Christian Boltanski: Exhibitions Remembering the Holocaust

      Though I prefer this blog to address projects related to more contemporary wars for the sake of consistency and succinctness, I think this story deserves a place. The power of massive amounts of organized information to overwhelm the emotions is perhaps the most foundational principle of the work of French sculptor Christian Boltanski, who has exhibited over 150 works internationally. Boltanski draws on this principle to allow viewers to respond to the physicality of the Holocaust by viewing enormous collections of photographs and materials meant to evoke the sheer number of lives taken. 

       A recent car conversation I had about choice superpowers somehow seems to apply to his method. When a friend said they wanted 'omniscience' we scratched the brainstorming powers stage and started talking about whether it would be good, or even possible to know everything. 

       One friend made the point that meaning is made from narrative---- and so omniscience would be impossible without something like a google search bar. Something to collect and organize. This was the side I ended up standing by, and also the position that makes me skeptical of the impact and ethicality of works like his exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, where a room full of clothes collected in neat squares is constantly clawed at by an industrial crane like a certain arcade game we are all familiar with. 

       Instead of trying to give faces to the faceless and discover the personal within the mass, he collages the personal to create the mass montage. The room of notes and letters of victims becomes a monochromatic heap of representation rather than an organized historical system. But I think that I can stand by his work by believing that he is commenting on the curatorial limitations of archiving and organizing the artifacts of war. In effect, the artifacts belong to collective emotions beyond their own messages and must be grouped creatively rather than indexically or logically. 

       It's not a stance an archivist would take, and certainly not a textbook strategy, but for the purposes of delving into the dark recesses of human emotion, and for the purposes of evoking utter chaos and voicelessness, Boltanski may just achieve his aim.