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Christian Boltanski
Conceptual Framework: Artist
Christian Boltanski (born 1944) is a French photographer, sculptor and installation
artist. He is known for a body of work that may be considered a disturbing
archive of our social, cultural, ethnic, and personal histories. His death-obsessed
creations have earned him an international reputation. He has spent his
artistic life working with the most ephemeral of materials -- newspaper
clippings, photographs, found snapshots, clothing, candles, light bulbs,
old biscuit tins. Christian Boltanski's work over the past four decades
has focused in different ways on the notion of individual identity, on the
ways in which we strive to create and maintain it, and the degree to which
it is lost in the midst of collective experience. Archiving, and our obsession
with recording and classifying our own lives and those of others, is another
recurrent theme. Boltanksi's installation works have involved the archiving
of thousands of photographs, rooms-full of clothes and tons of lost property.
With no formal art training, Boltanski began painting as a teenager and
has since gained an enormous international reputation as an installation
artist exhibiting in prestigious galleries across the globe.
Conceptual Framework: World
Christian Boltanski was born in France in 1944 around the time of the liberation
of France from Hitler’s occupation. He has a Catholic Corsican mother
and French Jewish father, although his Jewish ancestry was not spoken about
in his childhood. His childhood was strange and difficult. He did not attend
school after the age of eleven and did not go onto the street until he was
eighteen. His was an introverted, protected life apart from the outside
world. His father spent two years under the floorboards during the German
occupation because he was Jewish. The strangeness of his early life affected
the artist’s perception of the world.
Conceptual Framework: Artwork
Monument: Children of Dijon (1986) is a photographic installation
with distorted enlargements of photographs of children displayed in an arrangement
covering the walls of a Medieval stone chapel in Paris. Individual spotlights
light each photograph with electrical cords draped in a haphazard arrangement
over the images of the children. The use of altar-like compositions and
the dramatic use of lighting to create a halo around each photo adds to
the spiritual dimension of the work and creates a calm, almost contemplative
mood of mystery in this installation. However the suggestions of death and
suffering create the paradox of the beauty of the work and the stark enigma
of its meaning.
Artmaking Practice: Ideas
The recurring theme in Boltanski’s work is the transitory nature of
human existence and the enigma of life and death. Monument: Children
of Dijon is based on a class photograph from his own childhood. The
artist has written that the work is about childhood and how these children
who were once so important to him are dead to him as adults. He mourns the
death of his own childhood. On another level, this work also make a quiet,
yet disturbing comment on the genocide of Jewish children by the Nazis in
WW II. These faded, almost anonymous photographs of children from a past
age set out, in a church, in altar-like settings suggest a monument. He
suggests the sacred nature of each individual child killed in the holocaust
yet also suggests that these children were not recognised as individual
human children but rather were seen as part of a species to be exterminated.
This work, as many of his other works, is paradoxical in that they are visually
appealing whilst being disturbing in content.
Artmaking Practice: Actions
Boltanski uses old Black and White photographs, sometimes school photos
from his own childhood, but often photos of anonymous children he has found
in Parisian flea markets. In Monument: Children of Dijon he has
edited the photos enlarging just the faces. These are re photographed numerous
times, becoming third or fourth generation prints. The images are distorted,
appearing to age and in some cases becoming skull-like. These add to the
poignancy of the images of these long-dead children. Set up in altar-like
groups, each with its own illumination, these blurred and out-of-focus images
of dead children become invested with the authority of documents.
Conceptual Framework: Audience
Boltanski wants his audience to bring their own memories and associations
to the interpretation of his installations. He wants the audience to read
its own meaning into the work dependent upon each person’s own history.
Because the sites chosen are often in basements or attics of buildings the
audience has to travel up or down, a journey into the basement or attic
of human consciousness.
Frames: Postmodern
Boltanski’s works are Postmodern. From the 1970’s he has used
photography as the basis for much of his work. Boltanski uses an eclectic
approach using found objects, such as old black and white photographs often
sourced from flea markets in Paris, and combines them to produce a new and
different artwork. He recontextualises these old photograph within a site-specific
environment to suggest new meaning. He is postmodern in his approach, both
in his recontextualisation of mediated images and in his use of site-specific
installation. They are also enigmatic and paradoxical with Boltanski often
not ascribing a set meaning to his works but leaving it open to a series
of possible meanings. With each installation Boltanski chooses a different
site. The choice of site is symbolic and adds another layer of meaning to
the works. He often uses the basement and or the attic of existing buildings,
not always art museums. By doing this he alludes to the ‘basement
or attic’ of human consciousness. Monument: Children of Dijon
was sited in the chapel of a Medieval church in Paris, a place normally
of darkness, shadows and whispered prayers. The installation of Boltanski’s
work here is enigmatic and paradoxical.
Christian Boltanski was born in France in 1944 to a Corsican mother and
a Jewish father, and presently lives and works in Malakoff, a suburb of
Paris.
Articles
www.tate.org.uk
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