Grand Palais:Christian Boltanski

The Grand Palais is a huge art exposition hall, with amazing architecture. It has a glass ceiling with green steel holding all of the glass together. (Check out pictures because I really can’t explain it). I was visiting the exposition of Christian Boltanski for my art history class. It was called Personne, in French meaning No One. He is a conceptual artist and he studied his influence during Nouveau Realisme. His works bring attention to what is NOT there, or the absence of something. The exposition was piles of empty winter coats thrown on the floor of the hall. The hall was completely bear and very cold inside. The piles of coats were arranged in flat squares and lined up like a checkerboard. He had strange clanking, dripping, sewer sounds playing as you walked around the clothes. In the center, there was a enormous pile of clothes was a crane at the top. The crane would drop the clothes on the top of the pile and then pick them back up, like a carnival game. The exposition was really interesting but a little creepy. I visited weeks before we learned about him in class, so I didn’t really understand it until after. He was Jewish, growing up during WWII in France. The coats are thought to represent the missing Jews, but he doesn’t reveal much about his works. Now, there is a new exhibit in the Grand Palais and I might stop back because I want to see the building used in a different context.