Entering the Park Avenue Armory drill hall in which Christian Boltanski’s latest installation No Man’s Land resides, the witness becomes aware of voice and the lack thereof. I only assumed that the clothing strewn across the wooden flooring, organized into methodical layerings and barrack-like groupings, were leftovers—remnants of people long gone and forgotten. The massive exhibition with its massive piles of donated, used clothing suggests an idea of commercial deadness, of an intrinsically cultural deadening spanning thousands, if not millions, of represented bodies. The shear number of accumulated articles of clothing indicates that mass is dead. That which lives is the opposite of mass: the unique person who walks into the exhibit and leaves with an expression and thought. You become the only life. And the haunting echoes of accumulated heartbeats serve as a piercing reminder.
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