크리스티앙 볼탕스키 작품세계 연구 : 죽음ㆍ부재의 이미지 중심으로

Abstract

Christian Boltanski(1944～), a French artist, has been expressing the same subject with various methods since he started his career. This thesis studies 'death and absence' , the subject consistently appeared in his works. Death has continuously been the subject of quest in each field, such as philosophy, religion and art through human's aged cultural context. Even though, for the contemporaries, the concept of death generally means the death of a creature which is called a human, shrewd artists recognize it in a different way. Therefore, these fear and horror toward death have been one of subjects for many artists. Boltanski is a Jewish French and has been centering on symbolic installation work by using photograph and object from 1968 when his first private exhibition was held to now. His early work was started from mail-art, which was progressed to an artistic act by borrowing a form of mail. He created a narrative self-myth by including an autobiographical anecdote in his works. This creation of self-myth reflects his own experience in choosing ordinary things ,which appear as the theme of his works. His series of installation works by photograph demand attention to a Jewish people, who were killed in a concentration camp by the Nazis during the World War Ⅱ, remind us that the death of the Jewish people is not only the matter of a Jewish people but also the matter of humankind through not real photographs but the character photographs produced by him and conveys a stronger message through a symbolic image. In the mean time, a series of installation works by worn-out clothes associate the storehouse which keeps the belongings of slaughtered Jewish, have audience walk on the installed clothes and make the audience feel the death realistically by making them feel as if they walk on corpses. The people, who weared worn-out clothes, disappeared. They are absent. However, their trace and the memories of them remained like scraps somewhere in the World . The storehouse like a vault mentions the scattered scraps. After all, the existence of humans may be a reminder, which is celebrated as the object composed of absence, trace, memory, the flow of time and so on. The real value of humans may exist beyond existence as the photograph taken in a destination is more valuable than a journey itself at times. Boltanski employed ordinary objects, such as worn-out photographs and clothes, a box of cake, a tin pail and so on to express time, memory, experience and death, which are the essential themes in a human life. Humans cannot experience their death directly. They are just aware of others' death indirectly. Death is an unavoidable being in a human life. He make audience think over human's death and our own death through the image of death, darkness and absence felt in an exhibition hall.