HOJA DE VIDA
DISTINCIONES Y PREMIOS OBTENIDOS
A portrait, then, can be viewed in terms of both identity and identification; the recognition of an identity and the recognition of an experience of subjectivity. In the portrait whose subject is anonymous, however, one may ask, whose identity is being foregrounded, whose subjectivity? Christian Boltanski’s use of the anonymous subject raises precisely these questions as ambiguities inherent in representation, particularly those of loss and mourning. An early work, the artist’s book 10 Portraits photographiques de Christian Boltanski, 1946–1964, 1972 (Fig. B7), demonstrates Boltanski’s play with notions of exposure and concealment, the authentic and deceptive, the body and interiority. The book is made up of photographs of boys at different ages, with captions ostensibly identifying the photographs as Christian Boltanski, aged …, and the date. What at first glance seems to be a straightforward portrait documentation of Boltanski from childhood to manhood, on closer inspection is revealed to be a collection of photographs of boys of different ages standing at the same location, only one of whom is Boltanski himself. Throughout his practice, Boltanski has continually drawn on material of his own life without seeming to reveal much “truth” about himself. Lynn Gumpert (1994) observes that there is a motive in
40 Homi K Bhabha, “Aura and Agora: On Negotiating Rapture and Speaking Between” in Richard Francis (ed.),
Figure B7
Christian Boltanski
10 Portraits photographiques de Christian Boltanski, 1946–1964 (detail), 1972
this dealing with self beyond that of self-obsession. She writes that Boltanski’s self-portraits that are composed not only of images of himself, but of French children, Austrian adolescents, Russian Jews, and Swiss bourgeoisie, who are “anonymous players in his drama of ‘self-revelation’… The overwhelming anonymity of their nameless faces contrasts sharply with Boltanski’s own face. Having seen it so often in his early work, we recognise
his face among the countless others, but the recognition only delays our realization that we do not, in fact, know him.”41 For Gumpert, Boltanski’s work mirrors the viewer while ostensibly portraying the artist.42
It is this absence, or loss of presence, that features so strongly in all of Boltanski’s work. Commenting on his class photograph of 1951, which he used for the cover of his first book, Recherche et présentationde tout ce qui reste de mon enfance, 1944–1950 (1969), Boltanski observed,
Of all the children, among whom I found myself, one of whom was probably the girl I loved, I don’t remember any of their names, I don’t remember anything more than the faces on the photograph. It could be said that they disappeared from my memory, that this period of time was dead. Because now these children must be adults, about whom I know nothing. This is why I felt the need to pay homage to these “dead,” who, in this image, all look more or less the same, like cadavers.43
Boltanski’s use of anonymous portraits to invoke memorials and monuments of mass mourning can be viewed as a way of questioning notions of authenticity, in particular the impossibility of art to represent and fix presence in the face of death and mass genocide. The ambiguities within notions of presence and remembrance challenge authenticity in a number of aspects: authenticity in terms of identity of the original referents of the portraits, authenticity in photography’s claim to truth, authenticity in the emotive living experience of subjectivity by the viewer. Andrea Liss (1998) writes that the use of nameless referents, as
41 Lynn Gumpert, Christian Boltanski, Flammarion, Paris, 1994, p. 152. 42 Ibid.
in Autel Chases, 1987 (Fig. B8), enables Boltanski to represent memory and trauma as “antimonumental memorials,” at once intimate and distanced, authentic and deceptive. Liss writes: “Boltanski’s mixed desire not to name or explicitly picture his evoked referent may well be appropriate to a move toward the formation of antimonumental memorials. It is an act toward circling around rather than smothering memory and the trauma of its representation.”44 Boltanski uses anonymity not metaphorically, but as a device that at once distances and allows a perception of intimacy. These representations, as the absence of presence, cannot engage visually as personalities with the viewer. Liss describes the sense of impossibility of re-presenting the truth of the people, the dead, behind the photographs: “The faces refuse to enact retrospective documentary gazes. Boltanski positions them to stand in as illegitimate witnesses – that is, as faces that have seen but cannot bear witness. They testify, nonetheless, that something has happened.”45
What is left is identification without identity, yet Boltanski nevertheless sets up devices for eliciting emotion. For Liss, Boltanski is being provocative by referencing both the sentimental and the inauthentic “precisely to implicate the ease with which the viewer gets trapped in a universalised quasi-ethereal and quasi-somber nostalgia.”46 Boltanski himself does not seem to give too much away. However, he has maintained the value of questioning47 – “it’s very hard to separate the true from the false” – and sometimes the false grows into the true – “it was a truth that I’d been hiding from myself, and which I could only admit to myself via the cover of a game.”48
Boltanski’s doubling – his effort to “create identification between the viewer and the pictured and its simultaneous nullification”49 – problematises not only the portrait as the
44 Andrea Liss, Trespassing Through Shadows: Memory, Photography, and the Holocaust, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis and London, 1998, p. 49.
45 Liss, p. 48. 46 Liss, p. 49.
47 Boltanski observes, “Some paintings invite you only to communion and prayer; others ask you questions. I see myself
as closer to the latter … I’m scared of an art that tries to impose itself on others”. In Gumpert, p. 176.
48 Gumpert, p. 176. 49 Liss, p. 49.
Figure B8
Christian Boltanski
Autel Chases (detail), 1987
(Altar to the Chases High School)
revelation of an inner truth, but the notion of authenticity itself. Thinking about the portraits as referencing the specifics of the Holocaust, the work becomes problematic in its collusion with notions of deception and generalisation, and ultimately of inhumanity. Yet, while Boltanski’s theatre of memorialisation cannot bring us to re-experience the actual deaths, nor the horrors of mass death, it does set up a means for mobilising emotions, not “authentic” in the sense of emotions responding to the realness of the people behind his photographs, but emotions that are nevertheless relational to other human beings, including one’s self; in other words, a space for an emotion of self within a collective place. Loss of presence, both temporal and spatial, features strongly in diasporic consciousness. The prevalence of human movement and displacement, and the consciousness and current theorising raised by this has entered and expanded our understanding of the contemporary world, in a way not dissimilar to the Holocaust’s penetration of the Western World’s consciousness. The sense of loss of self through displacement, the separation from people and contexts, the paradoxes of belonging to place, all endure in the diasporic consciousness even through subsequent generations.50 Loss of presence is not limited to experiences of diaspora, but can exist in identification with displacement, from the mother-child relationship to one’s relationship with death. What is common to all these senses of loss is not only the loss of an original presence, or “being”, or home, but that they are relational; they are fluid and change according to positions taken. Here we may be reminded of Stuart Hall’s notion of cultural identity as one of “becoming” as well as of “being.”51 It is not necessary, I believe, to find the contextual particularity in Boltanski’s portraits for them to be identified with, or to elicit a genuine emotional response in the viewing experience – “genuine” in the sense of emotion
50 See the section “Postmemory” in the chapter Seeing above.
51 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” in Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (eds), Theorizing Diaspora,
as affect, as a non-narrative response, even while knowledge may come into play. Emotion has been given a space to be experienced, whatever its origins or sources.