In 2009, the Tasmanian art collector David Walsh commissioned a piece of work from Christian Boltanski called La Vie de CB. As the title suggested, the completion of this was to take Boltanski the rest of his life. That, in fact, was the point of it.
Walsh had made his millions through gambling, Boltanski his name as an artist by a tireless engagement with death. Under the terms of their contract, the Australian was to pay the Frenchman, then 64, for the right to film him 24 hours a day for the rest of his life via a live video feed installed in his studio in Paris. The resulting footage would be stored in Walsh’s cave-gallery, the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), outside Hobart. The agreed sum was to be broken down into a monthly stipend: if Boltanski lived more than eight years, then he would be in profit.
“He has assured me that I will die before the eight years is up, because he never loses,” a cheery Boltanski said at the time. “He’s probably right. I don’t look after myself very well. But I’m going to try to survive.” When the artist died, aged 76, he was four years to the good.
It was a rare miscalculation on Walsh’s part. From the moment of his birth in 1944, mortality had been Boltanski’s special subject. His Ukrainian Jewish father, Etienne, a prominent doctor, had spent 18 months of the German occupation of Paris hiding in a space between two floors of the family house in the rue de Grenelle, protected by his leftwing Corsican Catholic wife, Myriam (nee Marie-Elise Ilari-Guérin), a novelist. The couple had gone through a sham divorce in 1942, Etienne allegedly fleeing to the so-called zone libre in the south. In fact, he emerged from his hiding place at night to sleep with his wife, resulting in her becoming pregnant: a potentially dangerous thing in the Nazi-occupied French capital. Christian was born 10 days after the Germans finally surrendered the city to De Gaulle’s victorious forces.
It was to be a peculiar childhood. As recalled in the 2015 memoir La Cache, by Boltanski’s nephew, Christophe: “The house was a palace but the family lived like tramps.” Christian and his brothers, Luc and Jean-Elie, seldom went to school, and not at all after the age of 12. Instead they were kept at home by a fearful and possessive mother who forbade the visits of friends. The children slept at the foot of their parents’ bed until they were in their teens. Jean-Elie still lives in the house.
It was in the rue de Grenelle in the late 1950s that Christian Boltanski, self-taught, began to make art – first, plasticine sculptures and then large-scale figurative paintings, which he in turn gave up for photography. This evolved into a practice that was to stay with him for the rest of his life – work made from discarded and anonymous images, culled from newspapers, police records and family photograph albums found in flea markets. These Boltanski assembled into narrativeless stories that yet seemed somehow autobiographical, often appearing to reference the Holocaust without ever quite doing so directly.
In 1968, his first solo exhibition, La Vie Impossible de Christian Boltanski (The Impossible Life of Christian Boltanski), held at the Théâtre le Ranelagh in Paris, consisted of a vast installation of these images, dubbed by their collector “a personal ethnology”. As became typical of his method, this work had an afterlife, or a series of afterlives. In 1988, images from La vie impossible were integrated into a larger project called Les Archives de CB 1965-1988, an enterprise of such epic vastness – there were by now well over 2,000 individual items of ephemera in the artist’s collection – that it begged the question of how, or indeed whether, it could be viewed. Boltanski seemed to be drawing on the double meaning of the word “enormity”, capable, in French as in English, of expressing both great size and great horror.
So, too, with the installation Personnes, which opened at the Grand Palais in 2010 before travelling to the Park Avenue Armory in New York as No Man’s Land. In this, a 60ft crane randomly dropped items of discarded clothing into a growing heap to the sound of 75,000 beating hearts, gathered from all over the world and stored on an island in Japan as Les Archives du Cœur (The Heart Archives, 2008).
Personne means both “person” and “nobody” in French, Boltanski’s old clothes simultaneously evoking the lives of the people who might have worn them and their extinction. The resemblance of his installation to the heaps of clothing taken from the dead at Nazi concentration camps seemed clear, although the inference was left for the viewer to draw.
Even countries untouched by the Holocaust were to be involved in Boltanski’s universalising of it. In 1990, he made The Reserve of Dead Swiss, now in Tate Modern. For this, he clipped photographs from the death notices in a provincial Swiss newspaper, Le Nouvelliste du Valais, blowing up 42 of them so that the faces blurred unrecognisably, removing names and captions and lighting each with a single, naked electric bulb. “I suppose part of the work is also about the simple fascination of seeing somebody who is handsome and imagining his ashes,” Boltanski mused. The installation also hinted at Switzerland’s wartime neutrality, questioning the difference between it and complicity.
For all the apparent horror of his life and art, Boltanski remained resolutely optimistic. Within four years of his first solo show in Paris and still with no formal training, he was exhibiting at the celebrated Documenta quinquennial in Kassel, Germany, having been invited to do so by its curator, Harald Szeemann. “This was the beginning,” Boltanski recalled. “Then my work got attention in Germany and it spread everywhere.”
That was in 1972. Two years before, Boltanski had met a fellow artist called Annette Messager: she would be his partner for the rest of his life, the couple’s careers developing in parallel with each other. The two artists occasionally collaborated, notably in a joint work called Le Grenier de Chateau (The Castle Attic) at the Rochechouart Museum of Contemporary Art in 1990. Messager represented France at the 2005 Venice Biennale, Boltanski in 2011.
As to his deal with Walsh, Boltanski derived a curious comfort from outliving the term of his contract. This was not simply to do with money. Having survived the allotted eight years made the time left to him seem like a perk. “My life now is in overtime, just like in football,”Boltanski said. “I like this idea. I’m more free.”
“Ultimately,” he went on, “Walsh would really like to view my death, live. He says that he is constantly anticipating that moment. He would like to have my last image.” Here, too, Boltanski triumphed, dying not in his studio but off-camera in hospital.
Boltanski is survived by Messager, and by Luc and Jean-Elie.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion