Christian Boltanski was a French sculptor, photographer, painter and filmmaker who occupied a unique position in the art world from the late-1960s to the present day. He left school at the age of twelve in order to teach himself to paint. The early years of his artistic journey were capricious and did not revolve around the major political and artistic developments of that era. Hardly anyone visited his first exhibition, held in May 1968 within an arthouse cinema in more or less the only district of Paris that had escaped the protests and riots during this historically crucial month. With the film ‘The Impossible Life of Christian Boltanski’, which criticised the impossibility of artists’ making a name for themselves in the city, he made a statement that would lead to his operating on the margins of the Parisian avant-garde for years. From the implicit challenge of the periphery, he soon gathered around him a loosely fixed group of artists who had consciously chosen the same position. They conducted semi-clandestine actions, infiltrated newspapers, exhibited in abandoned places, and posted ‘mail art’.
This guerrilla mentality was inextricably linked to Boltanski’s quest for his artistic identity. In this context, he created his first ‘notebooks’, collections of personal paraphernalia and photos in which he tried to come to terms with, as he put it, “the absence of memories of his childhood”. These were the first steps towards creating memory with the help of real and fictitious ‘evidence’. At an early stage, Boltanski linked this fascination to his interest in classification methods, such as those used in natural history museums. He linked museums with the idea of death since their presentations seem to drain the life out of objects. Such institutions were thus inherently melancholic. Nearly all the work that Boltanski produced from the 1970s onwards dealt with accumulation and recycling, whereby he collected, structured and presented lives and memories “as a bulwark against forgetting”. The meticulous ordering that the artist applied to the personal memorabilia of others has an explicitly religious quality.
In the mid-1980s, Boltanski’s work became increasingly monumental, and he played with dramatic effects of light and shadow. Not long afterwards, he started to use objects charged with meaning, such as rusty cans and used pieces of clothing, alongside photographs. Due to his Jewish background, his quiet tributes to memory were often interpreted as a critique of the Holocaust and a homage to its victims. He never refuted this, although he consistently emphasised that he was primarily interested in exploring universal memory mechanisms. To this day, Boltanski is one of the few so-called ‘Spurensicherer’ (trackers), artists who search for and secure these ‘pieces of evidence’. This makes him one of the most relevant of all French installation artists.
