I'm reading THE POSSIBLE LIFE OF CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI. Published in 2007, it's a conversation between Boltanski and Beaubourg curator Catherine Grenier. Boltanski's votive installations, archives and objects, revolving around the fragile polarities of memory and amnesia. identity and anonymity, have made him one of the world's most renowned contemporary artists.
I like what he says about theory, that his art is based on emotion and is not theoretical. He says, "I don't know what "art theory" means. There's no progress in art, there's just sequence. Art has been using the same five or six subjects since the beginning of time. Every artist talks about the same things as his predecessors, he just used the vocabulary of the time. It's no better or worse...... And there is little or no distinction between what I'm doing today and what painters were doing in the sixteenth century. Sure, I employ a modern technology - photography - but that makes no difference whatsoever".
Here is my photograph of Bolanski's work, Zeyt, 2001 (and lilies, my addition not his) installed at the Foire d'art contemporaine, Paris, in November 2007.
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