A work which plays with the codes of the monumental always runs the risk of seeming too authoritarian, too ambitious, even too political. In a context where artists are no longer expected to commemorate the powers that be, but in which, to the contrary, we expect them to play a subversive role, it seems difficult to work in the realm of the monumental. Several artists have been able to get around the problem by being, for example, massive and minimal (Richard Serra and Tilted Arc,1981), conceptual (Jochen Gerz and Monument Against Racism,1993) or even kitsch (Jeff Koons and Puppy, in 1992). For Christian Boltanski, one way around the booby traps in the monumental was that of introducing garments into his work, which he has done since 1988. Used garments hung up in great quantities, or ranged in piles or on shelves, become a material of unprecedented critical and emotional weight. 

Christian Boltanski. Réserve – Canada, 1988. Exhibition at the Musée de Grenoble, 19 Jan.- 11 Mar. 1991. All rights reserved.

The implicit reference causes one to quake. One immediately thinks of the piled clothing of deported Jews, mountains of mute rubbish screaming with horror. Christian Boltanski shifts the reference and calls us to think about our own relationship to traces, to vestiges. Each garment is a trace of remembrance, the absence of a body rendered manifest: on a larger scale, it is a vacuous paradox confronting us, a mass grave empty of persons. The monument loses all grandiloquent or apologetical function: it becomes – by this sole use of the fleeting, dusty, even odorous material - a space for intimacy and tears.