CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI.

"The big problem when you're an artist is that the times of creation don't come often. Most of the time I stay here in my studio and groan, and after that I go to my room, look at the TV.One of the beauties of my life is that I never work. I'm lazy and I have no other way to work. I teach this to my students: you must wait and hope - there's nothing else you can do. And when you have an idea, you can do it in ten minutes.' "

Christain Boltanski was born in Paris in 1944 and spent his early years hiding from the Nazi's. His artwork is haunted by the problems of memory and loss. Boltanski's work seeks to memorialize the anonymous and those who have dissappeared. Many of Boltanski's projects have used actual lost property from public spaces. He has had exhibits all over the globe, including one in the MFA.




Flowers and Airman 1991


Monument Odessa 1944


Sans-Souci 1991



Faces 1996



L'École des Fans 2000



Gelebt



Archive Dead Swiss 1990


Boltanski does his art work in a room that serves as his studio. Most of the time he doesn't let people into his studio. "Nobody comes here - I don't like it when people come here. There is nothing to see - most of the time I give interviews at a cafe in Paris, and it's good." He says that his "studio" is a place for him to live, he says that the only useful thing about a studio is that after some time you can imagine something in the space, like a forrest. "I walk in it and today it is nothing for me, but perhaps in two weeks it will become something."

At age 12 Boltanski began his life as an artist, when he felt that his childhood was over and he had become an adult, "when i understood that my childhood was finished, and was dead." Boltanski says "I think we all have somebody who is dead inside of us. A dead child. I remember the little Christain that is dead inside of me." Boltanski stopped attending school and started to stay at home. "I was very crazy" he says. One day he made a small object out of plasticine and his parents and brother encouraged him by telling him how good it was. Boltanski then began to make large paintings in his room while his brother taught him english.

Boltanski goes to his studio every day at 10:30 "and I stay and do nothing. I go to Paris sometimes. I have a few ideas. To be very pretentious, sometimes I believe it is mystical. Sometimes you find nothing, and then you find some-thing you love to do. Sometimes you make mistakes, but some-times it's true. In two minutes, you understand what you must do for the next two years. Sometimes it's in the studio, but other times it's walking in the street or reading a magazine. It's a good life, being an artist, because you do what you want." Most of his artwork is destoryed after his shows, if it is not destoryed it is removed and recylced and used to put into another piece. "When I make a show it's like when you arrive at home and you open your fridge at night and there's two potatoes and one sausage and two eggs, and with all that you make something to eat. I try to make something with what is in my fridge".

When Boltanski makes a show he tries to make it so it has a begining and and end because "emotion comes from time." Boltanski says "t's a different kind of time than theatre or cinema. I mean, when you read a book, you have, say, a young girl who is happy on one page, and you turn the page and now she is dying. That quality of emotion comes when you have some kind of a shock.When I make a picture, I try to create different kinds of space, and even different kinds of shock, to have a beginning and to have a sweep of emotion. My work is a little like theatre, but it's also always so different. I'm like a musician, I can play my work and I can play my work better, or worse, depending on the place where I am showing. It's theatre without text, without spectacle. What I wish to do is something between theatre and installation.'"


'Being an artist does not make me happy. You have no reason to wake up in the morning. That's my big problem. Why don't I look at the TV all day? I've made no reason to come here. But if I stop totally, then nothing happens. I always hoped to open a bakery in Bratislava - with a very fat wife and ten children! - but I shall never do that. This is a lonely life. Some of my friends love to make gardens or have cars, and I understand that. But for me I want to do nothing, to have no distraction. I love to eat, I love to drink, I like to see friends. I'm not always alone. I am not a good cook, but I love to cook. I occasionally have this dream that I am a teacher, but I am a bad teacher and I don't go to my school very often! 'And what is very lonely is that nobody else can say anything useful to you about your work. Even Annette [Messager] never comes here. She never looks at my work. 'There is a beautiful story in Proust: A sad man whose wife has just died sees a friend going to commit suicide. They pass through a garden and he says to his friend, "Look at these flowers, so beautiful. Look at the blue sky." Seeing these things, the friend forgets to kill himself. He survives because he forgets. Sometimes we need to forget. For this reason, I do nothing, and I only wait to die. We must be friendly with dying. To be alive is to be honest.'-Boltanski