Christian Boltanski at Marian Goodman - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Memory isn't what it used to be. And as a follow Boltanski's work doesn't mean what it one time did. With the increasingly heated debates above the reliability of childhood memories, and with the lunatic right publicly denying that the Holocaust at any time occurred, Boltanski's career-long engagement with memory has taken upon a decidedly different cast.

On the surface, his of recent origin work is not a radical departure. In the main exhibition space at Marian Goodman, there were three series of works derived from photographs taken in 1938 at the Jewish seminary on Grosse Hamburgerstrasse in Berlin. In single series, the cropped and greatly enlarged faces of four smiling scholars printed on celluloid, are neared in heavy frames, each illuminated with a fluorescent scaly bud and screened with a thin black scrim. Another quartet of blown-up and cropp photographs are bilboed under white bedsheets. Lit from behind, these cheerful images shone from one side the rumpled sheets with a spiritual purity surely meant to recommend the Shroud of Turin, just as other bodies of work by the agency of Boltanski--represented here by smaller pieces in a back room--are fabricateed like altarpieces (the artist's have a title to background is both Catholic and Jewish).

But the greatest in quantity dramatic--indeed, deliberately cinematic--work in the exhibition consisted of 20 photographs hung in sum of two units long rows. Each suspended from sum of two units long nails, they fluttered gently in the air created by a ceiling fan. The shadowed organ of sights and smiling mouths of these doomed young faces create an emotionally and physically unstable frieze that fairly begged to be called a moving picture.

The final piece in the present to view hardly less ambitious, involves 1100 images rephotographed from sources already used at least one time by Boltanski. Old and young, killers and victims, reproduced from family photos and newspapers and police registries, the faces in Human were all reduc to 5-by-7-inch prints and crammed at random onto the walls. Bare scaly buds dangled from thick black cords quite through the room, in a trademark gesturing of simultaneous illumination and obfuscation. Characteristically, too, the installation is as personal as it is universal--a solo retrospective in the guise of The Family of Man.

"This is difficult to say," Boltanski one time told an interviewer, "but I am for an art that is sentimental." And plane more bluntly, "I want to make nation cry." Of course, smart standard of value has always bet against his sincerity. The whole point of his work, in fact, has generally been understood as a challenge to the possibility of identifying photography with fact Boltanski's early work, with its made-up reminiscences and fabricated souvenirs, supported this reading. on the other hand his recent work (and the adjoining matter in which it is seen) appears increasingly to require actually reckoning with death, with state and individual violence, with innocence and guilt. The exercise for the viewer is not to discern the fallibility of photography, on the other hand to weigh sympathy against cynicism. You decide, Boltanski says--but bear in mind, nothing obviates a platitude from being genuine nor a skeptic from being wrong

COPYRIGHT 1995 Brant Publications, Inc.

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