Life and death in No Man's Land

Filling the vast Wade Thompson Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armoury in New York, No Man's Land is the latest work by the French artist Christian Boltanski.

The exposition is Mr Boltanski's most ambitious project in the United States to date and seeks to explore aspects of individuality, anonymity, life and death - in a landscape that incorporates 3,000 stacked cookie tins, 30 tons of discarded clothing, a 60-foot crane and the sound of human heartbeats.

At first sight, the monumental artwork seems to suggest nothing so much as a crane claw. In fact the exposition, which runs through June 13, is centred on a five-story crane and a 25-foot-high mound of salvaged clothing rising from the floor of the Armoury's vast drill hall. Every few minutes, in an act reminiscent of the arbitrariness of death and survival, the crane's giant claw plucks a random assortment of shirts, pants and dresses from the mound which are then released haphazardly.

Visitors watch the action, set to a ceaseless, reverberating soundtrack of thousands of human heartbeats, as they stand in the midst of dozens of plots of discarded jackets that extend in all directions, perhaps suggestive of refugee or death camps. Behind the visitors, a 66-foot-long, 12-foot-high wall made from 3,000 stacked cookie tins cut off views of the exit.

No Man's Land aims to inspire questions like "Why did my mother die?" and "Why am I still here?" Its large-scale exercise in futility ultimately points to a single fact, Mr Boltanski suggested during a tour of the drill hall. "You can hold onto the clothes, and even the heartbeats of many, many people. But you can't keep anybody."

At 65, Mr Boltanski has spent a career producing vivid reminders of life's inevitable passing. His engagement with both death and survival has drawn glowing comparisons to the poetry of John Keats. It has also been denounced - particularly when his fascination with the Holocaust is most evident - as pornographic and exploitive.

"What makes me very happy in my life is that I have enough money until I die," he says. "I don't need money, and I don't need glory. And for this reason I'm really free."

Asked what he intended to do with this freedom, Mr Boltanski said, "I want to try to understand".