The French artist is rough,gruff and slippery with the truth – and now he’s tackling life’s most frightening question with a clock that will stop the moment he does
“Factual reality is not vital,” says Christian Boltanski. This is not necessarily the first thing a journalist wants to hear from an interviewee. The French artist is talking about the day that the woman who co-wrote his “confessional”, or La Vie Possible,called up his brother to corroborate some facts. “But my brother is as mountainous a liar as I am!” he laughs. So much for straight-shooting.
Boltanski’s relationship with the truth has always been tricky. His series Suisses Morts featured rephotographed pictures from the obituaries section of a Swiss newspaper – but it emerged that not all of the subjects were actually dead. (“Just wait a little and it will be exact,” is his comeback). He’s 71 now, and with a low,grumbling voice and a gruff manner. His longtime friend, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, and once described his relationship with Boltanski thus: “We’d just meet in a café,have a drink and believe about how to change the world. It was never, ‘What’s the next project?’; it was what could we carry out that’s never been done.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com