The Museum of Contemporary Art has just opened one of the most compelling exhibitions of the year.
Called ”Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness,” the show is the first American retrospective for a French artist who for more than two decades has created personal mythologies that press upon the universal.
”I hope people can understand themselves better by looking at my work,” Boltanski says. And to that end he has produced sculptures, installations and films that speak with a power unusual in art of our time.
The title of the exhibition refers to the portions of Scripture read during the Catholic Good Friday service that ends with an extinction of candles. The character of the service is funereal, dirgelike, commemorating the death of Jesus Christ.
Death is the central theme of Boltanski`s work, and he explores it on many levels. The language of his exploration is indebted to Conceptual and Minimal art, though his use of it is highly emotional.
”For me it is positive to touch people,” he said. ”For example, I always like to go to the movies and cry, but also I see that the images or construction of the film may be beautiful. In the same way, I want to touch people but also am an artist speaking through the formal problems of the end of the 20th Century. Minimal art is in my work, and I am sure there are plenty of other influences because artists are people who `eat` everything. It is natural. I `eat` too. But for me the first idea always is human, not formal.” The largest of these ideas is the Holocaust, which Boltanski feels is the most important event of the century. It has been in his work almost from the beginning, though the pain of it first was too great, and only in the last few years did he realize how it underlay what he had created.
In more recent photo pieces, the impress of the Holocaust is unmistakable, yet elsewhere it is suggested less openly, through the lightness and perishability of materials. Some pieces are of the kind that might be stuck in a pocket when one lives on the run. Others are themselves in danger of being extinguished.
”I am half Jewish, half Christian, half Russian, half French,”
Boltanski said, ”and was born on the day of the liberation of Paris. So I grew up in this story of the concentration camps. But I want to be much more universal than only to work with the Holocaust. The camp is a concrete example of a dying place. I want to do something about all of us.
”I am talking about the idea of dying, the fact of death and the attempt to escape. And for me one of the only possibilities of escape is to dream. In the first part of the exhibition, there is a projection piece of a little boat, and that is to say perhaps you can escape by dreaming. Life is not so terrible if there is a bit of poetry. The poetry perhaps can save you a little.”
Humor is important to Boltanski, as well. A large part of his work, he says, has the tone of a terrified person who uses jokes to make the fear go away. The point is, the two feelings exist inside together. The artist is, for Boltanski, both killer and clown.
He conveys this by manipulating light, as the majority of his works use either shadows or photographs. He likes shadows because of the fugitive quality that has a parallel with how candles are used in churches to symbolize the human spirit. He works with photographs for a similar reason.
”The first time of our dying is childhood,” Boltanski said. ”You were a child. I was a child. But we are no more. It was something inside us that has disappeared. This is part of why I use photographs very often. The photo always is an impression of the idea of dying. It tries to keep life but also says something about death because just after the photo we already are different.”
All of Boltanski`s photoworks are fictional insofar as the images construct a believable ”reality” that in detail may not have happened. For example, the pieces that are apparent catalogues of Holocaust victims contain no images of people who actually were in the camps, instead using photos of friends, acquaintances, even the artist himself.
This is a point of honor with Boltanski, who believes actual Holocaust photos cannot be employed, as they are sacred. Still, principle or no, his method has a way of yielding expressive, multi-layered results, particularly when enlarging yields a transformation.
”The piece, `Lycee Chases` (`Chases High School`), is about the Holocaust because I found a photo of the terminal class of the Jewish school in Vienna in 1931,` said Boltanski, `and in this photo, like in all photos of graduating classes, everybody looks happy. But when I blew up each of the images, everybody looked like they were dead. I don`t know what happened to the people. I hope some of them escaped. But I thought death was inside them because it was very dangerous to be Jewish in Vienna.”
A much earlier piece, the ”Photo Album of Family D., 1939-1964,”
illustrates Boltanski`s belief that an artist is one who carries a mirror in front of his own face that is meant to reflect the viewer, as here are types of images everyone knows from his or her own family album. The work thus is completed only when spectators enter into it and recognize themselves.
Embedded in all such pieces is something of the desire to create an
”ideal” autobiography, as Boltanski had a troubled childhood and feels it is important to express that, too. Much of what we see thus reverberates with a search for lost time.
”I am sure I was saved by making art,” he said. ”I am positive of it because when you make art, you say your problem to others. When I started, I really was out of my head, very, very strange. I left school when I was 12. I had to stay home with my parents. One time, I made a little drawing and one of my brothers said it was good. That was the first time anybody told me anything I did was good and, afterward, I made more and more and more drawings.
”Years later, I wrote a suicide letter. When I wrote it, I was terribly upset, terribly unhappy. I think if I was not an artist I would have sent the letter to one person and perhaps would have killed myself. But I had worked a lot in mail art, so I sent this letter to 60 people, and in this way I escaped. I was not sad anymore. I was making something about being sad, which was not reality but a representation of it.
”I think all artists work like that, transforming the personal into the universal. And throughout time there have been very few subjects, four or five in the whole history of art. Always it is the same because they are human subjects and, really, nothing changes.”
Though Boltanski makes objects, he calls himself a painter, feeling that by conveying emotion through visual means he is not that different from an artist of the Renaissance. He is part of a great continuum and wants to be. He calls the artists who preceded him his ”good fathers.”
Still, one`s place on the continuum is partly earned through an exercise of responsibility.
”I think artists must have some kind of exemplary life,” Boltanski said. ”Take (Andy) Warhol. He had an exemplary life. Maybe it was not so good but it was exemplary. And (Joseph) Beuys, he also had an exemplary life. They were like saints.
”To me, Beuys was Christian and optimist and Warhol was against religion and pessimist. One believed in man. The other was a black angel. Both were exemplary. What I wish, for me, is that when I have died people would see my work and try to understand what I wanted to say, how I speak about the fragility of things. I think an artist must be like that. There must be some kind of a message he has given.”
”Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness” continues at the Museum of Contemporary Art through June 19.
