tonight i went to a talk that my company helped organize. it was a talk between the french artist christian boltanski and the head of publications at the boston museum of fine arts. boltanski is one of those artists about whom i only know a little, but whose work i usually enjoy. he does massive installations, inventories, they're called. piles of folded clothes on shelves, blown up black-and-white photos of children's faces. there was a piece i saw at the little modern art museum in paris, a row of rooms you walked through, with all these multiplied objects stacked and lined up. the clothes piled against the walls of the first room effectively shut out all sound from the rest of the museum, so you felt like you were really inside the piece, rather that surrounded by lots of objects. anyway, my boss and i approached the event with some anxiety, afraid that no one would come or that the talk would be awkward. well, it wasn't crowded, but the talk was wonderful. the gentleman from the mfa had come prepared with plenty of leading questions, and boltanski was quite pleased to tell stories from his life sprinkled with little jokes, and to make pithy romantic statements about his philosophy towards artmaking. i belittle it to describe it that way because i enjoyed it enormously. in college our art history methods teacher one day brought in a prominent conceptual artist for us to interview who was so determined to be true to the conceptual nature of her art and the theories behind it that she wouldn't answer any of our questions and it was very uncomfortable for everyone.
i enjoyed most what boltanski said about the employment of the element of time in his work. if i understand him correctly, he likes to always have something in a piece that is time-based, some performative element or some action that takes place, something that passes and then is gone and cannot be recalled like we would turn back the pages of a book. talking about his inventories, he said they were inspired by ethnographic museums, in which all the objects that pertain to a person or people are displayed, everything but the actual person, and in the end they only underline that absence. and he picked up his glasses and said, if i put these glasses in a vitrine, they will be preserved, they will not be destroyed, but they will not be glasses any more, because glasses are an object that you use to see. once you put them away and prevent them from being used, they become a different kind of object. and he spoke of how this act, which he equated with the production of art, is fighting against death and decay, which is a very futile act.
i''m reading catcher in the rye for the first time, and on the subway ride home after the talk i read a passage in which the main character goes to the natural history museum. most of the new york he describes is unrecognizable to me, but i remember walking through the museum. he's talking about looking at all the vitrines, and he says:
The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, those birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.