Christian Boltanski: representation and the performance of memory

Memory studies at the turn of the century are in a boom; struggles with the concept of memory increasingly occupy contemporary artists, writers, historians and theorists across fields as diverse as cognitive sciences, cultural studies and psychology. Artmakers such as Christian Boltanski have become a familiar focus for the problematics of understanding personal and cultural remembrances and their relationship to history, identity and memorial, yet they also offer us new ways to map the performativity of memory. His theatrical installations highlight the engagement of memory and art to body and cultural space. Boltanski's works point to memories as continuously recreated events, based on the past, but understood through the present. Through re-examining Boltanski's 'performances', we can therefore find optimism in the crisis in memory that grips modern society. Boltanski's work seems to seat memory comfortably in its uncertain twilight space. Rather than rushing to ineffectually freeze-frame the past, Boltanski seems happiest articulating, questioning and unsettling the conceptions of mnemonics through the complexities of the photographic medium. Revisiting Boltanski it is thus possible to map memory not just as a host of floating signifiers nested in fragile physiologies, but a performative form, a set of concurrences which hover between original and copy, a theatrical source of creativity.

Replicating Memories

Andreas Huyssen locates the millennial critical and artistic obsession with memory in "a deepening sense of crisis often articulated in the reproach that our culture is terminally ill with amnesia." This is a crisis, born of the dangers to memory, perceived in the growth of technology, the image-laden spread of mass communication and the rapid acceleration of modern living. Memory may have been continuously and obsessively archived, memorialised, monumentalised, recorded and mapped through the photographic and filmic image, but time, as Scott McQuire says, "for judgement [between one flicker on a screen and the next] disappears."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

     Huyssen goes on to claim that,
     ... the memory boom however is a potentially healthy sign ... a
     contestation of the informational hyperspace and an expression of
     the basic human need to live in extended structures of temporality
     however they may be organised. It is also a reaction formation of
     mortal bodies that want to hold on to their temporality against a
     media world spinning a cocoon of timeless claustrophobia and
     nightmarish phantasms and simulations.

Jay Winter maps the strengths and the weaknesses of the contemporary fascination, even "obsession with memory" when

     he notes that,
     [t]he study of memory is one of the most fashionable branches of
     scholarly inquiry in a wide variety of disciplines. ...
     Consequently, we have a dazzling array of inquiries into memory,
     postmemory, counter-memory, traumatic memory, collective memory,
     collected memory, national memory, testimonial memory, witnessing,
     repressed memory, distorted memory, underground memory, deep
     memory, cultural memory, and so on. No pair of these terms can be
     equated; indeed, there is no consensus at all on even the
     rudimentary elements out of which some kind of conceptual ordering
     of memory studies could be built ... He questions the vagueness
     as "the term memory becomes a metaphor", but for what is unclear.
     For melancholy? For nostalgia? For the "uncanny"? And what's more,
     the term memory does not mean the same thing in German or French as
     it does in English. Metaphors multiply in this field at an
     exponential rate.

Without delving too deeply it is possible to see that memories are potential, simultaneously irretrievable, instable, fluid, transient poignant, melancholic and goldenly nostalgic. The mapping of memory offers history a chance to reinvent itself and yet concurrently exposes the uncrossable voids, those irreversible wounds that remind us of what humanity is capable of. Memory is a source of power, a storehouse of cultural treasures and a source of grief and obituary. Perhaps part of the contemporary critical appeal of the notion is thus is in its postmodern slipperiness, its poetics, it's coupling of irony and identity and it chameleon propensity to multiply and mutate across fields of inquiry.

     Huysson notes:
     [i]t does not require much theoretical sophistication to see that
     all representation--whether in language, narrative, image or
     recorded sound--is based on memory. Re-presentation always comes
     after, even though some media will try to provide us with the
     delusion of pure presence. But rather than leading us to some
     authentic origin or giving us verifiable access to the real,
     memory, even and especially in its belatedness, is it-self based on
     representation. The past is not simply there in memory, it must be
     articulated in memory.

In constantly questioning memory, we then hover in the in between, neither the true and exact presentation of a past event, nor an entirely contemporary reinvention. Memories are inextricably tied to the past yet cannot be articulated, viewed or shown without a contemporary recontextualisation. Filtered through the present, they are what Huyssen calls a 'Re-presentation': problematic restored events or behaviours. Yet this gap between past and present in memory, argues Huyssen, may be cause for celebration. The fissure that opens up between experiencing an event and remembering it in representation is unavoidable. Rather than lamenting it or ignoring it, this split should be understood as a powerful stimulant for cultural and artistic creativity." It is in this gap that Boltanski's performative representations of memory reside.

The Outvering Afterimage

Boltanski famously works with ongoing themes of childhood and death, and of memory that shapes our sense of reality. His works show a "shifting consciousness between now and then," and work with the "lingering shadowy presence of the past." Boltanski's works for the "Places with a Past: New Site Specific Art in Charleston" exhibition during the towns Spoleto Festival in 1991, for example, centered on the concepts of imagined and recreated past. Shadows, designed and installed by Boltanski, centered on the Peter Bocquet House. 93 Broad Street, Charleston. Shadows mapped what he saw as the collective memory of Charleston city, "a dream reconstructed according to modern day memory-'not a real town but a museum town' shaped by our images from this film [Gone with the Wind] and other sources-that simulates a past that can never be again". He used characters, imagery and actual projections of stills from Gone With the Wind, couched inside the antiquity of a Franco-American period house. The images presented were shadowy and insubstantial, projected only as silhouettes onto screens that fluttered in the breeze or windows rear lit and visible only through half opened doors. In one section of the house. Boltanski also placed images that emphasize this passing of time, a Polarold and old books. Visible only though a crack in the wall. Boltanski lit these objects with a candle, but this candle was again what Boltanski calls "a figment of reality" not a real object, but another image projection.

Much of Boltanski's work uses the power of light and shadow to emphasise memory's place in the twilight between past and present. Helga Pakasaar notes this in her introduction to the Camera Lucida exhibition of 1989.

The physical presence of reflected and projected light giving the flat impenetrable surfaces of reproductions a seductive, physical presence ... Metaphorically significant glows and shadows express the intangibility of light and form ... in fully exploiting the transformative properties of light, artists such as Boltanski, keep images in this enlivened state and consequently, import a sensual and disturbing immediacy to these works, similar to the quivering effect of an afterimage."

The second part of Boltanski's Charleston work Inventory of Objects Belonging to a Young Woman of Charleston, was housed in the Gibbes Museum of Art, 135 Meeting Street, Charleston. This work echoed another ongoing theme in Boltanski's art. the questioning of self-representation and identity and the problematic significance given by the present to objects from the past. Boltanski took objects belonging to an anonymous college student at the College of Charleston, arranged them in vitrines and on pedestals and exhibited them at the Gibbes Museum of art. There were echoes of other Boltanski exhibitions, a continuing fascination with human remainders, lost property offices, catalogued belongings of the dead, but in contrast these were the belongings of a contemporary living student. To Mary Jane Jacob who curated the "Places with a Past" exhibition, Boltanski's inventory gave significance to the everyday. "Boltanski's exhibit spoke about how objects became memorialised and made valuable by the passage of time and through the manner of their presentation". She saw this as "using the belongings of one individual [thus] touching on the life of the Everyman." In the context of Boltanski's body of work, however, this work can also be seen as a gentle critique of attempting to inventory and thus re-present the past. Here the objects were present day, and yet by their inclusion in an exhibition "the present seemed cast into the future."

Boltanski's display "embalmed the objects so effectively that one sensed that they were all that remained of the owner's life." His careful labelling of each contemporary object 'Umbrella,' 'Gloves,' 'Shoes,' also parodies the historical museum label that attempts to fix an object in the past, to solidify the memory of history. Boltanski's Charleston inventory also refers to his wider interest and distrust of evidence gathering, and inventories as a whole. Many of his other installations refer to the idea of an inventory as an incomplete and shadowy device for memory disguised as a scientific and rational way of mapping the past. Whilst often inventories can provide the only clues to an erased life, Boltanski remains fascinated as to how these 'clues' can only be gathered and examined through contemporary eyes, thus working with whilst mourning, what Scott McQuire calls memory's 'sense of irretrievable loss."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The vast majority of Boltanski's work uses the photograph in some way and the medium has proved masterful at capturing the Inconstancy of memory and self-identification. Boltanski's Monument toured as part of the Islands Contemporary Installations Exhibition in 1986, being featured as part of the "Camera Lucida" Exhibition at the Walter Phillips Gallery, Atlanta, curated by Helga Pakasaar. It used photographs encased in installation, a Boltanski trademark, whilst works like Lessons of Darkness, also featured in the "Camera Lucida" exhibition were produced as hand bound books and later published. Both works utilise the inconstancies within the photographic medium to unsettle and question the place of memory in the self and in time and both engage the body in a performative reading of the work. A photograph captures a moment in time, but is filtered by the perception of the photographer. By its very nature it implies selection and priority, one moment chosen out of a million possibilities. The multiplicity of possible perspectives is endless, whilst the definite moment in time remains crystallised. As Barthes notes.

The photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination, false on the level of perception, true on the level of time, a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest shared hallucination (on the one hand 'it is not there' but on the other' it has indeed been'): a mad image chafed by reality.

Boltanski emphasises the contradictions possible in the photograph to map the contradictions in memory and representation itself. "Representation is problematized by exposing its rhetoric as well as its more opaque meaning. The paradoxical nature of the photograph-as a commemorative record that is witness to and denial of human existence-is explored."

Monument, contains three black and white photographs placed into an installation shaped like a conventional monument column and lit by Boltanski's trademark individually placed bulbs. The photographs are of French children, individually unnamed but collectively referred to in their many incarnations in Boltanski's work as The Children of Dijon. A sense of lost presence is thus conjured up, we know little of these children beside the fact that Boltanski was personally interested in the children growing up in post-war France (despite the constant attempt to read this work as alluding to the Holocaust). Boltanski admits that whilst the children were anonymous French children of the 1970's, the images did flirt with death, as the children in the photographs were" now dead, not really dead, but [the] images of them were no longer true," since they had grown to adulthood. He states "[t]he children in the photos no longer existed, so I decided to make a monument to the glory of childhood now dead".

Helga Pakasaar calls Monument a

     ... shrine-like assemblage of Christmas wrapping paper and blurred
     faces, dimly lit by incandescent lamps fed by a network of vein
     like wires ... Boltanski transforms the remains of human lives into
     an ironic memento mori. He acknowledges that photography is a
     posthumous affair and draws on this sense of loss to evoke
     collective memory.

Andrea Liss acknowledges the central role Boltanski's work has taken in the heated discussions around the ethical problems of photography and memory, particularly in reference to the holocaust. She joins the debate in her chapter "Between Trauma and Nostalgia. Christian Boltasnki's memorials and Art Spiegelman's Maus", in her recent work Trespassing Through Shadows: Memory, Photography and the Holocaust, aiming" to point out the dilemmas and the possibilities [Boltanski's work] raises about eliciting feigned pathos and risk[s] turning specific historical memory into nostalgia to provocatively engage with the past with the present and to implicate the contemporary viewer" Artistic images of post Holocaust "postmemorial", like Boltanski's," have been famously interrogated by theorists such as Andrea Liss and Marianne Hirsch, due to the fact that "the very presumptions they generate-their horrible fullness simultaneously couple with hovering absences about the realities of the people's endurances and destructions-that taunt the viewer with uncertainties."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Even though the fear that the nameless documentation, repetition of images, illusionary sentimentality and unclear references that mark Boltanski's work will only contribute to the irreconcilable pain, loss and erasure of Holocaust victims and their families, Liss does admit that, even in Boltanski's more directly Holocaust related exhibitions, like Altar to Lycee Chases, where the graduation photos of a private Viennese Jewish school from 1931 are rephotographed and lit to expose their shadowy skeletal forms: "the semi-obliterated faces [do] have a moving ability to trace the incomprehensibility of what they are made to stand for". Perhaps out of the gentle performances of Boltanski's installations once can see how Boltanski uses" ... memory as the means through which reworkings, engagements and [physical] confrontations with the past can take place." Despite the problematics of memory, especially when represented in artwork, as Maria Sturken goes on to ask, it is not "... precisely in the controversies and tensions, in the conflicting stories and multiplicity of voices, ... [that] the desire to both deconstruct and question, that the past can be sustained and witnessed within the present."?

Lessons in Darkness was a collection of Boltanski's reworking of photographs, exhibited as hand bound books, shown in a series of different exhibitions and later published. Here he is once again questioning and critiquing what constitutes modern memory recall, in this case the press photograph. The photographs, previously published in the magazine Detective, were of victims and murderers of sensationalist violent crimes. He rephotographed and mixed the photos together, nothing distinguishing murderer form victim and printed them onto semi transparent paper, each page shadowing the one underneath. In later exhibitions following this theme, Boltanski exhibited family photographs of German SS officers, pictured at home with their children, questioning whether this way we could acknowledge the darkness possible within us all, how we could "... love our own bebe in the morning and then kill bebes in the afternoon," how we could all be "... some part Nazis, some part crying at night for their souls." Here Boltanski questions self-representation and identity, opening up the possibility that everyone however memorialised is possible of horror, that the self may not always match the image or the memory of the self. "In unmasking the subjective presence of social identities, the artists point to not only the effect, but also to the origins of representation."

Performing memory

It can also be argued that memory, as mapped by Boltanski, parallels ideas of performance similar to what Richard Schechner famously calls 'restored behavious:" "In fact, restored behaviour is the main characteristic of performance." Schechner, in his early anthropological performance studies working in the intersection between theatre and social behaviour, saw restored behaviours, "... independent of the causal systems (social, psychological, technological) that brought them into existence, the original 'truth' or 'source' of the behaviours may be lost, ignored or contradicted even while this truth or source is apparently being honoured and observed," a statement that could also refer to the idea of memory as memory itself is a selected and performed behaviour. "History is not what happened but what is encoded and transmitted. Performance is not merely a selection from data arranged and interpreted, it is behaviour itself and carries in itself kernels of originality, making it the subject for further interpretation, the source of further study" Schechner sees performance as acknowledgment that "It is not possible to 'get back to' what was." Performance, based as it is on bodies, space and presence, does not necessarily mourn this unrepeatable past but actually relies on the generation of the re-presented moment, the both completely original and simultaneously patently fake, and it is out of this juxtaposition that performance takes its very form. For Boltanski, these similar characteristics attract him to the problems and inherent creativities of working through the past.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Indeed, Boltanski's work embodies the theatricality of memory in its presentation as well as in its content. The method of installation art, his use of everyday objects in conjunction with his photographs, his careful use of light and shadow all speak of a theatricalization of memory and self. "Associating with other materials and texts, once engaged in the theatricalized space of a sculptural construction and activated by the viewers memory, a commonplace snapshot that might be previously overlooked as pedestrian becomes highly charged." Placed in what Pakasaar calls "a new poetic construct...," the public language of social documents "is articulated by subjective excess... They rely on provoking a second sight-the familiar is defamiliarized and what is already known can become compelling again." In the tactile and visual engagement with his work, in both the artists' books and the installations, Boltanski insinuates the viewer into complicity, an involvement with the enlivened images that acts on the body itself. Memory thus is shown as a complex performative, presented by Boltanski in artworks themselves shaped with a strong sense of the theatrical.

Paper Monuments

When finally asked to create a Holocaust monument for an American museum in 1994. Boltanski declined, but he did have an idea for how such a monument could be made. He suggested that if such a thing be made, it should be made of something "fragile, that would not last, like paper," so that the monument in order to last had to be "constantly tended, looked after and rebuilt," as perhaps in the frequent physical watching over and rebuilding of the monument instead of building a monument in bronze that we could leave behind and forget," ... we would have to physically act to remember and keep remembering." Through the fragile art of Christian Boltanski it is possible to understand memory as transient performance, an endlessly reiterable recreation of the past, mediated each time through the body. Boltanski's chosen medium, enhanced by its placement in installation with careful and deliberate use of light and shadow, allows Boltanski to explore the curious photographic double bind, the photograph as both evoker and destroyer of memory. With his art he can highlight the photograph as an object which replaces and re-evokes modern memory whilst simultaneously challenging the possibility of pure or 'true' memory, making obvious by its very nature, the fallacy of the singular perspective, the absolute moment or the unfiltered document of the past. Boltanski takes advantage of the irredeemable sense of loss associated with memory processes, as the past can never be again, but couples this haunting melancholy with a strong sense of irony, constantly reminding the viewer that what is seen is entirely constructed. He gently reminds us that there was never an original pure identity to the past that we can mourn the loss of and while our recreations of the past may flicker or go out, our memory is a performance created in the moment, filtered through a million preconceptions and adaptations, a fragile action that needs constant attention and which speaks just as much of the present as it does of the past.

NOTES:

1. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995), 3.

2. Scott McQuire, Visions of Modernity (London: SAGE, 1998) 129.

3. Huyssen, 6.

4. Jay Winter, "At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture." (Book Reviews) The Art Bulletin, June 2001, V.83 #2, 357-359

5. Huyssen, 5.

6. Huyssen, 5.

7. Mary Jane Jacobs (ed.), Places with a Past: New Site Specific Art at Charleston's Spoleto Festival (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1991), 78.

8. Mary Jane Jacobs, 79.

8. Mary Jane Jacobs, 79.

10. Helga Pakasaar (ed.), Camera Lucida, Catalogue to the 1989 exhibition (Atlanta: Walter Phillips Gallery, 1989), 5.

11. Mary Jane Jacobs, 80.

12. Mary Jane Jacobs, 80.

13. Mary Jane Jacobs, 81.

14. Scott McQuire, 177.

15. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 115.

16. Pakasaar, 6.

17. Andrea Liss, Trespassing Through Shadow's Memory, Photography and the Holocaust (Minneapolis: UMI, 1998), 50.

18. Liss, 50.

19. Liss, 41.

20. Liss, 41.

21. Liss, 48.

22. Maria Sturken, "Imagining Postmemory/Renegotiating History". Afterimage, May-June 1999, V 26 #6, 10-13.

23. Sturken, 11.

24. Christian Boltanski, "Christian Boltanski interviewed by Melvyn Bragg", The Southbank Show, LWT production for ITV in association with RM Arts, aired London, May 15th, 1994.

25. Pakasaar, 6.

26. Richard Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthropology (USA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 38.

27. Schechner, 38.

28. Schechner, 38.

29. Schechner, 38.

30. Pakasaar, 6.

31. Pakasaar, 6.

32. Christian Boltanski, "Christian Boltanski interviewed by Melvyn Bragg", The Southbank Show, LWT production for ITV in association with RM Arts, aired London, May 15th, 1994.

REBECCA CAINES is a performance maker from New South Wales, Austrailia, working on her Ph.D. at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Visual Studies Workshop
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group