CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI. Signatures
Christian Boltanski in Es Baluard. Courtesy: Es Baluard
Archives du coeur (Archives of the Heart) is a universal project by Christian Boltanski which, since 2005, compiles a collection of heartbeats recorded all over the world. It evokes the memory of a vital human force which, in an interaction between multitude and individual, remains and is transmitted from beyond the grave. It has been presented at art centres such as the Palais de Tokio (Paris) and the Serpentine Gallery (London), but is held in Teshima (Japan).
Signatures, the sound installation produced by Boltanski for the Aljub, in Es Baluard, configures, in the Archives project, an immaterial monument to the absence of those who worked its stones, bodies erased by an anonymous death. There is nothing left –in the aesthetics of a hyper-modern baroque which survives in the transparencies and radiations of technology, in the sublime fleetingness of ephemeral things–, except for the signs whose meanings are, like memory, diffuse, unintelligible. Inscriptions of a cryptic alphabet, referred to the wages and amount of work-sweat, of continuous effort: Marx also beats, unavoidably, in that slave, or almost slave, hand, in the children who work in mines, in the prisoners of the Inquisition, in the muscles which carry heavy loads, in master stonemasons. All monuments are erected on the death of others, on the price/sign of human life, merchandise: sometimes, nothing.
Boltanski conveys myths: the flow of the incessant, of an unstoppable, ever-repeated, tune. Time. It registers the Freudian lightness of “the same” in the matter of air, neon, in the acrid cent of fog. It archives the impossible: the spectral of the spectacle alluded to by Barthes. It ritualises the insistent return of death in a simulacrum of cables, speakers, machines and lights. In banal, day-to-day materials. In the domed space of the Aljub we hear the deafening rhythms of hearts, monotonous hammering, stones moving. They are the workers who reconstruct a disappeared world. The ruins of today, transformed into a museum, house the return of the dead, who never left and confront viewers and tourists with the disbelieving sight of what is impossible to understand: always death.
What is revealed here if not the creative act which moves through the stones and signs, perceiving the silence of the unrecognisable and the deafening sound of hearts and hammers, following the path of cables, becoming lost in the white steamy fog and the spectral neon of signs, like a blurred memory, a strange writing? Meaning, for Boltanski, is not opaque; neither is it clear. It is connected by synergies, rumours, ambiguities, immaterial bodies, energies, illuminations and darkness. By the absence of form. Meaning—when it emerges– is not literally conveyed. Unlike in Structuralism and the aesthetics of Wiener Kreis, where meaning is not discovered, but produced, in Boltanski’s work –closer to a Bergsonian view of time, to Foucault’s “face of sand” and to Deleuze’s topology of surface– in an interaction of immaterial signifiers which illuminate the incomprehensible. The vertigo of an infinite death, of a meaningless randomness and sublime destiny which ridicules the supremacy of the immediate, the pointlessness of the object, the hyper-expressiveness of the body and appearance, the cult of relics. For Boltanski art is not decorative: it conveys existential matters. It is not the event it tells us about, he says, but the human condition.
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