Video No. 6045. English Language Pal VHS.
An Exploration of Art on Film.
Directed by Gerald Fox.
The French artist Christian Boltanski (b.1944) has achieved an international reputation for his installations based on the meticulous display of photographs or ordinary "found" objects - a method Boltanski traces to his early fascination with ethnographic museum exhibits.
In this intriguing interview, Boltanski discusses the development of his art to the 1990s. He is shown at work on such recent projects as 'Dispersion', featuring a room filled with a deep layer of discarded clothing.
Born of a Corsican mother and Jewish father at the time of France's liberation after World War II, Boltanski experienced a childhood coloured by almost hallucinatory anxieties. The Jewish experience of the Holocaust is a haunting presence in his work, although Boltanski dilates its significance to include all onlookers - thus precarious columns of biscuit tins bear untitled "obituary" photographs, with no way of distinguishing between heroes and villains, and portraits of children may allude to the child victims of the concentration camps or perhaps to the "lost" childhood of the viewers themselves, an ambiguity that underlines Boltanski's view that we can never stand back judgementally from human experience.
Boltanski's excavation of his own past is combined with a refusal to categorize his art, and this remarkable interview conveys the complexity - by turns disturbing and surreally humorous - of the relationship between individual experience and the momentum of history.
