Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

Christian Boltanski, 1944-2021 - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Raises questions on death: 'Why do I live and others die?'
      - immersive, audience walks around
      - brings own memories and associations to the work
      - ambiguous - reads into its own meaning
      - sites chosen: basements and attics > the journey up and down from the basement of human consciousness
      - poignant because > take viewer back to the indistinct and yet emotional vividness of childhood memory; not that one remembers these particular old photographs of objects > evoke what is personal to each individual in oldest memories and remind us of experience of remembering
    - - Frames
        
        Post modern
        
        rephotographs and recontextualises old photos of school children
        
        sites: basement, attic > human consciousness
        
        repurposing historically significant places: Medieval church
        
        sheds light on the future by looking into the past
        
        Medieval church/chapel = normally dark, shadows with whispered prayers
        
        enigmatic and paradoxical, not ascribing a set meaning
        
        Cultural
        
        commenting on the genocide of Jewish children in WW2
        
        anonymous photos in Medieval church - altar-like
        
        monument; sacred nature of each individual child in Holocaust
        
        Holocaust > children were not seen as people but a species to be exterminated
      - photographic installation
      - distorted enlargements of rephotographed children
        
        skull-like, shows age
      - Medieval stone chapel in Paris
      - individual spotlights
        
        halo, chiaroscuro
        
        contemplative mood of mystery
        
        electrical cords = haphazard over children
        
        altar-like omposition; spiritual atmosphere
        
        calm, contemplative
        
        mock-shrine
        
        bare bulbs of cheap metal lamps > interrogation evoke images of Holocaust
      - calm, contemplative
        
        death and suffering = paradox of the beauty of the work
      - pseudo memorials
      - paradoxical: visually appealing but disturbing in context
        
        beauty of the work and stark enigma of its meaning
    - - born 1944, around the time of French Liberation from Hitler
        
        'Liberty Christian Boltanski'
      - french photographer, sculptor, installator
      - concerned with culture, memory, time, the ephemeral, rememberance, legacy
    - - class photograph from his own childhood class
      - addresses tyrannical nature of time and its inevitable destruction of youth
      - Anselm Keifer = alluded to
      - milieu - horrors of Holocaust
        
        continually influence by fears of nuclear holocaust and environmental destruction
      - mourns the death of his own childhood
      - Jewish father and Christian mother
      - post-generational trauma from WW2
  - - - edited photos, only enlarging the faces
        
        rephotographed numerous times, third or fourth generation prints
      - images are distorted, appearing to age and looking like skulls
        
        adds to the poignancy of long-dead children
        
        pathos, sadness
- - - - immeresed into the artwork
        
        heart beats recorded and morphed into a brilliant auditory pantomime of a thousand other heartbeats
      - Audience immerses themselves in the work, walking through the space, becoming aware and overwhelmed by sight, sound, smell… work triggers all senses and engulfs the audience in an experience that make them think/challenges ideas about art/history/life and death…..
    - - Frames
      - Winter, New York Armory
        
        not as stinky as summer paris
      - Components
        
        30 tonnes, 25 foot high of used Clothes
        
        Five-storey Crane
        
        Sound of the heartbeat speaker - recording the audiences heartbeats as they entered the sitspecific installation.
        
        3000 stacked biscuit tins - rusty, old, oxidised….
        
        Installed at an armory - old drill hall used by the army to hold equipment = very industrial, large cavernous space….
        
        Rectangle arrangement of lights around clothes - non traditional materials used/ everyday items that audience can bring their own meaning/reading
        
        Site specific and temporary - installation in New York, Paris and later in Japan, this piece challenges the notion of the art object as a “masterpiece” - precious and original……
        
        ‘No Man’s Land’ is a testament to Boltanski’s social and cultural heritage. He has used his artmaking to refelect his French and Jewish background, particularly the period of the Holocaust, which his jewish father had lived and survived through. Boltanski highlights the random and incidental cycle of life through the use of old clothing to represent people and a crane with a grapple to symbolize the hand of fate. Once the grapple picks up a random article of clothing and then discards it in another place, Boltaski suggests that similarly people can so easily be disposed of. This could possibly indicate a homage to the holocaust as during the 1940s in Germany and all over Europe, millions of people were being pursecuted simply because they were born and raised as a Jew.
      - The focal point of this work is the 25-foot-high mound of salvaged clothing rising from the floor. It is centered in the middle of the room, creating a tall mound, shadowing over the surrounding space, this represents bodies, piled up to show the amount of death, the crane picks up these ‘bodies’, dropping them and then repeating the process, showing a loss of individuality and life and death, with Boltanski himself stating “why do I live and someone else dies?”
    - - The smaller squares around the pile have also been lit up with spot lights in the corners creating a spotlight effect referencing the concentration camps of Nazi , Germany. The site that was in New York was in the cold winter and then the other half of the year the work was in France during the summer.
- - - - individual identity
        
        loss of identity in the collective experience
      - transitory, dynamic nature of human existence
      - enigma of life and death
        
        transient nature of life and death
      - obsession with recording and classifying our own lives
      - abandonment; recalls events and memories
      - childhood
        
        children who were once so important to him are dead as adults
        
        mourns death of his own childhood
      - quiet and disturbing comment on the genocide of Jewish chikdren by Nazis in WW2
        
        sacred nature of each individual child killed in holocaust
        
        suggest killed kids not recognised as individual human beings but rather part of a species to be exterminated
    - - site-specific installation art
      - recycles old photos
      - ephemeral materials > > newspaper clippings, photographs, snapshots, clothing, candles, light bulbs, old biscuit tins
      - open titled works; emotive but ambiguous in nature
      - tin biscuit boxes
        
        Europeans = hold memories and trinkets, a vessel to convey nostalgia, memory, preciousness, mystery
        
        lids enhance mystery; 'what's inside?'
    - - uses old black and white photographs, photos from his own childhood
      - often uses old photos found at Parisian flea markets
  - - - strive to create and maintain it > degree which it is lst in the midst of the collective experience
    - - real first name = Liberty
    - - hence the ambiguity for his artworks
  - - - Jewish ancestry not spoken about during childhood
        
        father spent 2 years under floorboards during German occupation bc jewish; strangeness of early life affected his perception of the world
    - - did not attend school after age 11, didn't go onto street until 18