Christian Boltanski ( Historical/anecdotal documentation )

Christian Boltanski a french artist who was born September 6th 1944. A very strange childhood since the Germans entered Paris and the fact of his father is a Ukrainian Jews.

His relatives are survivors from internment camp, he was taught in a horror way when he was young, a feeling of ubiquitous danger that always haunted him. 

Every artist has the unusual experience of growing up, accompanied by a serious of trauma, by responding to these psychological trauma they called this a Heroic myth.

Heroic myth can often increase significantly of artist work and enhance the understandable  and market visibility. Therefore, art criticism of such drama are dismiss with contempt, that is to be sarcastic. 

Christian Boltanski’s artistic career began when deep down his bones, death is something that cannot be avoid in life. Death and survival is what he had always been working on, the way he want to present his work is something between theatre and installation. From the beginning and an end of his work, emotion comes from time. The quality of emotion comes when some kind of shock or events that has happened and spaces will be create by different sweep of feelings. 

For me, the holocaust from World War II makes Boltanski instinctively thinks fear is indiscriminate with the world, he can’t stand the normal life of school and refused when he was 12.  Today’s Boltanski, had investigate about death or life, finding himself ever more close to the fear that he live for. The work of his way of thinking itself, or even beyond the work itself. “ The only way to resist death, is through inheritance.” Artistic heritage can reverse the meaning of existence by the end of death, time bombs set to lift of death.

Boltanski’s new work entitled “Personnes” means “no one” or “person”, the individual significance of the artist’s long term existence and devoid of exploration. Memory and the work of death is a symbol of “Personnes”, the concept of the absence of the body. He believes that photographs, second-hand clothing and the body is the same that represents, but he can only present the first two, exhibiting the body is immoral. Photographs and the absence of the second-hand clothes are the main objects to summon and to record the body without the real body. To reflect on “Inventory of objects” series, a lot of items had been collected to display like a convict photograph( book from library) 

“Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.” 

John Berger, 1992

The context of how Christian Boltanski photographs are different from others, he was not intended to publicly presented. What is left behind is the cultural codes of that era and the common memory, between 1939 and 1964 popular clothing styles, furniture, decoration and motorcycle model are what we see in Boltanski’s photographs, perhaps its the reconstruction of the history but also the images and memories of that era.