ARTIST PRESENTATION
Christian Boltanski

Boltanski: It’s rather a problem for me to be here because I’m not a photographer and I nearly never met a photo in my life. I’m a very traditional painter and perhaps that was some kind of mistake, but we can talk about painting. We can stick with painting in any case because I can’t speak about photography really. In fact, I don’t believe that there’s a difference in the media, I don’t believe it’s a different way to work if you use video as part of a painting. It seems to me in any case, there’s no progress in art as much as there’s a progress in sounds that one shows as no progress in art, and it seems to me that we are all repeating the same thing for so long time. There’s very, very few subject and the artist always speaking about the same subject since the beginning of time, when the subject are looking for God, sex, but it’s always the same question. And we have no answer, just a question. And we repeat and repeat the same thing, we use perhaps different kinds of words, we are not exactly speaking like in the 18th century, but in fact, it is exactly the same thing that we are speaking about.

I told you that I was not a photographer, and I tell you that I nearly never met a photo, but I’ve used a lot of photos in my life. Because there is some kind of correlation between a human being and a photo. A photo is a little like a shadow of somebody who is missing. And I can tell you, in my work, there’s a lot a lot of people. There’s always a lot of people. I work with a lot of people. Thousands of dead Swedes, thousands of Spanish criminals--there’s a lot of people in my work. And I always made the correlation between the photo of somebody who uses cloth, and a dead body. All that is object, but is object in relation to a subject and the subject is missing. And what is something so strange with photos that they say nothing about a person? I made a very large work a few years ago who is called human, and there is something like more than 1,000 photos and these photos I’ve used in my life were of people, and all these people are dead, and I have mixed totally all the faces, and when you look at the piece it’s totally impossible to know who they were. Who was a nazi and who was Jewish and who was a Spanish criminal? The only thing we can say is that all these people were human. When we see a photo of somebody we know that there was somebody, but we know only that--there was somebody. I think one of the questions I ask to myself is so strange because I really believe that everybody is unique, and also everybody is so fragile. After a few years nobody is going to remember. The last part of my work is about discretion. I was somebody. We are each somebody. We’re totally unique and can disappear so quickly. I work also often with object, and I did that also in New York, I worked with lots of people creating object. I made a big piece a few years ago with all the objects that were in a train in New York, and for me they were the same things, I don’t know. I have my glasses; I know these glasses. I know when I bought these glasses, I know that they’re rather good but not so good, and that one time I lost them. Now if I lost these glasses, they would be only glasses with no more identity. Now what is awful to me is to lose identity. I’m not Mormon, I’m sure there’s a Mormon in this room, but there’s something about the Mormon religion that they believe that at the end of time God is going to call everybody by his name because to have a name means that you are somebody. A few years ago I wanted to tell the names of everybody that was living on earth. And we tried to think about that, and the big problem is that I needed four years, day and night, to say the name of everybody, and the people are dying so quickly and being born so quickly also, that the list can’t be complete because you say three names and there’s somebody who’s dead and somebody who’s born. And it’s totally impossible to really have the complete list of everybody on earth. I made a large piece with all the telephone books I could find. I found more than 3,000 telephone books and it’s in a museum now, and it’s like a library and there was a small room with something like 400 million names. But in any case, to say the name of somebody is to say that somebody exists.

I am working, in fact I really don’t care about the media, and I’m working with several media, but it seems to me that I have tried something with visual, no words, to ask questions and to speak about what we are. A large part of my work is about the dead. And I think the last part of art is about the dead. It’s about how we can survive, but I know we can’t do that. When I began to work a very long time ago, I tried to preserve my life in boxes, and I thought, “What can I preserve?” I thought I could do something with hands during one hour and to think really about what I’m doing and if I put that in a box it will be one hour of my life that will be preserved, but that I can say didn’t work really. But in any case, I think all my work is about questions dealing with disappearance. In the beginning I made a lot of work about my childhood because the childhood is the first part of us to disappear. All of us were once a little child, and that little child is still inside us, but we forget and forget. A few days ago somebody told me a beautiful story. There was a little girl who was 7-years-old and in the family a new baby arrived, and before the baby arrived, she said, “I wish to speak to the baby, I wish to speak to the baby.” And when the baby arrived, she said, “I wish to be alone with the baby to speak with him.” And the parents were a little frightened by that and they put out a little microphone or something, and the little girl said to the baby, “Please speak to me about God because I begin to forget.” And it seems to me that we have the child inside us, and we forget. We know that he was there, but more and more we forget him. And the first part of us dying is through this child, and for this reason, the last part of my work at the beginning was about my childhood, not my real childhood, but what I can remember about my childhood. The only thing we can say with little optimism, and it’s something that Napoleon said, and it’s something that’s terribly awful and very beautiful at the same time. Napoleon was ruler and there were thousands and thousands of dead people, and he said, “Oh, no problems, a night of love in Paris is going to replace everybody.” And to say that is totally awful, but on the other hand so true and so optimistic. The only thing we can say is that in a few years there will be another painter and another public is going to be here and it seems that everything is going on, that’s the only thing really optimistic we can say. But at the same time it’s awful because nobody can be replaced and everybody is unique.
What I try when I make a show is to ask questions, but also to move people. For me, art must be something very physical and very moving and the problem is that if somebody arrives at one of my shows and says, “Oh, Mr. Boltanski is a good conceptual artist from the 90s” that means I’m a very bad artist, they must arrive and say, “I don’t know what happened, but something happened, but it’s art.” And if somebody can say it’s conceptual art, then his art is very bad. They must say, “I don’t know what it is, I don’t know--there is no name for it.” And I think what we can call avant-garde is when there is no name. Each time there is a name and it’s finished. For this reason it’s easier to work outside of museums or galleries and work very often in church and railway stations because in a museum people know that they’re going to see art, and they add a little idea of what art must be. But if I begin to cry just now, you are going perhaps to be upset. But, if I’m on stage in a theater, you’re going to say, “Oh, he feels so badly.” I think for this reason it’s easier to work outside of galleries. I like to be on the edge, I mean, I’m only an artist and I make only art, but I, like the people, don’t know exactly if it’s actually art or not art. A few years ago I made a big show in Spain and I choose to work in a church, and just before the opening there was an old lady that said, “What happened there?” I told her we were going to make a big celebration for the dead people. I think she understood my work, but if I had told her I’m a modern artist sent by the museum, I’m sure she would be so frightened and say, “It’s a shame to do that in a church.”

I work a lot with dead Swiss. I have something like something like six or seven thousand dead Swiss. Of course they’re dead, but I have a photo of them when they were alive. If I choose Swiss, it’s because the Swiss are so universal. They have no reason to die. They are cleaner, rich, literal, so for these reasons it is better for me to choose them, because it’s impossible to make a piece with dead Jewish, you know, it’s too normal. It’s also works well because they’re all smiling, clean, happy, and now everybody is equal. What was good also was that there was always new dead Swiss. All the Swedes die and the piece is never finished. I receive them by post office, by letters, and each week I have, I don’t know, 100 new dead Swiss. And there were so many people and I know nothing about them, but they were so many people who disappeared. In my work there’s two kind of pieces. There’s pieces that are in a way more traditional pieces, and there’s pieces that are more experimental. For example, I made a show with all the objects that belong to an anonymous person, and I made some kind of museum for anonymous people. It can be done by me but it can also be done by somebody else. The rule is to put on display all the objects of somebody chosen by chance. I made this piece six or seven times already, and it’s always strange how finite object you can find. In Germany I found an artificial leg. It was strange for someone to have lost a leg. In New York I found a dress of marriage that was lost on the train but if you’re optimistic, you can imagine that she was so happy that she put on her dress fast, but also perhaps that the marriage didn’t work and so she left the dress. The objects are so strange. In Paris they told me that one day they found the ashes of someone in front of the cemetery. Three days after somebody went to find the ashes. But what is beautiful with all these subjects is that we know that the subject is a relative of somebody, but we don’t know the story, if there was a story.
I don’t like to speak about formal wear, but I’m an artist of the 21st century, and in a way I tried to use objects that people had before. People notice I work a lot with biscuit boxes, and if I’ve used the biscuit boxes so much because it’s a minimal object. But also, everybody or a lot of people, remember when they were a child they used a biscuit box to put their little treasures inside of it--it’s safe for people in some way. At the same time it’s a minimal object but also something that people can remember and recognize. It’s very important for me that people can grasp something. Like you know it’s always the one who looks at the work who makes it work. The only thing an artist can do is sense some kind of a stimulus, and after I can show you a photo of a boy running on a beach, but for each one that’s going to look at this photo, each is going to see another beach and another child. You can say, “Oh, it looks like my neighbor in Long Island,” “It looks like my cousin in Norway.” You know, each one is making the work. What seems to me always so beautiful when I go to the movie is that everybody is sitting like you are, but each one sees a different movie. A few years ago I met someone in Japan and I made a piece with clothes. There were two or three tons of used clothes on the floor. I showed this piece before in Europe but in Japan people said, “Oh, it’s really the lake of the people in the Zen tradition.” And they re-read my work with their own background. They told me, “Oh, your art is so Japanese, I’m sure your grandfather was Japanese.” I think for an artist it’s very important. I’ve been to Africa where people say, “Oh, your art is so African.” Because, when you’re an artist at the same time you must speak about your own village, but that must be the village of everybody. You speak about your own life, but each one must to say, “It’s me. It’s my story.” If you can read an autobiography of somebody, like we can read Proust, for example, it’s because he’s not speaking about himself, he’s speaking about us. And each time, at first it’s impossible to speak about something that nobody knows. There’s this stupid joke of the first man to go to the moon and somebody asked him what the moon looked like and he said, “Oh, the moon looks like a baseball.” Because I can’t describe something that nobody has seen. If I say baseball field, you know more or less what it is. But you can’t describe it as something not known. And for this reason, I think the work belongs to everybody but we’re going to show something better than what everybody knows already. To be an artist, it’s too difficult, I never did it, would be, for example, to make a work about the smell of the coffee at home a long time ago, and everybody can say, “Yes, I can smell it. I remember.” But that is very, very difficult to do. It’s this kind of strangulation between the individual and the collective. At the same time, we work and I work with my own background. I think to be an artist is also to repeat and to repeat the same problem. One of my favorite artists for example is Louise Bourgeois, for 90 years she repeats the fact that she had a problem with her father and she repeats it and repeats it and repeats. But if we can love the work of Louise Bourgeois it is because at the same time it’s her story and she tried to understand a problem and at the same time it’s a story of everybody. I have an idea, but I’m not sure if it’s too technical or too Christian, I thought that an artist didn’t have a face anymore. The more you work the less you exist and you become the others, and you are always a reflection of the others. It is rather difficult to speak, really, I didn’t like to show slides, like I said before my work is always awful on photos, on slide, because I’m not sure if my work is good enough to be in the room. I’m going to be pretentious, but it’s a little like going to church, something must happen, and to show a photo and say it’s only this is not enough when what I hope is that something is going to happen. With a photo it’s very difficult because when I make a show, it is very important for me to know if the weather is going to be cold or hot because I think I’m a better artist for cold country. But in any case you always have to imagine if there’s some heat or not or if there’s some sun, because you don’t see the same thing if you have plenty of sun outside. If you have plenty of sun outside you can play with the darkness. Like in some small church in Italy, for example, it’s very hot and you arrive in something that’s fresh and dark, you must play with that. There’s a big difference between music, radio, theater and painting. Film and music are art while working with a time problem, and the painter, like me, is are working with a space problem and that’s something very different. Unfortunately I think the emotion is much more easy to give with art that has a time problem because you have the suspense--you never know what is going to arrive one minute after. If we can be touched by music, one of the reasons we are touched by the music is because [intentional scratching noise]. And, when we see a movie we see the nice guy and ten minutes after we understand that he was not nice at all--there’s the suspense. When you see a painting, you can stand ten hours in front of the painting but there’s no kind of suspense. When I make a large show, I try to make some kind of a sequence. I try to have a beginning and an end. In fact, people can stare ten minutes in the first room and five minutes in the second room and they can move as fast as they want, but I try to have some kind of a continuation. When I make a show, and I’m very old and have made a lot of retrospectives in my life, I make a retrospective with something that is funny for me. It’s a little like when you go back home and open the fridge and you have one or two eggs, some butter toast and one sausage, and with all that you try to make something new. When I make a show it is the same. In the fridge in my head I have a lot of things and I try to recreate something. When I use, for example, when an object belongs to a museum, if the curator comes, they’re always so depressed because he can’t recognize the object because I transformed it totally, and at the end I want to create only one piece with perhaps 20 pieces. And all the pieces I made is some kind of material with which to create a new work.

You know it’s something rather difficult because now I, like a musician, take my old work and transform it. But after me, somebody must try to play my art because it’s not the same to make a show in this room or in the garden or in a gallery. Each time we must think how to do it again, and yes, to transform it. I hope that people are going to play my art and sometimes it is going to be well-played, and sometimes it’s going to be bad-played, but like, you know, I’m not sure how people play Chopin, in a good way or bad way, but they play it. And for me what I try to do is not stop. I mean, the show is for a space, but if you change the space, you must change the piece. I have a story about how a few years ago the dead gallery in London bought a large piece, which was some dead Swiss on shelves with a white curtain. When I arrived there, the curator told me, “You know, the white sheet is going to be yellow in a few years.” I said, “Okay, well, you change it.” And after he told me, “You know, the photos are going to disappear,” and I said, “I really don’t care, there’s new dead Swiss.” Then I said to him, “You know, I made the shelf for this room, but if you show the piece in another room, you must change the shape of the shelves.” And he said, “What I bought?” And I said, “You bought the idea of the dead Swiss on a shelf with white sheet.” Last year I sold a piece and I wasn’t happy because it was a cloth piece and I gave them nothing. I received the money but I gave them nothing, not a paper or anything. The rule I gave them was cloth on the wall on four walls--but that’s all. After that they can do what they want with it. It’s cloth on four walls and they can do what they want. They must display it and in fact they displayed it very badly and when I saw the piece it was not very good. But it’s not my fault; it’s their fault. At the same time, there’s no materiality and the work must be able to move all the time. Because some of you are working with photography, I’ll tell you that I just had a problem at the Guggenheim a few years ago. They bought a large piece of mine, which consisted of 1,000 photos and now the photos have become yellow because I work with plastic paper. They say, “Oh, it’s awful, what can we do?” And I said, “I really don’t care.” And they say, “But in a few years they are going to disappear.” And I say, “Good, they are going to disappear, it will be always something.” They were photos, large size, but were not fixed. And I put this photo in a big metal box and people knew that they had two hours to look at the photos, and the photo becomes darker and darker and disappeared after two hours. For me, it was funny because you can look at it only for five minutes and say, “Oh, I wish to look at it for six, but next day, I can’t. I can’t take too much time, it is the life of the photo.” It’s a little like people who collect wine. You have a very good bottle of wine but if you don’t drink it then you have nothing. If you do drink it then the bottle disappears and your collection disappears. They know that if they look at these photos, they’re going to kill them. In fact they don’t look at them.

What can I tell you about my work? My work is more or less impression. But I work a lot with criminal newspaper, and I have a kind of photo in the criminal newspaper of people--victims and criminals. After some time I forget to tell you who was the victim and who was the criminal because they have the same place and they are perhaps the same person. In any case, for me, what I wanted to say was that they are nearly the same or they are the same. When I make work I try to say something about what I believe. It seems to me that because the subject is politics, one of the things that we can do or what I try to do, is to be human and not post-human. There is something terrible, and I think it’s something terrible for all of us that we try so much to forget that we are human. And for example, to be human is to die and to kill. I love sausage but it will be totally impossible for me to kill a pig. Totally impossible. And I think it’s a shame. I must not forget that I have to kill--if you are on earth you kill. And now there is something so strange about the fact of dying. In the old time, for example, people were always dying in very good humor. If you were a big writer or big artist, there were always the last words. I don’t know about Kafka reciting Chopin on the night of his death, but everybody was dying in very good humor. Not anymore. You go to the hospital and after a few days, somebody pulls the electricity away and that’s all, nobody has these last words, for example. It’s finished. Also, before when somebody died it was a big event and there was a big meeting and a big party and it was a place where people could meet each other and begin something. You know, the grandfather dies, the father takes the place of the grandfather, the son takes the place of the father, and what was important was that the farm go on. But there was no idea to try and forget the fact of dying. Now we try to forget the fact of dying and we forget the fact that we become older; it’s like we don’t want to be human. And more and more it seems to me that the next fight, and I don’t want to say it because it sounds totally ridiculous, should be against cloning. You know that what we’re going to have is a social difference. There will be some people who are going to die in 140 years who are going to be clever and healthy while most people are going to be stupid and ugly and dying young. In fact, in that case, it sounds like it could make some kind of a social difference. There’s a lot of people in my work, and there’s a lot of unique people in my work, and the only thing I can say is that everybody is important, everybody is unique, and we should try to speak about these things. Like you perhaps, I am half Christian and half Jewish, and for me it was very important to have these two religions, even though I’m not a real believer. In any case I’m more and more Christian--that’s why my name is Christian. I wanted to make a new religion with Christian, my own religion. You know, you think about people, you think about each one, and for me, art is something so complicated and there are so many ways to make art, but that’s my way. I don’t know if you have any questions. I have an answer. Do you have a question?

Audience: Earlier you were talking about how yourself and many artists tend to repeat the same issues. And I’m wondering if that is related to like a Freudian model of repetition, how repetition is a manifestation of trauma. So I’m wondering, is your work related to some kind of trauma?

Boltanski: I really believe that very often there’s a problem in the beginning; there’s something that happens during childhood. It’s a little more complicated for me because I think that the big shock is that I was born in 1944. I’m really a child of Auschwitz. There is something very depressing for my generation. In the beginning of the 20th century, everybody believed that there was some new utopia, that it would be better and better. As idealistic as it sounds, there was the idea that people were going to be more and more wise. But now we know that it was the worst century, the 20th century was. And also we thought that the science was going to save us, and now we know that the science is not going to save us. You know, like mad cow and AIDS. We realized that there would be no more utopia. And for the European, in any case, the end of communism was something terrible, because communism was the last universal Christian Utopia. And we know now that it was so bad, and the end of the communist was so ridiculous, that I would have to believe that there was another way. When I was young I really believed that when the Viet Cong died, he died for something. He died for something good. Now I’m not sure he died for something good. In any case, there are no more words and nothing is going to change. People really did believe that the relation between the people are going to change--some kind of a Marxist utopia, but in fact it didn’t work at all, and no there is no more utopia, and what is very difficult is if you have no utopia you are really dead. But it’s also difficult to have because we know that utopia is also dangerous and that with utopia you can kill everybody. The people who have utopia are very, very dangerous, and I can say that the Christian sometimes in history are very, very dangerous, but it’s nearly impossible to be without utopia. I think that the big shock for my generation, and I am really an artist of the last century, I’m not an artist of this century, was this relation between fascism and communism, for example. And I was never a communist, but there was this idea that there was this utopia that was possible. Now we know that it failed. The only thing we have now, it’s small utopia, is to help your neighbor or to speak with your neighbor. It’s not to change everything that we know that’s totally possible and dangerous, but to just speak with your neighbor. But an artist must be very modest because art didn’t change anything. The Nazis love Schubert, I love Schubert, but the Nazis also loved Schubert. Art is not something to change your life. Art is not going to change your politics. Do you have another question? No?

Audience: I have a question about the Dead Swiss piece that you were describing. In particular you were talking about it being a universal representation, but at the same time you were talking about the Swiss being rich and a certain kind of country. I’m thinking that on the one hand you’re stressing the uniqueness of individuals, but talking about how, nonetheless, your representations of them become universal. I’m wondering if with describing it as universal, some of that particularity gets lost.

Boltanski: No, the Swiss are not totally universal, that is true. No, for me it’s some kind of a joke because it is true that it is one of the best countries on earth, and a country with no drama and no war. For this reason, the last part of my work is about the shower. In fact, when I spoke about the Dead Swiss, it was a way to talk about the shower because there was this idea of so many, so many dead. It was this idea of why this one dies when he is 30 or why this one dies when he is 44, you know, it was kind of the finger of God. But in fact, I think it was for me to think about the shower. I made a piece, you know it perhaps, called Missing House, and it was in three parts. There was a staircase A, the staircase B and the staircase C. I did plenty of research about the people that were in this house--why they die. Not the staircase A and not the staircase C, and in fact there really is no answer. But there always was the question, why was this one killed and not this one? What is this thing that people call the finger of God? Why does it happen? It’s only by chance.

Audience: I had a question about your mention of failed utopia, with reference to communism. In some ways I’ve heard people on the far left talk about how the project of democracy is an utter failure as well, and that in both cases, neither has ever existed in any pure form--neither socialism nor communism nor democracy has ever really existed. All we really have are historical frameworks that have been set up to represent these concepts in a utopic sense, but there’s this kind of superficial assumption that because democracy is the only thing truly surviving, that it exists.

Boltanski: Let me tell you one thing about that. I think Churchill said that democracy is not good, but it is the best, or something like that. It seems that democracy is not good, but it is the best, yeah. What is difficult, since we speak about politics, is that in France we have a very large fascist party now. One of the big reasons is because there is no difference between a Social Democrat and a Conservative. For this reason, people are unhappy and they try to find something different, and they become fascist. I think that means it is good to have a Leftist party and a Conservative party, and to believe that there is a difference in between. I think that now you have that--you have a very conservative party but in France the Social Democrat and Chirac are exactly the same--the difference is so small. I think that’s dangerous. And I can say in fact that in France, the same people who were communists are now fascists--the same group of people.
Audience: Your work, which seems to deal so much with life and death, has kind of a life and death of its own from what I heard you say today. It seems that you’re more concerned, perhaps, with whether or not there’s an extra package of sausage in your refrigerator than whether or not your art dies. Sort of like once you make it, then once the check clears, it’s somebody else’s concern if it dies. Do you have any hopes of a legacy for Christian Boltanski? What would that legacy be?

Boltanski: First, if I work it is because I hope that somebody that I don’t know in Australia is going to be sad for five minutes; that he’s going to cry for five minutes. I find it marvelous to be an artist for this reason because you can touch people you don’t even know--you never see. That’s something very beautiful. And for my art, what I hope is that people can do it again in the same way either with my name or without my name. I made plenty of pieces, I told you, with biscuit boxes, rusty biscuit boxes. In the beginning I can say they were a little more close to me because in order to rust them I had to go pee-pee on them, and for this reason there was some kind of relation between the biscuit box and me but I used so many biscuit boxes that I couldn’t make pee-pee anymore so I used Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola is very good to rust biscuit boxes because it’s very acidic. For this reason now, if I have a piece in a museum and they loose one biscuit box, I say, “No problem, you take another one, put some Coca-Cola on it, and it’s the same.” The biscuit box is not sacred. Nothing is sacred. What is perhaps important is more or less an ideal or rules for making the work. I made a show with friends and the show was called “Do It” because of the rules of the game. There were plenty of friends and the rules of the game were to describe a word and to make a little book with that, and to send all these descriptions to plenty of museums. It was possible for everybody to do the work, to do the piece, but the artist must never to see what happened. I mean that everyone can play it. But the only rule was it was forbid for us to see the show. Lots of people have to have some kind of rules as to how to do it and they try to do it but sometimes they do it well, I suppose, and sometimes they do it badly.

But the piece of art is very close to the religious relic. For example, you know that during the Middle Age in Europe most of the cities were created because somebody found little bones of a holy person. Afterwards they made a cathedral and there was a fair and plenty of people go to pray and back than go back to the fair. Now if you make a big museum like the Guggenheim and you put some famous art inside then the city becomes rich. It’s the same way now even in a small city. You can put in a Van Gogh and it’s going to be rich and everybody’s going to pray there. There’s a very similar relation between how the art is working and the religious relic. For example, we now use computers. It will be totally possible to create Van Gogh exactly like the real Von Gogh would. If the people love Van Gogh simply because of the beauty of the painting, it’s because it’s a part of a holy person--the holy man touched it. And in my works, some pieces we can say are more or less relics but a lot of the works are not relics at all--they can do it again. If it is destroyed, do it again, play it again. Perhaps also, you know, it is better that somebody plays it again because it is given new life. I don’t like museums very much because although they are useful, they are like big cemeteries. I think it will be better, perhaps, to make a facsimile of the work and to put the work in the street and if the work is destroyed, no problem. Why not to make a facsimile of someone like Flavin. It would be a thing that’s more in “real life” rather than in a museum. There are weird problems, I think, with videos and this is going to be a problem. For example, there are some videos of artists who are very good but they make narratives, like films. In that case, why are there only three copies when video is a something that you can make as many or few as you want? There’s no reason. The only reason is the economic reason. But there is no real reason.
Audience: I was struck by three points that you made regarding being an artist in this world. One was the act of creating or posing or invoking questions, which is one of the tasks, perhaps, of being an artist. The other is the sadness that you feel, which I share, around the death of utopian ideals, despite how problematic those ideals or the way that those ideals were played out in the 20th century. Nevertheless, I personally feel the almost necessary function that those ideals had in our lives in the creation of some idea of a contemporary society. It makes me to ask, given those two points that I just brought up, do those two ideas have any influence on why you define yourself as a 20th century artist as opposed to a 21st century artist?

Boltanski: There is something that is very strange for me when I try to understand that the time we are living in is more important than us. For example, you can recognize totally the paintings of the 18th century and a painting of the beginning of 19th century and if I were born ten years earlier, I think my art would be abstract impressionist, although I can say that I don’t really like abstract impressionist art. So when I thought about that it was really very depressing because when you are an artist you always imagine that you are stronger than the time when in fact, I’m only an artist of the end of the 20th century. You know, in the future we’ll realize it. It will be in a museum, perhaps, and it will be called “Artists of the late 20th Century,” and what is very strange is that I am sure that there would be in the same room other artists that I don’t like so much. But people are going to say, “Oh, it must be the same artist,” because, for example, if you look at paintings from the end of the 18th century, it all looks not totally the same, but there’s something common in all of them. So there’s something that’s stronger than us. It’s not only for formidable reasons but it’s also for some meaning. For example, it seems to me that the minimalist is very close to the communist. Not in their ideas, but more in their hope of a universal utopia. I know that the people of the Bauhaus were nearly killed by the Nazis or sometimes killed by the Nazis, but there’s a relation between the Bauhaus and the Nazi--it’s this kind of utopia, a utopia that everybody must to be the same. I mean, I love Bauhaus but in a way it’s very totalitarian--everybody must live in the same flat, and there’s a place to play and a place to work. For this reason they were rarely killed by the Nazis. There was some kind of a relationship because it was during the same time.

Audience: You know, our generation and our parents had a hope for us, for this utopia. Do you have a hope for another generation after us?
Boltanski: I only hope that everything is going on the way I told you at the beginning. Two years ago for the 2000 anniversary somebody asked me, “Can you imagine what it is going to be like in Europe in 30 years?” I didn’t answer, but to myself I thought maybe there would be a stupid war or something.

Audience: You made a comment that I think a lot of us in this room can identify with, and that was that you don’t like sharing slides because you don’t like your work in slide form. I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit more specifically about what gets loss in the translation from the experience in the gallery to slides.

Boltanski: What I can tell you is that I really work a lot with the darkness, with a door, with something, and this will sound very pretentious, but with something magical. Something magical must happen. And sometimes in a stupid or in a very simple way, but something magical must happen. For example, three years ago I had a very, very large show in the city museum in Paris, and it began at the first floor and after some time you had to go into the basement even though it was forbidden to go in a number of ways but you go more and more into the basement and there was something physically to go down and down and to see for the first time, a new space of the museum. You open the door and you arrive in the street. For me, the show is a little like a theater play but without actors and without words, though the spectacle becomes actor. But it is a little like a theater play. Like theater or ballet, it’s possible to do it again, but it will be not the same thing.