Christian Boltanski, Life in the Making @ Pompidou

Christian Boltanski, Depart,  Life in the Making

There will be no surprises in this exhibition for visitors familiar with Christian Boltanski's work. Boltanski is an artist who has been preoccupied with similar issues for fifty years, and he found a language in which to express those ideas very early in his career. Moreover, since the 1990s, the innovation has not always been in the works themselves, but in the way the installations are exhibited. In fact, the most interesting iterations of his work have often been the unique and interesting spaces of exhibition. 

Christian Boltanski, Les Regards, 2011

On entering Life in the Making on the top floor of the Centre Pompidou, I felt as though I was entering a mausoleum. The temporary exhibition walls are painted a dark grey, the lighting of Boltanski's black and white images is minimal, if it exists at all, and the mechanically sounding heart beat - no doubt the artist's own - drums through the entire space. To the point where the presence of the thumping heartbeat becomes subliminal, working on a deeper level of consciousness, underlying every step, and no doubt, leading to headaches for some visitors. As we move through the exhibition spaces, the black and white family photographs lining the walls plunge us into the familiar Boltanski world of memory, pathos and hopelessness. Given the sounds and images, I was puzzled by the exhibition's title, Life in the Making. Because nothing here resembles life in the present, in the making, or the pleasure of simply being alive. Rather, in familiar Boltanski fashion, everything points to death.

Christian Boltanski, Autel Chases, 1987

An enormous pile of black clothes, le Terril Grand-Hornu, 2015 resembles the charred remains of the unfortunate people to whom they might once have belonged. A single electrical light bulb hangs above the tip of the pile, barely illuminating the signifiers of death below. It's impossible to see any kind of life after death inside this dark, depressing world. Even when death is far from the work, it's memory haunts our thoughts and imaginations. Thus, for example, in his well known use of images of school children, in a work such as Après in which photographs show anonymous faces of girls smiling as they play in Hamburgerstrasse in Berlin, the blown up, indistinct, anonymous faces printed on very thin, torn veils are haunted by the fact that the girls must be dead. The children may not be  dead, but Boltanski reproduces their portraits in such a way that they remind us of ID photographs of Holocaust victims, or sufferers of other kinds of violence; they are votives encouraging us to mourn.  

Christian Boltanski, Prendre la Parole, 2005

Or in the row upon row of columns made from rusted steel boxes, each with a small photograph on its front, we cannot help but imagine that each box contains the ashes of the person depicted or naming the box. Or perhaps their valuables have been placed in the box, as if in a vault, for safekeeping. Either way, there is no suggestion that anyone is coming back to collect their belongings. 

Christian Boltanski, Les Registres du Grand-Hornu
1997

Boltanski grew up with a father who, as a Russian Jew, had escaped deportation by hiding underneath the floorboards for over a year. The profound effect this had on Boltanski's father is potentially taken up throughout the son's art across decades. The icons and symbols of the death camps are everywhere recognizeable, even if they are not present, in the works: piles of clothes, great numbers of blurred, anonymous faces with blackened-out eyes in photographs printed on flimsy cloths, black mirrors and veils, as well as sound installations that evoke practices of witnessing death and trauma. Of course, the exhibition and the museum are now closed in keeping with the government shutdown. However, should further reiterations of Life in the Making be staged elsewhere, Boltanski's work might just be seen as an omen for the end of the world that appears to be approaching through the silent city streets of our time.