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Boltanski's visual archives

RICHARD HOBBS

ABSTRACT

The Archive is a central but

paradoxical image in the work of the con- temporary

French artist Christian Boltanski

(born 1944).

Because

Boltanski is

obsessively concerned with the death-like rupture and loss by which experience is continuously reduced to fragmentary and inac- curate memories of the past, especially regarding the adult's perception of childhood, archives represent for him a potential means of regaining access to what has been lost and is being mourned.

However,

Boltan-

ski's installation and performance works that investigate the powers of archives set out ironically the absurdly limited and misleading processes of an archive.

Photography

in particular is shown to be unreliable, more icon than document, challenging rather than asserting notions of cat- egory and coherence. The notion of the icon, moreover, underlines the spiritual dimension that accompanies this absurdist relationship with the past. Our faulty but much-desired awareness of a past gives complex value to our present, often in a touching, pathetic way, however arbitrary the means involved. The trail of the archive leads to an uncertainty that is nonetheless precious. The many subjects that

Boltanski treats in this

light vary disarmingly and controversially from the trivia and detritus of everyday living to the supreme seriousness of the Holocaust. He also transforms himself and his family into a labyrinthine and playful archive. Here a curious relationship emerges with the reputation and books of his brother, the sociologist Luc

Boltanski. Christian borrows with no

explicit acknowledgement the archive resources of Luc's sociological research as a sub-text in his visual works. Even more surprisingly,

Luc Boltanski

published in 1993

HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 11 No. 4

© 1998 SAGE Publications (London,

Thousand Oaks and New

Delhi)

[0952-6951(199811)11:4;121-140; 006612] at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on March 6, 2016hhs.sagepub.comDownloaded from 122

Poème,

a collection of highly emotive and personal poetry about the past and the Holocaust. The problems raised by

Christian Boltanski

and by

Luc conflate the

personal and historical dimensions of the

Archive.

Key words archive, Boltanski, Holocaust,

poetry, visual arts The contemporary

French artist Christian Boltanski

(born 1944) has turned repeatedly to the subject of archives in his major works. In a broader sense he implicitly celebrates and critiques the Archive throughout his entire oeuvre, even where explicit reference to it is absent. In the 1990s his work has attracted increasing attention, but interpretations and reactions to it have been diverse, showing more puzzlement than praise or even consensus. I shall seek here to unravel the contradictions in Boltanski's visual archives in order to investigate the teleology of his seemingly absurdist works. I shall trace what he clearly perceives as a complex but pervasive archival culture, one in which the relationships that underpin our self-consciousness are inescapably bound up with the Archive. In doing this,

I shall build some

bridges between his visual archives and the writings of his brother,quotesdbs_dbs29.pdfusesText_35

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