Christian Boltanski

Christian Boltanski

               Christian Boltanski was born on September 6th, 1944 in Paris, France. He still lives there today. He is 67 years old and has been an artist since he was only 14 years old.  When he was young, he was a very good painter and he decided to pursue his artistic interests rather than go to school.  He was not noticed for his work until 1960 when he released some short films and published a few notebooks.  

               He had a number of exhibitions.  His first exhibition was in 1968, when he was just 24. This exhibition was presented through a short film and many sketches with life-sized marionettes. His work then continued into the 1970's where he created photo albums and autobiographic films on what his childhood was and could have been. He was known for also creating fictional characters.  He also created photo albums and autobiographical films using his fictional characters. He created autobiographies of the person, what they liked, and what they did.  He included actual objects and journal entries.

               In 1976, he released his concept of "average taste" through his work. In this portion of his career, he withdrew to what he did as a child. He took photographs using an amateur skill and printed them in painting sized dimensions. He thought this would appeal better to the average person, which it did. In 1985, he started over again, trying new things. The "Monuments" series was born. In this, he created many photos to be represented on a massive scale. He printed photos and placed them in altar-like settings and filled entire rooms with photos lit by small lights, almost like stars.

               Christian Boltanski's work is very moving and experimental. His photos range from simple portraits of people to mounds of clothes. His work can be very odd and in some cases just flat-out strange.  But for some reason people are drawn to them likely for the sole reason that they are unique. Christian has a way of taking very simple things and making the viewer think about them. He takes a single object from a fictional character's childhood and is able to create an entire story from it. He takes simple, "amateur" style photographs and turns them into works of art. A good example is this photograph.

This is Christians gallery on March 1st of 2001 called "Coming and Going" in New York. He took many'a'photo and placed them in completely random order, using simple frames and hard, coloured light to create his final product. It's simple, very simple, and yet it looks absolutely fantastical. The way the portraits are aligned, the way he arranges the lights on the wall in a square-like pattern. Everything is simple. People believe this to be his best trait. He takes simple things and makes them seem like masterpieces. Christian says that he can take from 10 minutes to 10 years to come up with an idea, and in the end it's still a simple one, one that anyone could think of, one that seems stupid. He finds it silly how easy it is to make money once you are famous. "They give me money and I give them nothing". He said this during his exhibition in Mexico, where he had a 600 square foot room to work with. He decided to display blue tarps over a wooden frame that would  be covered in hard white light to create pure black shadows. He then says that afterward, he had it destroyed.

This was his work before his exhibition in Mexico, he said that "the shapes will be different". It was just an idea of course, which was why instead of actually going to Mexico, all he did was send a letter to tell them how to create it and set up.

One final thing about Christian Boltanski is his philosophy of living and dying. Many people find it incredibly moving in how he thinks of his life and work.

For instance, this is one of his works in Paris at the Grand Palais. It is of a grid pattern of clothing and in the centre a massive amount of wrecked sweaters, dress', pants and shirts. A small crane goes up and down, lifting and dropping small amounts of clothing back onto the 50 tonne mound of clothes. The art is as simple as the process of picking up and dropping the clothes, as well as it is pointless. The entire building is filled by the sound of heart-beats. These are recordings of over 50,000 people, their heartbeats all unique, just like all of his work. His philosophy follows the same idea, we all have unique properties but at the same time we are all so simple. This work is so far from the fact  of death and yet so close to the idea. His work has all sorts of attributes that are similar to death, the slow heartbeat of a person, who at some point, will not have a beat of any kind. The dust covering all his work to show that time has effects even on simple objects, and even the clothing itself, bright children's clothing to old tattered shirts from a garbage bin. He does not believe in art as being a preservation of one's self, just an extension. He does not like people who create art in hopes that they will live forever, he believes that we must be content with the idea of dying. A lot of people have trouble grasping this idea since it is so impossible to ignore.

               He says that he usually sits around and doesn't do much.  The life of art is easy for him and he finds it too easy at times. He creates such simple things and doesn't really care what happens to them. Whenever he creates a large exhibition, he says he tries his best to organize his pieces to create a beginning and an end.  He wants people to feel uncomfortable or at least uncomfortable with the fact that the show will eventually end. Doing this creates a great emotional response in his viewers, which many people find terrific.

This was the photo taken by me chosen from about twenty just like it. It was hard to decide which one was the best when they were almost identical. I decided to do the exact same thing Christian did for his Mexico project. I asked Rachel Wolf and Samantha Kelly to randomly throw their coats on a table in the studio. Just like the people in Mexico had done for his gallery, I had Rachel and Samantha follow simple instructions. Then I set up 2 lights without a diffuse and put as close as possible to create the hardest shadows possible. I used coats instead of a tarp because I wanted to fuse 2 of his best pieces together. From his work in the Grand Palais in Paris and from his gallery in Mexico. Using the harsh light on random articles of clothing helps me convey two different ideas very well. The fact that we are just teenagers and we have a lot of life ahead of us, hence the use of new-looking clothing instead of a mix of clothing like Christian used. Christian was always so obsessed with the idea of death, this was why he always had old material in his pieces. Since we are young, I decided to use new clothing like the coats in the picture. To help emphasize the fact that we are far from the end of our lives.

" But there are also artist videos that are more like cinema, because they have a beginning, an end, and we sit down to watch them"

-Armand Mech