The Big storehouse.

Christian Boltanski belongs among those obsessive artists who are courageous and strong enough to tackle again and again their most personal vision, revisiting, modifying, and constantly reinterpreting it. His installations appear at once as a continuation, a further elaboration, of his familiar universe, yet they always address us with new, unexplored meanings. As a highly conscious “painter of the end of the twentieth century,” he is very clear in naming what precisely this obsession is about.

“I am interested in what I call ‘little memory,’” Boltanski writes in the catalogue to his new Paris exposition, “an emotional memory, an everyday knowledge, the contrary of the Memory with a capital M that is preserved in history books. This little memory, which for me is what makes us unique, is extremely fragile, and it disappears with death. This loss of identity, this equalization in forgetting, is very difficult to accept.”

From the very beginning of his career, Boltanski has been in unswerving search of traces, collecting passionately what is left, incidentally, after our disappearance. Countless objects, masses of used clothes, thousands and thousands of photos taken from family albums or magazines, are endlessly piled up in his huge storehouse. And the result is the utmost bewildering, paradoxical memento. For the monument exposes something which by definition does not exist. It makes somehow lively the existence of a person who has already gone. It evokes phantoms, exhibiting the broken remnants of the once living man, woman, or child. But here we are forced to face a particular contradiction: uniqueness and anonymity, difference and identity are simultaneously present. He seems to be intrigued by the opposition of the personal and yet neutral, leveled together. “Number, the almost unchangeable aspect of the human being and its uniqueness, its own particular character, are one of the oppositions I work with,” he says.

The enormous mass speaks about multitude, but the still unforgettable individual faces are incomparable; they signify different meanings. These faces of unknown persons have had their own destiny, they have been captured in the most common, intimate moments of their life. Yet, in Boltanski’s deliberately arbitrary configurations, they have lost this strong identity. They are but one among the thousands. Looking at his momentous displays we also have to understand to what extent memory and oblivion complement each other, how inseparably they are intertwined—since memory necessarily obliterates, evokes but the fragments of past. It is disappearance itself. In order to express this idea of loss, of the fading of our memory images, Boltanski applied a fine and sophisticated method: he made photographs without a fixing agent; they faded as one looked at them. Reproduced and effaced, ruined and reframed, the gaze of these people is at once the gaze of absence and that of testimony. The working of time has become part of the creation itself.

In one of his first works, the book he did in 1969— Research and Presentation of All That is Left from My Childhood—Boltanski wanted to show this part of himself that had gone for ever: bringing together amateur family photographs, pictures of worn clothing, objects that had lost their meaning. And then he came to realize that the effort to resurrect the “dead child” he carried in himself is hopeless; that only the sheer fact of the effort can be recorded. And at that moment was he forced to spell out his modest ars poetica: “I raise questions to which I do not have an answer.”

What are these questions? They are starting points, historical and psychological stimulations, that call the artist to take on a journey and which keep him caught throughout his whole life doing nothing else but retelling the same experience, again and again. For Boltanski, born just at the end of World War II, the knowledge of the holocaust, the devastating mass murders, was decisive in his formative years; and even if he did not want merely to reduce his work to this drama, the inexcusable destruction, the relationship between innocence and guilt—in other words, the terrifying capacity of man for...