dim light among empty benches and abandoned
winter coats, chilled by the blowing of a wind machine while a fake snow machine
fills the air with fog, minute bits of confetti and its own particular smell.
Sounds of a muted accordion lull us, and then we are startled by the sudden screeching
of a loud foghorn. Total darkness turns to dimness; or we are blinded by bright
lamps.
Though
O Mensch! is immensely evocative, there is also something stale about its re-assemblage
of cliches of the gothic/apocalyptic imagination. The dark corridors and locked
doors with their room numbers painted over; the brilliant beams of prison searchlights;
the winter coats abandoned as if after a razzia; the hunched woman dressed
in woolen hat and coat meandering as if lost in an abandoned ghetto; the metallic
music oozing out of a doorway. It is as if we had entered a dark Mittel-Europa
of the imagination: a foggy alloy of Kafka and the holocaust; redolent of a nostalgia
for an end of time, as if we were walking through a dusky neon-less East Berlin
serenaded by a willowy accordion. We cannot but think of images from Bela Tarr's
Satantango, Tarkovsky's Stalker, and Carol Reed's Vienna, of Pina Bausch's settings
and Meredith Monk emigrants.
Is it pathos or is it sense-surround bathos? Does it matter in the end? After
all, O Mensch! -- a title as sad as a sigh of resignation -- is a theatrical installation
as melancholy as a late Beethoven quartet, a place where loss meets you at every
turn and seeps into your bones like a good winter chill.
Ricardo
Bloch is a Paris-based artist and writer. His e-mail: blochstar@yahoo.com.
O Mensch! was created as part of the Paris 2003 Festival d'Automne.
