35.Artist appreciation

Christian Boltanski: Storage Memory

Christian Boltanski, Personnes, installation for Monumenta 2010. Paris, Grand Palais.

Beginning April 25 to July 8, the Power Station of Art hosts "Storage Memory", China’s first major solo exhibition from acclaimed French artist Christian Boltanski. Born in 1944 and widely considered a key figure to the post-WWII art scene in Europe, Boltanski has been exerting profound impacts on the development of contemporary art from Europe to Asia, and was a contributing artist to the French pavilion during the Venice Biennale in 2011. According to the artist, while individual memories might prove to be fragile, they are still filled with truthful yet unique values, making it the reason why he often chooses daily items as the main creative elements in constructing an archive of humanity.

Through installations, videos, sounds and shadow theaters, the exhibition seeks to inspire visitors’ emotional bonds on visual, aural, and psychological levels. Furthermore, to question the unpredictable encounters and experiences of individuals in daily and historical contexts. Nearly a 10-ton pile of clothes, hundreds of pictures showing infant and elderly faces, as well as the echoes of thousands of heartbeats are on display at PSA. All to help constitute a storage memory that encompasses personal experiences and collective histories.

Set to be an event with retrospective implications for the artist, "Storage Memory" not only showcases Boltanski’s most important works spanning his career; but also his new project specially commissioned for the PSA’s exhibition space adapted from its 165-meter-tall chimney. It proves to be an exclusively immersive experience, as visitors are invited to personally join the artist’s special creative endeavor, The Archives of the Hearts (Les Archives du Coeur,2005-), by recording their own heartbeats.

Personnes – Tons of Cloths referring to Human’s Absence

"There are a lot of people in my work, there are thousands of Swiss people and hundreds of Polish babies, tons of clothes. Right from the start, I felt that a photo of a human being, a used piece of clothing, a heartbeat, a dead body, were equivalents, they all show absence."

- C. Boltanski

With individual memories always being transient throughout history, the artist’s attempt to archive human memory is therefore declaring a sense of paradoxical sadness, just as the clothes themselves represent both disappearance and absence of their long-expired owners. Installation Personnes was first on show within the “Monumenta” program under the nave of the Grand Palais in Paris in 2010, before it was shown in New York, Milan and Japan. Now coming to PSA’s ground floor, it dominates the 1,200-square-meter space including a mountain pile of garments weighing nearly 10 tons, over which a 15-meter-tall crane repeatedly and endlessly lifts up and lets go of the pieces of clothing. While such recycled human clothing is meant to symbolize our flesh, the crane above is an allegory to the hand of God as well as the ineluctable fist of fate. With noise from the machine repeatedly echoing throughout the whole exhibition space and the ground floor covered by scattered clothes, visitors are invited to special-planned avenues allowing them to dive into the memories of those deceased.

Originating from Personnes in French, the title has dual meanings, referring to either “persons” or“nobody”. Here, the artist uses this double-edged word, which denotes presence but literally contains absence, to emphasize the inescapability of death and how chance watches over the destiny of each. As curator Jean-Hubert Martin once commented: “Those unclaimed clothes let go by the crane of fate actually belong to each and every one of us, and the differences in design and color become insignificant here. Traces of human kind are always so ridiculously similar that no one will be able to escape the eventually deceasing fate and its boundless uncertainties.”

The Archives of Hearts – Using Heartbeats to Chronicle Life’s Frequency

Once defining himself as an “artist who shaped his practice during the time of Minimalism” and also “a sentimental” one (from the interview Something personal by Chiara Bertola); Boltanski has been fascinated with choosing daily items of simple forms and rich emotions as creative materials and endowing them with epic universal values. In 2005, out of fear for approaching death, the artist started to take the sound of heartbeats as his artistic medium. From nothing but an accidental attempt, he recorded his own heartbeats. Describing individual heartbeats as “little memory”, Boltanski said such memory is “what makes us unique, is extremely fragile, and it disappears with death”. Inspired by the strong symbolic ties between heartbeats and individual lives, he decided to start his collection of different heartbeats."

Since 2005, a project entitled The Archives of Hearts has being undertaken by the artsit who globally set a utopian goal – an ambition to collect heartbeats from all parts of the world. To date, his collection has grown to include heartbeats of nearly 120,000 people, all permanently preserved on Japan’s Teshima Island. Through this ever-ongoing project, the island just off the coast of Japan will be continuously recording the traces of current or previous human existences. Many years from now, we can expect people of different regions, colors and cultures to travel to this remote archive, where they honor the heartbeats of their beloved ones, with their visits themselves constituting an integral part of the project.

With both Hearts (Coeur, 2018) and The Archives of Hearts (Les Archives du Coeur, 2005-), the "Storage Memory" at PSA seeks to present Boltanski’s heartbeats-based artistic endeavor in a comprehensive manner. After several field studies to examine the construction of the PSA, the artist personally chose to broadcast his own heartbeats within PSA’s massive chimney, one of the museum’s unique and irregular exhibition spaces. The recordings play along with a huge light bulb hanging high inside this enormous Industrial Age heritage, to glitter in sync with the acoustically amplified heartbeats. Meanwhile, a special workshop to gather heartbeats is set up on the 2nd floor of the PSA, where visitors can record and preserve their own heartbeats, or even send them to dear friends for interconnections of their life frequencies.

Storage Memory – From Childhood to Death

Most of Christian Boltanski’s works carry strong biographical implications, and his childhood memory often unconsciously looms heavily in his creative attempts. Following his birth in 1944, Boltanski grew up in the aftermath of WWII. To avoid detection by the Nazis, his father, a secular Jew, hid under the floorboards of the family’s Paris apartment for a year and a half. Although he downplays family history, his artistic work is haunted by such saddening encounters of slight absurdity. He once said: “I am half Jewish and half Christian… I was born at the end of the war and the war is very important to me…”. Obsessions with existential questions related to death and chance have been central to his artistic pursuit from the very beginning.

Ever since human kind first came to this world, its history has been a living manifest of the choice of fate – it has been hard for individuals to escape inherent connections with their collective history, and the power of death comes not just with its ineluctability, but its unpredictability as well. Amidst the contradictions between presence and absence, how to store memories and archive individuals became something perpetual to Boltanski’s existential questions. But often, he has been iterating that he is not a scholar-artist, as he has stronger hopes that people who don’t understand contemporary art can also walk into his emotionally-striking works.

Boltanski once said: “I believe that even if there are differences between culture, each of us is confronted with similar questions and the same perplexity.” So, Storage Memory, with its universal artistic language, expects to transcend cultural boundaries with Chinese viewers, to together question human kind’s most fundamental existence, starting with a heartbeat, a garment of clothes, a bulb, and a photo. Gong Yan, Director of PSA, concluded: “Opening up sealed memory is just like having long-hibernating blackbodies restart their thermal motion, and the resurrection of blackbody radiation will change the nature of a specific location. Death, tale, and death tales… Memory, shadow, and others’ biographies… Such are all typical Boltanski-style expressionist elements. Their creations are not to reiterate the cruelty or misfortunes of fate, but to play a game of go with HISTORY, who happens to be an opportunist. What humanity leaves is nothing but fragmented images and spells, and every day, we’re telling others’ stories. And that makes Boltanski’s PSA event a shamanic evocation ceremony.”

Christian Boltanski, "Personnes", installation for Monumenta 2010, Paris, Grand Palais

Christian Boltanski, "La roue de la Chance détail", 2011, view of the exhibition Chance, French Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale