Christian Boltanski's Dernieres Annees: The History of Violence and the Violence of History

In the last decade, the Jewish Holocaust has been invoked in the visual arts with increasing frequency. Ideally suited to a postmodern impulse to test the limits of cultural representation, the Holocaust figures substantially in recent work by artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Ellen Rothenberg and Nancy Spero. One of the most compelling and controversial producers of a post-Holocaust art is Christian Boltanski.

Many of Christian Boltanski's books and installations of the last two decades contain oblique references to the Jewish Holocaust. Their materials and forms make visible, fleetingly, not the Holocaust itself but the culturally mediated representations through which those of us born after 1945 experience it. The artist's reluctance to name the genocidal history to which his work frequently alludes has unsettled several critics. Michael Newman, for example, reasons that the absence of any narrative element in Boltanski's elegiac works contributes to the erosion, rather than the preservation, of historical memory. ¹ Abigail Solomon-Godeau questions the carelessness with which the artist sometimes does use narrative, historical evidence, in tandem with memorial images. A site-specific installation such as The Missing House (1990), she argues, which elides distinctions between Berlin Jews deported to concentration camps and the Germans who subsequently occupied their homes, is ethically compromised by its generic commemoration. ²

Though Newman and Solomon-Godeau offer two of the most textured readings of the artist's work, their arguments rest upon a strangely untroubled notion of history and its recuperative powers, a notion of history contested by Boltanski in a 1998 retrospective installation. The artist's Dernières Années offers a striking engagement of the problematic of "art after Auschwitz." Rather than bracketing the Holocaust as a singular or defining episode of historical violence, the installation is laid out as a series of encounters with evidentiary remains--some sinister, some benign--that invite and then discredit rationalization. It problematizes the practices of narrative and history and suggests a different frame through which we might experience what Ernst van Alphen calls the "Holocaust effect" in Boltanski's work--one less bound to the conventions of memorial imagery and more attuned to a project with which the artist has long been engaged: eliciting the relational tensions between historical episodes of violence and the intellectual violence of history. ³

Installed at the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1998, Dernières Années recycles and refashions nine earlier works whose formal and discursive contiguities are emphasized in the exhibition design. Composed of three distinct areas, Dernières Années begins with a brightly lit introductory space that seems to exist without the artful intervention so obvious in the second sequence of rooms, or the third. The walls in the foyer are not freshly painted or prepared, and their arrangement is more concerned with instruction than with aesthetics. The starched matter-of-factness and didactic panels convey the pedagogical arena of curators and historians more than the spaces of art. This preliminary area recedes as one enters the second series of rooms, the transporting spaces of "art" just beyond. A dramatically altered lighting design announces four galleries that compose the next phase of the installation. The first reprises the 1995 work, Menschlich (figure 1). It is a darkened, rectangular chamber which requires a bit of eye-blinking to adjust to the charcoal graininess of its light. Over time the gallery comes into focus; it is covered nearly floor to ceiling with cropped and enlarged photographs of photographs that have been collected by the artist and recycled through installation projects dating back more than a decade. Several times removed from an original, these reproductions of reproductions appear vaguely distorted. They resolve gradually as the eye adapts to the darkened space, a kind of photographic dark room, that seems to make [Begin Page 6] tangible...