Arithmomaniacs are obsessed with numbers. Indeed, several artists can be characterized as arithmomaniacs. One thinks for example of Roman Opalka who, since 1965, has re-transcribed the infinite series of natural numbers starting from zero. One can think of On Kawara’s work entitled One Million Years (Past) (1970), which is a repertory of ten 200-page volumes covering the million years extending from 998031 B.C. to the year 1969. Christian Boltanski is perhaps not an arithmomaniac, but numbers are important to him. And also what goes along with numbers, i.e. listings, or lists. When he plans to name all the Earth’s inhabitants for the year 2000, he realizes it will take three and a half years; he never would have been able to make a precise list of all births and deaths for that period...  

Christian Boltanski. Les abonnés du téléphone, 2000.
Photo Marc Domage / Tutti. All rights reserved.

The obsession with numbers is here used to think about the individual and the masses: how can what is unique stand up for itself against the many? How can our individualities survive the collective? For Christian Boltanski, seeking to be exhaustive, the quantity of numbers becomes vertiginous. When he writes in 1973 to a museum: "I would like a room in our museum to present all the things surrounding a person throughout his life and left after his death, bearing witness to his existence", he demonstrates with an impossible request how the unique individual is a totality, as inescapably as the sum of all living beings is. From One to the Multiple, there is a form of identity working in negative in Christian Boltanski's always unfinished work.