Christian Boltanski

Christian Boltanski is a Plasticien French, born the September 6th 1944 with Paris. Photographer, Sculptor and Scenario writer, known above all for its installations, it is defined itself as painter, although it for a long time gave up this medium.

Biography

Christian Boltanski was born with the end from the Second world war in an Jewish family and there remained marked by the memory of the Holocauste. It starts to paint in 1958, at age the 14 years, whereas it forever known of true schooling nor followed artistic formation in the traditional sense of the term. The majority of the tables which it carries out then are in major part of large sizes representing of the characters in macabre circumstances or even of the scenes of history.

Boltanski moves away from painting as from 1967 and tries out the writing, by letters or files which it sends to artistic personalities. It integrates into its work of the elements resulting from its personal universe, and its own biography, real or imaginary, becomes the main theme of its work.

Married with the artist Annette Messenger, Christian Boltanski is recognized today like one of the principal French contemporary artists. He lives and works with Malakoff.

Work

Boltanski seeks to communicate emotion in all the artistic expressions which it uses: Photo S, Cinema, Video. Its recurrent themes are the memory, the unconscious one, childhood and death. Boltanski uses a material multitude, that it is photography, found objects, corrugated cardboard, modeling clay, luminaries, candles.

One of the characteristics of Boltanski is its capacity to reconstitute moments of life with objects which never belonged to him but that it however exposes like such. He tells a life which he claims to have lived and all the objects of his files, books, collections and others are the agents of a memory to which is attached an emotional capacity extremely, allowing each individual to recognize itself there. These objects, it puts them in scene not only in space but also in time, since each object reminds us a past, a past which is real fiction or personnel.
Thus works of Boltanski are based and call upon the memory, of the memory of childhood to the memory of late, and one personal history to the common history of all and all. In 1972 during an exposure it entitles one of its section “mythology individual”, which characterizes and summarizes well its work.

He works the topic of the hallucination, where absence and existence merge.

He put in prospect in some for his vidéos the sufferings endured by the Jews. Those express, without any word, the horror of the war. The absence is a recurring subject in its work: the video like the photograph is presences, memories which revive the absent ones.

Christian Boltanski is member of Narration Article This movement asserts the use of photography like that of a text. These two uses are quite separate in work; their bond must be done by a mental relation.

Analyzes works

Christian Boltanski, the man who coughs, (carried out with J.C Valesy), 1969. Film 16 mm color, sound. Duration: 3 ' (in the files of C.B., video recording, Brigitte Cornard, Christian Boltanski, taking part, 1998. )

For Boltanski, it is the cinema initially which challenges it when it carries out this film. It is the truth amplified by the movement and the sound. But it realizes that the spectacular side of a film arrives coarsely to the spectator, (whereas the opposition to progress of a photograph is let interpret with individual parameters, therefore more moderated, according to the individual who receives it. And in this direction, the photograph is closer to the truth for each and everyone). Entry in an empty and dilapidated part tinted of red and black, having like only source of light that of the sun in end according to midday, coming from the window at the bottom of the room. The camera films in diving, trembling, a man sitting by ground, which is spitting of blood. It is masked by white strips, which leave only the visible mouth.

The camera makes a dolly before and back on this character. One hears it strongly cough as if it were going to vomit, and it starts to spit of the jets of blood on itself, blood which flows on its legs lengthened on the ground. It with the air to be sequestered; a imprisonment, a suffering which also gives a feeling of claustrophobia for the spectator. The cameraman who moves in front of the man while keeping as only subject this one during three minutes makes film worrying, disturbing, and badly puts at ease the spectator.

Boltanski wants to give the impression that the character is a scapegoat, on which converge the ill treatments, not only like here physical, but also psychological, perhaps in relation to the memory of the war, his aberrations, the dislike which it generates. It delivers to us by this film a feeling of rejection of events which marked the history, and which touched it personally.

Christian Boltanski, Reserve, 1990.Installation, fabrics, lamps, dimensions variable.

This work represents an entirely retapissée room of old worn clothing, which releases an odor similar to that of the old attics, because this work with the characteristic to be as visual as olfactive. It is into 1988 that the advance of this work starts; with the whole beginning Boltanski creates a work entitled Réserve Canada, which is not other than a part referring to the warehouses in which the Nazis stored the businesses and other objects of the off-set people. The use which it makes of clothing is thus directly related to the topic of death, like the east already the majority of its other works. It is a means of meaning that there was a life, a history, a passage but that this is not any more and thus forms part of the past. It is for this purpose Boltanski uses clothing, in the series of the Reserves which it previously carries out with its work, Réserve Canada.

Selection of works

the oval room , 1967
the Man who coughs , 1969
Essai of reconstitution (Three drawers), 1970-1971
Vitrine of reference , 1971
Saynètes comic , 1974
theatrical Composition , 1981
Enfants of Dijon '', 1986

files of C.B. 1965-1988 , 1989

Reserve , 1990

Subscribers of the telephone , 2000

Writings and testimonys

Christian Boltanski, impossible Life , Cologne, Walther König editor, 2001
Christian Boltanski, Kaddish , Museum of modern art of the Town of Paris, 1998

References

External bonds

Discussion with Elisabeth Lebovici appeared in Release the 1st November 2nd, 2003 and published on the site paris-art.com

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