Anonymous dead people, suggestions of interrogation and torture, theft of identity, lost lives.
Christian Boltanski La Réserve des Suisses morts. 42 photographs on paper, 42 electric lamps, fabric and wood, and variations. 1990
The point is that there are many configurations and iterations of these idea possible. As an artist I relate to that in installation - especially using moving image, which I understand can sometimes be so laden with license conditions that it cannot be reshown if it finally make it into an institution's collection. Art must have a little space to breathe, to be recreated, reinterpreted and recurated.
I totally see how viewers might, and do, mention Boltanski in relation to my final project, Embedded, particularly with the use of the probably anonymous school photos, Class of Yesterday. However, my use of such archive material, although I have shades of similar suggestions of the loss of identity in time and the suffering of war and events, does not signpost or interpret the material in the way Boltanski does. I have found in critiques, tutorials and conversations with friends - as yet the piece is unexhibited, that people do pick up the other side unprompted by me, that the interpretation is more open and potentially less bleak - perhaps a more universal view that we are all subject to such time and the waves of chance that fate will give to us. For all the waves of darkness which are unquestioningly there, are also waves of light, or consolation that we are all subject to such opposing forces - in sunshine and in shadow.
11th November 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment