My heart will beat after I'm dead.

One of my recent out-and-aboutings was going to see Christian Boltanski's Monumenta 2010 exhibit at the Grand Palais. He's one of France's most famous contemporary artists, and with the sheer size of "Personnes," the installation he created for Monumenta, I can understand why. The Grand Palais is a gigantic nave lined with rod iron and floored with concrete. Even without the exhibit, it would have been a haunting space. But the installation consists of hundreds of rectangles laid out on the floor, filled with empty coats and sweaters. Directly opposite the entrance, there is a giant pyramid of clothing, several stories high, with a crane claw that keeps dipping in, lifting, and dropping the clothes in a brief flutter back to the top of the pile. It's a never-ending process of lifting and dropping. Hold and flutter.

And the space is filled with sound. The sound of heartbeats. Each rectangle has a set of localized speakers, blaring two different heartbeats. Together, the grand, grey space of the Palais is filled with the muffled, beating, white noise of hearts, certainly not in unison. Boltanski has said that the exhibit is meant to toe the line between being and not-being, and he has certainly succeeded. There is so much life and so much emptiness all in one massive space.

But perhaps my favorite bit of the installation is the "Archives de coeur," a space where you take a number, and wait for a doctor to call you back to a room so that you can have your heartbeat recorded. The heartbeats will be stored away and will become part of an exhibit (designed for long-term (and I mean long-term)) display, where the 15,000 heartbeats will beat on Teshima Island in Japan at the Naoshima Fukutake Art Museum Foundation, with the theory that the hearts will continue beating long after their owners have died. It's strange to think that in 80 years, some little kid in Japan will be able listen to my heartbeat (which, thanks to a small murmur, was irregular enough to make the woman recording it look at me with shock and a bit of concern). "C'est bizarre," I told her. "Non, special," she replied.

I happened to forget my camera that day, but here are some official photos.