1998-2021
1998-2003
From 1998, Boltanski began to conceive his exhibitions as symbolic itineraries, through works that functioned like the stages of a journey or the stations of a procession. This was his intention in the exhibition ‘Dernières années’ held at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1998. Visitors walked through rooms occupied by Menschlich (Human), Les Registres du Grand-Hornu (The Grand-Hornu Registers) and the Lits (Beds), then descended to the basement into Réserve du musée des enfants (Reserve of the Children’s Museum) (a permanent work executed in 1989) before reaching the last stage, Perdus (Lost), where they were surrounded by 5,000 items of lost property that nobody had ever claimed. This approach was, as he himself says, inspired by his ‘theatrical’ work.
As a result of these experiments with theatre, Boltanski began to master light, sound and spectator movement. In 1999 with Kalman, he directed Der Ring in the Berlin suburbs. He was accompanied by Ilya Kabakov, whose paintings punctuated the space. Inside the ruined former sanatorium in Beelitz, the audience wanders around, guided by impromptu events. For this final staging, the artist developed principles that would become recurrent: viewers would walk around around a large, dark and preferably cold space, their attention captured by visual, musical and theatrical events. Boltanski was drawn by the ephemerality of the world of theatre, and the fleeting nature of a staging, which cannot be repeated, only recounted. In 2001, his collaboration with Jean Kalman led to Bienvenue, a performance in a factory basement for the Nouvelles Scènes festival in Dijon. On this occasion he began a lasting musical collaboration with Franck Krawczyk.
In the early 2000s, Boltanski worked on projects at once utopian and universal, the first of which, Les abonnés du téléphone (Telephone Subscribers), acquired by the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, was regularly updated. Boltanski endeavoured to show the whole of humanity, collecting the names and addresses of everyone in the telephone directory, undertaking a census of humanity.
2003-2009
It was a continuation of his work in the 1990s on lists of names which leds to large-scale, evolving projects such as Les archives du cœur (Archives of the Heart). This catalogue of all the world’s heartbeats, destined to row over the years, has since 2008 been held on the small island of Teshima in Japan. Here, in a simple building inspired by the fishermen’s huts, are more than 100,000 heartbeats collected throughout the world. Visitors can record their own on site or consult those of friends or relatives. The artist conceived this project as a place of pilgrimage dedicated to the memory of a family member or friend and more broadly to the essence of life. Its scope widened with the stations Boltanski planned to build on the five continents in the hope of global participation and linked to the Teshima database. The Asian station has already been built in a remote village in China.
Besides these universal projects, Boltanski resumed the autobiographical theme revolving around a fear of his own death. In 2003, his exhibition ‘Entre-temps’, opened on his birthday at the Yvon Lambert gallery in Paris, focused on what was left of him. Visitors were greeted by his face projected on a surface like a shroud. A few years later, an autobiographical account based on a series of long conversations with Catherine Grenier was published in La Vie possible de Christian Boltanski (Paris, Seuil, 2007; English edition: The Possible Life of Christian Boltanski, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2009), as was the first volume of a catalogue raisonné of his oeuvre on which he worked with Bob Calle.
He devoted himself increasingly to autobiographical works, including Vie possible (Possible Life, 2001) in which he assembled his own archives in twenty wall cabinets; 6 septembre (2005), a collection of all the television images broadcast on that date, his birthday; Autoportrait (Self-portrait, 2008), showing his aging face. The same goes for The Life of C.B. (2010-21), thousands of videos recording every moment of his life in his studio, which are kept at the MONA Museum in Hobart, Tasmania, owned by David Walsh. This art collector and professional gambler took a gamble on the artist’s date of death and Boltanski accepted the challenge, offering him the purchase of this work, payable for the remaining years of his life: he was filmed night and day in his studio and the recordings were livestreamed to Tasmania and stored. Passing time was also the subject of Horloge parlante (Speaking Clock, 2003), held since 2009 in a crypt in Salzburg Cathedral.
During these years, Boltanski worked extensively in Japan, where he took part in the Echigo-Tsumari Triennial: he exhibited Les Linges at the first edition in 2000 and, with Jean Kalman, The Last Class (2009), an installation that has now become permanent. In 2006 he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale by the Imperial Family of Japan for his major work in the field of sculpture.
2010-2013
Disappearance became the major theme of his work, in which autobiographical recordings accompany the creation of ephemeral artwork. He had a very strong desire for effacement, and, as he often remarked, no longer made anything permanent. He created monumental temporary installations in which everything that was built would be destroyed. He abandoned the autonomous artwork in favour of on-site construction, using items that he had found with which he put together systems that were destroyed at the end of the experience.
Two large installations illustrate this direction taken by his work. In 2010, he occupied the Grand Palais in Paris for the ‘Monumenta’ exhibition with Personnes (No Man’s Land); the following year, visitors at the 54th Venice Biennale were arrested by Chance, an enormous structure erected in the French pavilion. In both works, Boltanski was reflecting on chance and fate. In Chance, a belt displaying thousands of portraits of babies, taken from birth announcements in Polish newspapers, rolls deafeningly through a structure of industrial scaffolding. Every now and then a bell goes off, like a stroke of fate, and the belt stops at the face of a baby. In the adjoining rooms, two counters display in real time respectively the number of births and deaths on Earth per day.
The installation executed for ‘Monumenta’ occupied the huge nave of the Grand Palais. With Personnes, referencing both a multitude and no one in particular, Boltanski was describing his philosophical, social and religious approach. He showed this coexistence of life and death by erecting a large crane that dug randomly into thousands of discarded garments piled up in the shape of a pyramid. Here, too, a relentless mechanical image combined with a frightful automatic noise reminds us of the brutality that governs fate and dictates the human condition. Reconstructed for the Armory Show in New York and the HangarBicocca in Milan in 2010, the ever more gigantic installation, standing 9 metres high, reached into the pile of clothes filling the pool at the Echigo-Tsumari Satoyama Museum of Contemporary Art in 2012. Opening in parallel to Personnes at the Grand Palais, Après (After) at the MacVal was an after-death landscape peopled with phantoms, a ghostly place with an atmosphere highly reminiscent of Tadeusz Kantor’s plays, which played a key role in Boltanski’s oeuvre. A few years later, the bed of light bulbs in Crépuscule (Twilight, 2015), going out day after day, reminds us of our inexorable fate.
The artist’s ambition to reach out to an ever wider and more remote audience manifested itself in a number of artistic initiatives. In 2012, he launched Storage Memory, a website via which the subscriber received, for a monthly subscription of 10 euros, ten one-minute video every month, all silent and shot during his travels with a small HD camera: ‘postcards of my life’.
2014-2021
Playing on fragility to the point of disappearance, his work became increasingly impalpable, made of light, sounds and effects, exploring the perishable, the transitory and impermanence. The Animitas installations (Animitas (Chili), 2014; Animitas (Blanc), 2017; Animitas (Mères Mortes), 2017, each featured a long video of an in situ work, in the Atacama Desert in Chile, in Île d’Orléans in Quebec, Canada, and near the Dead Sea in Israel, respectively. Installed at symbolic locations to pay tribute to the dead, like memorial altars, Japanese wind bells were hung on poles stuck in the ground, echoing the night sky at the artist’s birth. Filmed in a static shot, from sunrise to sunset, they tinkle in the wind. With each recreation of the installation, the film is placed in its setting: a sense of the arid desert extends onto the floor with a scattering of fresh and wilted flowers, while the icy desert is suggested by a sea of crumpled tissue paper.
In his representations of memory, Boltanski made increasing use of ephemeral means, particularly sounds. In 2016, he installed La Forêt des murmures (The Murmuring Forest) halfway up Mount Danyama on Teshima Island, in Japan: four hundred wind chimes, each carrying the name of a loved one, tinkle in the breeze. The work is permanent and destined to be enriched by new bells.
In 2017, for Bienalsur, he installed near Bahía Bustamante, northern Patagonia, at a whale gathering site, three huge metallic structures that reproduce the wales sounds when they are moved by the wind, offering the possibility of a dialogue with these fabulous creatures. This work gave rise to the video triptych Misterios. A few years previously, at the 50th Venice Biennale, hidden loudspeakers played the poignant barking of stray dogs: Entendre les chiens (Hear the Dogs) is a sound piece with which Boltanski invites us to pay heed to these lamentations, these ancestral communications.
During the last decade of his life, he became more and more interested in transmission, preferring the narrative to the object, creating an ephemeral and emotional experience transmitted orally rather than a tangible relic. He was fascinated by oral tradition, be it religious or mythological. He did not pretend to enjoy reading yet had a fondness for anecdote, storytelling and joking, and popular belief.
In recent years, he sought to stimulate our consciousness by asking questions that remain unanswered.
By reusing his works in retrospectives that are more like journeys or paths, or ‘stations of the cross’, as he himself described them, he recently presented successful exhibitions at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and at the PSA in Shanghai. The Centre Pompidou in Paris, where his first retrospective was held in 1984, was the location of his last. His final work, Subliminal, consisted in four wide screens arranged in a cross and suspended half a metre above the floor; they showed images of a lush, peaceful and innocent nature disrupted by flashes of superposed images, lasting several hundredths of a second of scenes of massacres and genocides perpetrated by humankind over the 20th century. The work highlighted the unconscious psychological processes that escape any cerebration and celebrate life despite its horrors. The piece was presented for the first time at the Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris in early 2021 as part of its solo exhibition ‘Après’.
Christian Boltanski died on 14 July 2021 in Paris while preparing his retrospectives at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Busan (South Korea) and the Manège Museum in St Petersburg. The latter, which was due to open at the outbreak of war in Ukraine, did not open.
From the outset, his work has focused on the ephemeral nature of the human condition in its indifferent course, in an infinite, inhumanly cyclical movement.
Annalisa Rimmaudo
Translated by Alexandra Keens
