Speaking from his home in Paris, at a moment when it was impossible to meet in person, this was possibly one of, if not the last, major interview given by Christian Liberté Boltanski, before his untimely death in the summer of 2021. In hindsight it reads as a remarkable testament to the artist’s energies and endeavour, his explaining the significance of life over death. Beyond art Christian spoke eloquently as a human being of the falsehoods that inform our lives, as an avoidance of the truth. Every word a breath.
For all of the readymade elements that make up a work by Christian Boltanski, in conversation, he insists he is still a painter. A painter working without paints or canvas, Boltanski finds degrees of colour in faded photographs of anonymous and original individuals, and in their clothing, the discarded garments that they might well have worn, the shoes, their spectacles, their crumpled scarfs, that are by his tormented imagination drawn together to create his emotional environments, that for the involving of an audience become these highly-charged ‘happenings’, that reflect as much of Boltanski’s angst and anxieties, and they do the spectator’s own grievances when encountering the work. And unlike a painter, Boltanski has no desire we stand in front of a work, that for him is everything of a confrontation between the object and self, more that we are at the centre of it, and that a work surrounds us in the same way that we experience life.
Boltanski’s sincerity is fuelled by his insisting on asking of his audience what he asks of himself, of such humanist questions as the presence of ‘god’, and of ‘the value and beauty of nature’. Born in the summer of 1944 when the Second World War was coming to a calamitous end, Boltanski was of a generation whose immediate family suffered greatly, and he saw the aftermath and atmosphere of war, as the undoing of his identity. For a long time he felt subservient to, and not the master of, his destiny. As a…
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