As unique as any of us are, in the end we’re all completely ordinary and destined to be forgotten. At least, that’s what French conceptual big shot Christian Boltanksi seems to think. You enter his show through a corridor lined with sheets printed with the faces of some anonymous family, their names lost to time, their histories forgotten. You brush past and dismiss them to find big film installations on either side of the corridor. One shows the desolate pure white of the Quebec winter, the other the desolate emptiness of the Atacama Desert. In each, bells tinkle in the wind, the sound ringing out and dying into the ether. Every sound is a single moment that exists and pops like a bubble. Dead flowers and crumpled paper litter the floor.
Go back through the corridor of anonymous faces and another room immerses you in countless billowing sheets, lights flicker across them like millions of soon-to-die insects.
Throughout, Boltanski seems resigned to the transience and futility of existence; it’s immersively nihilistic.
But the final video finds Boltanski’s sculptures installed on a Patagonia beach, three wind-trumpets screeching at the ocean alongside a whale skeleton. It’s an attempt at surviving, it’s the artist screaming for permanence, begging to be remembered. He wants to be the guy who used his art to yell at a whale skeleton.
It won’t work. He will be forgotten. We all will.
@eddyfrankel
