Its creation is like him complex a reality

Imagine that you proposes to have 13,500 m2dans the place which is certainly the most prestigious Paris: the Grand Palace. If you call Christian Boltanski, you will not succumb to the stress - "at least for that, I am someone very quiet", he said. And you will do the opposite of everyone. You will not expose not in the spring, when the canopy filter lenient light and under the nave temperature is pleasant. You want him to the atmosphere of the tough Parisian winter. 21 Next February can see his huge installation made apparently almost nothing: 50 tons of used clothing. all of the loudspeakers that broadcast a concert by beating of hearts; and lighting neon to make even harder light.

The Interior of the work

In fact, this facility should not tell. Too many words serious, even grandiose, as souls, deceased, Shoah, missing, remains, God... they are lining up in the brain and put a brake to the senses. It is better come without preconditions, to be take to the game of Boltanski, to give time to walk in his world. "It should not be before the work." "It must be inside," he said. It is there. It grelotte a little and thought immediately, by feeling it seeks to raise: "they are all dead." But that it At each of its truth. The artist likes to say: "all art is complemented by one who looked at."

The haunting death

Refers to many common areas on Boltanski. A collection of interviews and a fairly well done DVD will give some good tracks for an understanding of his speech (1). First of all, Boltanski is obsessed with death. He was born in 1944 to a Polish Jewish father converted to Catholicism, a doctor who fled two years under the floor of the family's apartment to escape the Gestapo. His mother, mistress wife, Catholic was an intellectual of Corsican origin away from his family. Christian design when his father was a shade between ground and floor has influenced the rest of its existence. Boltanski tells that he sleeps very late at the foot of the bed of his parents. Similarly it will wait eighteen out alone on the street.

Anxiety is lastingly permeated family. "Small Christian", as he likes to call itself, is schizophrenic. He can't go to school. His parents leave it to his musings. "chance." If I had not changed in such a context, I would have been interned. "When his parents die, the verve absolve and the idea of death takes the form of images of large formats representative of the dead. The public associates them with those of missing persons of the Shoah. Boltanski were found in a newspaper of Valais obituary announcements. "Because the Switzerland, it's neutral."

New directory

However one wonders if it does not use the emotion of the greatest human catastrophe of the 20th century. No unequivocal answer. Its creation is like him: complex a reality. He said with humor: "my case is simple." I am Jewish, Christian and French. "Finally, since five years, it has renewed its directory and lists of missing portraits with new evocations. It is therefore used clothing. "Yes, they are like portraits of the deceased." Everyone was confronted with the fact of not knowing what to do with the clothing of his relatives, dead. "At the Grand Palais, a 20 metre high crane, takes continuous, a handful of these relics, randomly, as a great mower before them in the air. But he wished to stay light: "I had this idea by looking at the slots of the Fairgrounds, those where when you put a piece we can never catch the bears with the claw."

And then there is the sound of the hearts, invading, the majestic space of the nave. Boltanski currently records, around the world, of beating hearts, they also consider portraits. In Sweden he did save 69 human hearts and a heart of dog - a master wanted to keep track of his canine companion - found in the concert of beats of the Grand Palais. The fear course is that they stop, that death comes... Meanwhile in Paris two cabins also allow to save his own.

Boltanski concludes: "I like enormously life." I am even a good living. But the misfortune today is that we want to have us believe that we will not die.

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Judith Benhamou-Huet on

http: //blogs lesechos.fr http: //blogs lesechos.fr

Find the slide show

of Boltanski on lesechos.fr/diaporamaslesechos.fr/diaporamas