Artwork: Christian Boltanski, Monument: The Children of Dijon, Paris, Salpetriere Chapel (1986)
One of the first Art Stories I wrote was inspired by Christian Boltanski’s installation series Lessons in Darkness/Leçons de Ténèbres. Recently I wrote a short piece on Boltanski looking more at his art from the point of view of the ideas, themes, and life experiences that shaped his work, and perhaps gives another dimension to the story I wrote about the boy who lived under the floor during WWII.
The Disappearing Artist
Christian Boltanski liked to describe himself as a preacher, a clown and a crook. He was a trickster playing and blurring the lines between fact and fiction, good and bad, art and life, reality and representation. And what he wanted most with his art was that it asked questions with no easy answers, or none at all.
Boltanski was born around Liberation day in Paris. His father was Jewish and his mother was Catholic. During WWII, Boltanski’s parents legally divorced (and remarried after the war), while his father hid under the floorboards of their apartment to evade capture by the Nazis. Growing up, the influence of Boltanski’s parents and this period of history was profound, such that he left school at eleven to paint at home, and didn’t go outside of his home by himself until he was eighteen. His father especially wanted him not to speak about being Jewish, associating his own Jewishness as negative, especially in regards to anti-Semitism. Boltanski believed his childhood was strange, but that most people’s childhoods are strange. Yet he revisited the recent past of WWII and his childhood continuously in his art, even as he said as an artist, when creating the work, he was becoming invisible, that he was disappearing, that the act of creating in some way negated the one creating it and their biography.
Boltanski’s art is replete with contradictions. He was obsessed with death, especially the idea of his own disappearance, but with his installations he focused on the lives of individuals who’d passed away, bringing them to our attention, often through photographs. Despite their absence, he gave them a presence. They might be strangers, but he wanted their lives to be remembered for their humanity, their uniqueness. In this respect Boltanski was interested in what he termed “little memory”, which was emotional memory and everyday knowledge, as opposed to memory with a capital “M” that belonged in history books. Boltanski said of this idea: “This little memory, which for me is what makes us unique, is extremely fragile, and it disappears with death. The loss of identity, this equalisation in forgetting, are very difficult to accept.” Death to Boltanski was inherently strange—to be an enlivened individual one moment and then gone. Which prompts the question: What enlivens the person; what gives them life?
While using photographs of individuals in his work to facilitate remembrance, Boltanski also understood how photography could be manipulated to confuse what it truly represented. In the case of his work Les Enfants de Dijon (Children of Dijon), there is no way to tell if the child was specifically Jewish or German. While his work might allude to the Holocaust, Boltanski never directly referenced it in his work. The ambiguity was also deliberate, inviting questions and stories to be created by the viewer, keeping interpretation open and ongoing. Boltanski wanted to reclaim these children now dead from simply being a number. He lit each photograph of a child’s face with light bulbs like votive candles in a shrine, emphasising that each was an individual life, a light, a spark of humanity. It is elegiac, a kind of memorial, but an affirmation too, of life itself. While Boltanski was not religious, he believed the reference to creating these “monuments” highlighted the holiness of each person, their soulfulness.
Mostly Boltanski utilised simple, fragile materials he referred to as “stupid”. Materials that were close to people’s every day lives, such as candles, biscuit tins, photographs, light bulbs and magazines. With his installations of piles of clothes these ordinary “stupid” items had once belonged to someone; had intimate contact and held the memories of those people. On occasion, Boltanski allowed the viewers to purchase the clothes through donation, and the cycle of life was reaffirmed, the clothes changing hands, bodies and memories. There is the possible interpretation of the piles referring to the clothes and items confiscated from the Jews in WWII by the Nazis and left discarded in massive piles. Yet Boltanski prefered the idea that depending on the place these installations are shown and the people viewing them, the meaning will change.
Boltanski believed people could be touched and have an intuitive and emotive response to his work. He never wanted to create art for museums, seeing such places as repositories of relics and not close to people’s lives. Instead he saw his work at the edge of art and life: relatable to people, even as it might be mysterious, the meaning elusive and open to questions.
A large part of Boltanski’s work will disappear given the fragile “stupid” materials used, and he saw this impermanence as fitting, closer to real life. It also seems to suit an artist always on the verge of disappearing.