Spotlight on: Christian Boltanski

‘I suppose part of the work is also about the simple fascination of seeing somebody who is handsome and imagining his ashes’

-          Christian Boltanski regarding his work, The Reserve of Dead Swiss, 1990[1]

Known for work accumulating mass amounts of abandoned clothes, old photographs and other personal detritus, French artist Christian Boltanski’s work conversed with death and drew on themes of chance, loss and memory. The artist passed in July this year at the age of 76 after a career spanning six decades, survived by his wife, artist Annette Messager, and two brothers. His work received international acclaim and was included twice at Documenta in 1972 and 1977, and six times at the Venice Biennale as recently as 2015, alongside multiple solo shows and retrospectives at major institutions.[2]

Figure 1

Boltanski’s work gathering anonymous mementos with their suggestion of a memorial to many lost lives are often linked to the Holocaust. In his 2010 installation, Personnes (a French work which can mean both nobody and someone), the artist amassed abandoned clothing row upon row in the large hall of the Grand Palais in Paris. Although never explicit, Boltanski’s artworks draw on the power of lifeless objects to carry the spirit of absent subjects and evoke collective traumas. The artist himself states that his works recall the horrors that unfurled parallel to his own life and how they remain as ghosts in one’s subconscious. The feelings such accumulations of objects evoke are often described as being heavy and unformed, both personal and anonymous. These works sit in the heart and open space for contemplation.

The artist himself was born close to this dark part of history in Paris in 1944, the son of a Jewish doctor from Ukraine and a French Catholic mother, only weeks after the city was liberated from Nazi occupation – the inspiration for his middle name, Liberté. During the German occupation of France, Boltanski’s father spent a year and a half hiding in the space under the floorboards of his home to avoid capture and transportation to the death camps, whilst his mother pretended to be divorced. The artist has said that the wartime and Holocaust stories of his parents and their friends told were formative for him and the shadow of these histories can be felt in the dimly lit arrangements of his work.[3]

Figure 2

Boltanski’s artmaking began after leaving school at age twelve in the form of small plasticine sculptures and large figurative paintings exploring macabre historical narratives. He eventually moved into photography and in 1968 had his first solo exhibition, La vie impossible de Christian Boltanski (The Impossible Life of Christian Boltanski).[4] Through the 1970s in shows such as this one Boltanski exhibited mementos of his own existence: letters, scraps, hair and photographs. Then, in later work he began to commemorate the lives of others. Bernard Blistène, who curated the artists retrospective Life in the Making at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 2020, says of the exhibition that it tells the story of ‘how you (Boltanski) started as an archaeologist of your own story, and then became a creator of myths.’[5]

Indeed, Boltanski tells the story of the past, amassing and organising the artefacts and traces of the dead. In 1990 Boltanski clipped electric lamps to the enlarged photographs of the faces taken from a regional Swiss newspaper’s obituaries and arranged them on simple wooden shelves for his work The Reserve of Swiss Dead. The categorical arrangement hints at the possibility of a limitless archive and this version sits among many other similar works in the artists oeuvre.

Figure 3

Although he was often seen as being preoccupied with death, Boltanski saw optimism and even humour in some of his works. This black humour and bold frankness towards mortality is epitomised by one of the final projects of Boltanski’s life, La Vie de CB. Commissioned in 2009 by collector and director of the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) David Walsh, the work entailed a contract, giving Walsh the right to film the artist for 24 hours a day for the rest of his life via a live video feed installed in his studio in Paris. The wager balanced on a monthly payment breakdown where it would only be after living for eight more years that the artist would profit – when Boltanski died he had a four-year surplus on Walsh.[6]

Figure 4

From 2008 onwards Boltanski commenced a long-term project, Les Archives du Cœur, in which he attempted to make a kind of spiritual sound map through recording the heartbeats of people all across the world. As a part of this project Boltanski eventually made his Animitas, an installation of tiny bronze bells strung from bronze sticks planted in the ground. The first realisation of the work in 2014 was located in the Atacama Desert and saw 800 bells arranged to dangle in the position of the stars on the night of the artist’s birth. Named for the roadside shrines to the dead found in Chile, the softly tinkling bells dancing in the dry and empty landscape make what the artist has called the “music of lost souls.”[7]

From May of this year an iteration of the Animitas has filled the Noguchi Museum’s garden as part of a broader exhibition of the artist’s work throughout Japan. Of the 180 bells the Noguchi Museum states, ‘Boltanski continues to extend the intimate, borderless, ephemeral network of loss and memory that constitutes his life’s work.’[8]

Written and researched by Amy Thomson de Zylva BA (Hons)

 Learn More

To continue exploring the monumental works of Christian Boltanski:

• Watch this virtual walkthrough of the artists retrospective, Après, and this interview from the same time.

• Read his recent 2020 interview with Alexis Dahan for the Brooklyn Rail, courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, here.

• Read this 1988 review of the artist form the archives of the New York Times.

Image Captions

Figure 1 Personnes 2010, courtesy of Flickr Commons.

Figure 2 Christian Boltanski photographed in his studio by Bracha L. Ettinger in 1990, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 3 The Reserve of Dead Swiss 1990, courtesy of WikiArt.

Figure 4 Animatas 2019, courtesy of Flickr Commons.

Footnotes

1. The Guardian. “Christian Boltanski Obituary,” July 16, 2021.

2. Marian Goodman. “Christian Boltanski - Marian Goodman Gallery.” Accessed July 2021.

3. Genzlinger, Neil. “Christian Boltanski, Whose Art Installations Dazzled, Dies at 76.” The New York Times, July 15, 2021, sec. Arts.

4. The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation. “The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation.” Accessed July 2021.

5. Dahan, Alexis. “CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI with Alexis Dahan,” The Brooklyn Rail, 10.

6. The Guardian. “Christian Boltanski Obituary.”

7. Marian Goodman. “Christian Boltanski - Animitas | The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum.” Accessed July 2021.

8. “Christian Boltanski, Animitas - The Noguchi Museum.” Accessed July 2021.