* christian boltanski (크리스티앙 볼탕스키)
1997.2.20~4.6
과천 국립현대미술관서 감동적인 전시를 봤었다.
Centro Galego de Arte Contemporaneo, Santiago de Compostela
Courtesy Christian Boltanski and Yvon Lambert, Paris
53 black and white photographs and small lamps
varying dimensions
1997.CB.04
Michael Sanders
Christian Boltanski was born in Paris in 1944. His artistic career began when he left formal education at the age of 12, at which point he started painting and drawing. Since the 1960s, he has worked with the ephemera of the human experience, from obituary photographs to rusted biscuit tins. Several of Boltanski's projects have used actual lost property from public spaces, such as railway stations, creating collections which memorialise the unknown owners in the cacophony of personal effects.
Boltanski has exhibited internationally at museums including: Muse d'art modern de la ville de Paris; Kunsthalle Wien; Stedelijk van Abbemuseum. Eindhoven; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angelis; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Malmö Konsthall; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo; Museum Ludwig Köln; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Regina Sofia, Madrid.
His work has been featured in Documenta (1972, 1986) at the Venice Biennale (1993, 1996), and at the Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh (1991). Boltanski lives in Malakoff, a suburb of Paris, with equally renowned artist Annette Messager.
http://www.tate.org.uk/magazine/issue2/boltanski.htm
Life is Happy, Life is Sad, 1974
Gouache on paper, frame; 104 x79 cm
Photograph. Three silver proofs, assembled alongside text written with white ink on blue cardboard.
37.9 x 71 cm. Each photo measures 28.5 x 18.3 cm.
1974 saw Boltanski’s autobiography-exploring endeavours take a lighter turn. Or, as he put it in his memoirs, “he outdid himself, he surpassed himself, he took a step back and started making fun of himself. He stopped talking about his childhood a nd started playing with it” that year.
He actually seems to shy away from the solemnity that shrouded his previous endeavours. Until then, he had been trying to tell the story of Christian Boltanski the character. But then he got to a point where, in his words, “That make-believe character became too heavy, and I felt the urge to kill it (…) kill the myth (…) kill it in ridicule.” (Boltanski, in an interview with Delphine Renard published in the Centre Pompidou catalogue in 1984).
Hence the Saynètes Comiques, a series of 25 pieces containing photographs he had touched up using pencils or pastels. Again, they recount his life, but they do it farcically this time.
Each photograph or group of mounted snapshots shows a family milestone (a funeral, wedding or birthday), which he had re-enacted for the camera. So all the characters are actually Boltanski disguised in a few accessories. That gives these images an unpretentious, almost scruffy look and street-theatre atmosphere that ultimately elicits contempt. The backdrops are often drawn in, adding to the spaghetti-western feel, and some of the labels explaining the scenes exacerbate the grotesque ingredient.
Detail of a triptych: 241 x 373.5 cm.
Boltanski was using photography extensively in the late 1960s. At first, he took small black-and-white phot os from family albums or photos that otherwise had some documentary value, and displayed them alongside text or other items. Then he started using this technique in a completely different way in the mid 1970s. He started showing large colour photos with no accompanying text or items (thus carrying the message single-handedly). He created a series he called Compositions. Depending on the object they portrayed, they were heroic, grotesque, architectural, Japanese or enchanted. The photographs were invariably huge and the backgrounds invariably jet black, making the tiny objects they depicted look monumental. There is something in their overblown size and colour contrast that makes them look like a vision. The black background makes the figures stand out like shadow puppets in the light. It also nestles them in an unfathomable void, isolating them in a sort of endless realm.
His 1981 Compositions Théâtrales feature diminutive corrugated-cardboard puppets that he had made for the occasion with wire and paper fasteners. These clever little makeshift characters are unmistakably reminiscent of the corrugated-cardboard objects that Picasso used in the 19 10s, with the difference that Boltanski made these toys for himself. They belong to Boltanski’s private, nearest-and-dearest treasure chest. He speaks of them as voodoo fetishes, explaining that they are made of tatty scraps yet harbour enormous evocative power. The public only sees them in the photographs that make them look huge and beyond reach. Boltanski, incidentally, spoke of photography as the “cooling off’ or separation stage. And, in a 1984 interview, explained that “objects are in the intimate, touchable realm: photographs in the realm of representation” (Boltanski, exhibition catalogue, Centre Pompidou). Photographs, in other words, have a way of transfiguring manual work.
http://www.centrepompidou.fr/education/ressources/ENS-boltanski_en/ENS-boltanski_en.htm#4
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