STATEMENT:No Μan Ever Steps Ιn Τhe Same River Twice II

The above phrase of Heraclitus was the first thing that came to my mind when a week ago seeing again Chen Zhen’s work “The Round Table” (1995), which is in the Permanent Collection of Centre George Pompidou Center, has inherent affinities with that of Jannis Kounellis.  So as concerns and rethinks arise, through a personal research, I discovered a number of artworks of the international art scene, having inherent affinities, without necessarily the artists to want to convey the same message. Christian Boltanski’s ‘’Personnes’’ (2010), exudes the strong atmosphere of the death camp, and belongs to the series of works “Storage memory” started in the mid 1980’s. The work comprises a mountain of clothing, weighing nearly 10-tonnes, into which the automated hydraulic claw of a 15-metre crane periodically descends, like some mysterious hand of God, to grab a bundle of garments at random, lifting them high before dropping them back to the massive pile. Pictorially has a lot to do with “Untitled (Metamorphosis)” (1976) by Michelangelo Pistoletto in which a pile of rags and used clothes is divided in half by a double mirror, the clothes on one side are multi-colored while, on the other, they are completely white.  While we can perfectly see that we are dealing with two different halves, the mirror doubles every half to complete it, while viewers are involved in a relationship with the work, and their ability to “see” beyond the appearance,  the concern. Boltanski throughout his work deals with existential questions: Why are we here? How will we be remembered? Who or what controls our destinies? Perhaps most insistently, he has been concerned with the extent to which memory shapes our sense of humanity – our collective as well as individual histories. For Boltanski, memory is porous, fragile and, at times, faithless, while retaining its power to preserve our darkest narratives and traumas, perpetuating our grimmest realities and the ongoing daily evidence of our violence and inhumanity. Pistolleto, on the other hand, focuses on the invisible, the imaginary. That which is behind and beyond the mirror. At the heart of his work is universality and the human beings  as a whole.