| An “Entre-Deux” Story, by Catherine Grenier |
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Excerpt from La Revanche des Emotions (“Emotion’s Revenge”), Catherine Grenier, published by Seuil, 1997. In large Parisian apartments there is a little central room opening onto all the other rooms, called an "entre-deux". During the World War II, a doctor hid for whole months in the closet of his “entre-deux”. After the war, he resumed his place in the family he had never left. The art of Christian Boltanski has always been bound up with stories. Sometimes sad, sometimes gay, these narrations which begin and foster the work are neither a recitation of the "history with a capital H", concerning us all, nor the chronicle of the "history with a small H", concerning only himself. These are “entre-deux” stories: between anecdote and legend, they are as fictional as they are true, even more so true in that he has invented them. In this way Boltanski positions himself in the lineage of artists of oral tradition, if one can consider that this type of lineage exists. What he creates is part of a genealogy of work that transmit words – works the form of which is not visual nor linguistic, but between these two formalizations of meaning, a more haphazard and shifting territory, that of the story in the process of being told, from memory brought to life. Therefore from his first works the artist tells about lives, his, that of the Durand family, that of a stranger in Bois-Colombes. In a second step he recalls deaths, his, those of crime victims, those of the Holocaust. His way of telling is particular because, as a reserved man, he tells without words. Owing to this Christian Boltanski is not a teacher, or a storyteller, or rabbi, even if sometimes he assumes the appearance of these men of words. He himself describes himself as a “painter”. In this way one imagines his body of work as a large fresco, which unfailingly refers to medieval art's illuminated chronicles. More prosaically, confronted with his installations, one notices the importance of the objects: objects that speak, for him and of him. Speech is therefore made principally through a familiar repertory, first of souvenir images, which are souvenirs and objects before being images, then pieces of furniture, biscuit tins, marionettes, and clothing.
In Saynètes Comiques (“Comedy Sketches”), which is subsequent to the project re-creating his life, the artist submits himself to the rule of the illustrated journal, while forewarning the spectator: these "sketches" are, as their name recalls, living tableaux, salon fantasies that counterfeit the autobiographical genre, and more especially, confessions. Moreover, all childhood memories resemble each other, and those that Christian Boltanski presents to us are even more stereotypical than those described by the Countess de Ségur, an uninterrupted continuation since the first games, punishments, first communions, laughter and tears. Nevertheless, what is intriguing in these grotesque constructions is the share in them is the share of real as opposed to invention. An image of the artist is created by negation, the image of he that he suggests he would have been if he had not been the perfect child, and which is perhaps what is really at stake in the fiction. But what if this positive side of this portrait by negation were the “real” image? One recalls the Jewish joke, in the register he enjoys: “Why do you tell me you are going to Warsaw to make me think you are going elsewhere, when in reality you are going to Warsaw?" The entire work will be built on this paradox: to appreciate Christian Boltanski’s work we must let the tale be told to us, believe it unconditionally, beyond this credulous attitude's absurdity and naiveté, whereas everything would make us think we are in an illusion. The accumulated proofs weighing in, comprised of grimaces, the situation's burlesque, the stage scenery, the general infantilism, confirm the image in the status of truth: what is so well denied cannot be irrelevant. The theatre of oneself is not a light farce; it is a harmless drama. In the “entre-deux” of which speaks the artist and in which he brings us, reality’s protocol is defined: hide to show and show to hide, believe in what is shown just as in what is hidden. Swept to behind the scenes of the self, the spectator approaches the mystery of the "entre-deux” without finding it. There is no better hiding-place than this daily life in which the artwork coils up and plays itself out. Hidden, truth is imperious; shown, it becomes invisible, or rather impossible to believe. The artist is pulled in two directions by his first self, Christian, the child, and his second self, the adult Christian Boltanski. A chasm separates them. One (but which?) was a French Christian, the other was a Polish Jew. He tried to escape the situation (but which?) by pretending that one of them was dead. The Saynètes Comiques followed from an installation in homage to Karl Valentin. Inspired by the German satirist and actor, who took on the clown’s garments to incarnate society's fool, he created a dual character: Christian Boltanski, the ventriloquist clown, accompanied by his doll, Little Christian. For months he would create the souvenirs of these two doubles of himself, fictional souvenirs of a clown who would be called Christian Boltanski, and re-create the sketches of the daily life, given as fictional as well, but to an indeterminate degree, of the child Christian. As for the artist, he cannot be equated with one or the other of the states he brings to life before us. The clown, if we are to believe the fiction, is dead and the child no more; it is there the “entre-deux” of ages, an ”entre-deux” of words he is addressing us with. Neither clown nor child, but like the clown, like the child and through their intervention he solicits the spectator's empathy, called by this voice which speaks to the depths of the unconscious. In a period when art affirms itself as rather proclamative, he gives pride of place to the subliminal voice. All the artworks he realizes therefore convey to another both familiar and unfamiliar, who indirectly questions this indeterminate of himself. Whether photographs of the Durand family or children in the Mickey Mouse Club, or even photographs of small news items or Les Lentillères CES students, the artist remains in the ventriloquist’s position and makes these images of others speak of the single subject bringing them together: the haphazard geography of his identity. Confronted with the real, ordinary identity of someone French who could have been called Durand, belong the Mickey Mouse Club, go attend the Les Lentillères CES, but also perhaps be associated closely or not so closely with a small news item, a mythic personification begins to take form, a demonic and protective alter ego, the Polish Jew. This man in his hat and too-short clothing that he stages in Les Saynètes, whom he says is inspired by Fernand Raynaud, seems to come from straight out of a Hassidic tale. Starting with this work, and even though he subsequently remains hidden behind images, the shadow of this second identity adds a layer to the artist's profile. In the muffled world of ordinary life, as in that of art, it is that which permits excess. Grotesque and derisive, such as his early works manifested it, tears and lamentations, which would impose themselves subsequently, only find their grounding in the liberating occurrence exceeding first, the framework of consciousness, and secondly, modern orthodoxy. Boltanski’s Poland is Jarry’s Patagonia, the psychic country where the unthinkable is thought and the undo-able is done, leaving free rein to one's instincts, one's most prosaic or most morbid impulses. In this way he frees a territory of extradition in the heart of art, the reign of an elsewhere found in the very foundation itself of reality. Based on this world, any representation becomes remarkable, any form an extrapolation. In this way Images Modèles and Compositions, which seem to reject the theatre of the self of the re-creations, to involve the image on the part of a sensitive representation of the world, display an obviousness that runs close to iconoclasm. The hypertrophy of the banal, the deliberate choice of middling taste, immersion in the common, this all takes, with a contemporary artist, a virtually obscene air. Because what will quickly be disturbing, with Christian Boltanski, is the absence of critical perspective; literalness, which will weigh on his art with a whisper of decorativeness, then of pathos, finally ambiguity or even deception. Owing to this, paradoxically, his art is troubling right down to its most simple forms, through the effect of this very simplicity, always next to nothing. In the 1970s the irrationality that showcased the “personal mythologies” movement, like the rationality that developed conceptual art, sought by two parallel paths to maintain a distance and re-enchant a world undermined by political and social disillusionment. By confusing mythology and myth-creating, as by putting the conceptual apparatus to work for an assumed infantilism, the artist reveals the nothingness on which the real structures itself. Far from a denunciation – Christian Boltanski is recognized by the mythographic research as he acknowledges what the conceptuals have brought to his work - his artwork operates out of this "entre-deux" that brings both artist and art to the realm of essential activity, the consumption of reality. In this way all his creative work comes into the realm of voluntary limitation of the experience principal; physical and psychological confinement that will determine both the pattern and shape of the artworks, by giving pride of place always to contact and emotion, tracked down even in the most fleeting and deteriorated forms. The artist had two brothers, one was called a prophet, the other an evangelist. He was called Christian and he held himself in this way between the Old and New Testament. Boltanski expressed his interest very early in people of the cloth, especially in Christian objects and figures. At the same time his work knitted together identification going back to the Jewish actor’s profile in Les Saynètes. There again the “entre-deux” position appears, both a place of passage and of the saturation of two cultures, Jewish and Catholic, and also a retreat into the fundamental impossibility of something beyond the real. This impossibility has a face, which reveals itself recurrently throughout his creative work: that of death, which takes varied forms of disappearance, oblivion, nothingness but also litany, shadows, the too-much-of-it. A death which is not given in a perspective of finality, but for an experience of daily life. In this way the artist refutes all speculations on death: whether it is the death of the masses, that patiently and obsessively he brings back to the naming of individual deaths, or on a more theoretical level, to the affirmation of death in art, or the death of history, that a few balls of earth, a few little silhouettes cut out of cardboard throw back to the realm of ideas, or more specifically, ideologies. If he states a bit learnedly that art's domain is that of the people of the cloth, it is that he is positioning art’s field of intervention as that of life. Owing to this, all the forms in his art determine themselves in a presence on the verge of nothingness. From the subjects he likes best - everyday life, anonymous people, marionettes – to the techniques he employs – photography, often reproduced from a haphazardly-found images, by tinkering with small objects, cutting out, piling up, without forgetting the very harmless materials from everyday life – boxes, lamps, beds, clothing – all his body of work is made from nothing, or virtually nothing, weighted nevertheless with a consciousness of their precariousness, because while the creative work is built out of nothing, it does not present arguments of insignificance out of it, quite to the contrary. The artist is attentive in a way we could characterize as religious towards the transfiguration of these scraps of life. First through art, from which it borrows its various means of sanctification, preferring efficiency by borrowing by turn from minimalism, arte povera, photo realism, pattern painting or post-conceptualism, to ensure the image has a current meaning. Then through the personal relationship he maintains with all that, in his hands, goes into creating an image; erecting his artwork by basing it on an autobiographical grounding and having for vanishing point his own death, the artist gathers to himself all the materials that go into the creative work. Finally, by the opening he leaves the other to appropriate these images himself and to see himself in them, by a phenomenon of translation, he offers the vehicles which will be successively laughter, then pathos.
With Monuments, Boltanski determinedly situated his work in the realm of pathos. Renouncing the humour of his early work, as in the poetic theatre of the Compositions théatrales ("Theatrical Compositions”) and Ombres (“Shadows”), he brings these works fully into the funerary dimension of art. "Raising sepulchres” seems to be the artistic plan to which he devotes himself, with means just as derisive and precarious as before. Whereas all the faces he presents to us up to now had seemed to be his, each of the images he duplicates and stages in Monuments, from which it comes, becomes a figure of death. The artistic question, like that of the pleasure of the images, refers henceforward to a work of mourning in action, which gives art a function of exorcism. By recalling the names and faces of the dead, he summons the operational nature of the images, this theological characteristic permitting the relationship of representation to the real. The doubt which seeps into the image erases its boundaries, undermines its reliefs, and dilates the work beyond itself to this occurrence of truth flickering out in the memory. In the context of the modern world, “paying the testamentary debt”, in the evocative term forged by Günter Brus, could indeed be the responsibility incumbent if not on the artist, at least on the art. To this memorial function corresponds a radical conception of art: one that attests to what is real, freed of any conceptual occurrence. In doing this, Boltanski joins with the legacy of "pathos" artists, from Goya to Artaud, including those well-known figures dear to him such as Tadeusz Kantor and Karl Valentin. He also opens or reopens the door to an entire young generation today, when one thinks of Douglas Gordon, Kendell Geers, Maria Marshall or in the field of painting of Luc Tuymans and Peter Doig, who all face what Geers calls “the principle of reality”. A reality which cannot be understood except in this “entre-deux” which approaches it and faces it from the start. He came from a family of intellectuals. His brothers wrote scholarly books. As for himself, he complacently admitted to having left school very early and never having read. On his nightstand next to the Bible was a pile of Marie-Claire women’s magazine which - he said - were his favourite publications. If “art and life” were the great theme of a contemporary art inspired by the avant-garde, few artists have nevertheless entered this realm without having passed through the “great culture”. The 1980s and 90s especially insisted on the self-reflecting character and analytical essence of art, preceded in this by proposals made by minimalist and conceptual artists in a joining together of art and philosophy. Two leading artists have nevertheless radically brought their creative work into the realm of the immediacy of what is lived, re-created as close as possible to their inner self: Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys. Both, beyond the great difference in their practices, were severely criticized for this lack of distance, denounced sometimes as indifference, sometimes as manipulation. In presenting arguments for form sticking to its subject, in subtracting art from any rhetorical shape to favour on the contrary an explicit, even didactic approach to the work, these two artists liberated art from its modern husk to bring about the birth of "contemporariness". What Boltanski has in common with these creators who speak out against contemporary art while remaining irrevocable, is this freedom to envisage art as an original experience rather than a cultural fact. In using Detective crime magazines or Marie-Claire women’s magazines as the source of his artwork, the artist does not strike off erudite culture, he deactivates the distancing process that culture introduces. In the same way, his marked interest for Catholicism aligns itself in this immediacy sought in sensitive expression. Lonely hearts letters, crime stories, the lives of saints, these will be the vehicles for direct access to the truth intrinsic in the real, his truth of experience. If Boltanski’s art can touch the real, it is because he situates it in an “entre-deux”, an ambiguity that puts the real into motion without delimiting it. In this way the personification of life always accompanies that of death, the executioner's victim, the sinner's saint, the good father or the bad father… In Monuments itself, the ambiguity is absolute, almost touching cynicism or at least incomprehensibility. Why these children’s faces, designated as dead people, associated with the coloured surfaces of Christmas wrapping paper? Why stage as dead these faces of Jews who are perhaps still living? Why an installation in a church of these accumulations of images or clothing that irremediably cause one to think of the Holocaust? Why use these images of the Swiss as mortuary emblems? Because, a psychoanalyst would tell us, the line separating that which cannot be reconciled, the self and the other, is in fact a join, an area of mingling and friction that permits differentiation. The artist has he himself several times underscored the nearness of art to psychoanalysis. But art in itself brings an answer. Because he chose to express himself through images, Boltanski integrates the principal of lack of resemblance, unfaithfulness in the very literality it bears. Refuting culture as a meaningful structure does not bring it closer to naive or folk artists. His work does not cut the tie to the great Western tradition of art; to the contrary, it is one of its most fertile expressions. Tempted by the purity of systems of repressed abstraction that one can discern in his "biscuit tin" version of minimalism, the artists has nevertheless fully opted for the impurity of image. An image which talks, beyond the artist and beyond itself; an image which carries therefore in itself, independently of its creator, the foundation of its autonomy. In this way narration, so important in Boltanski’s art, is not what the image produces, but the effect induced by it. It is what the artist demonstrated in his early work, what he leaves to simply take effect in the later work. At the intersection between the Bible and Marie-Claire, it is life which speaks in the image: life, sealed in the “entre-deux” between art and death. Excerpt from La Revanche des Emotions (“Emotion’s Revenge”), Catherine Grenier, published by Seuil, 1997. 
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