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Art Essay: Christian Boltanski's at Noguchi Museum May 5 - Sept 5, 2021

By Suzaan Boettger
arttimesjournal August 28, 2021

Christian Boltanski Bells at Naguchi MuseumChristian Boltanski Bells at Noguchi Museum

Tinkle tinkle little bell – for whom do Christian Boltanski’s bells toll? You. Me. And everyone who craves a serene escape, calling us to the verdant sculpture garden of the Noguchi Museum, now strewn with tinkling bells. The French artist has installed 180 slender steel rods at various heights. Arcing over at the top, each dangles a bronze bell, and each clapper suspends a slim rectangle of glass. Twirling in the breeze, the panes catch the light, reflecting sparkles around ground and greens. The delicate light and sound show envelopes and sweeps us away.

Titled Animitas, the environment takes its name from its larger version installed in Chile’s harshly arid Atacama Desert in 2014. An animita is a small roadside shrine honoring the departed; each chime calls up a lost soul. There, in the desert, Boltanski positioned the 800 bells in the locations of stars on the night of his birth, September 6, 1944, reiterating his personal attachment to loss. Astrologically, he’s a Virgo, a zodiac sign said to be devoted to details and also especially capable of making the best of negative circumstances. That he has done. Born in Paris shortly after its liberation from the Nazis (from whom his Jewish father hid beneath floorboards), Boltanski seems to have identified not with emancipation and relief but anticipation of a threat – a sense of the world as a place with a strong presence of death and degradation.

Christian Boltanski Bells at Naguchi MuseumChristian Boltanski Bells at Noguchi Museum

Boltanski’s career has been a series of environmental assemblages as inventive as they are melancholy. Mortality is his beat; his investigations first gained attention in the 1980s for his claustrophobic arrays of enlarged, blurred, and roughed pictures taken from the yearbook of a prewar private Jewish high school in Vienna whose students were likely lost during the Holocaust. Bare light bulbs, sometimes fronting the portraits as if under interrogation, and exposed electric cords extended the funky materiality. Subsequently, he titled multiple stacks of worn tin boxes “reliquaries” as if sacred containers for bits of hair, clothes, or treasured possessions of martyrs. At his “No Man’s Land” filling the Park Avenue Armory in 2010, piles of discarded used clothing signaled either the disappearance of their wearers or the imminent appearance of a catastrophe’s victims to claim these garments. Like the Romantics’ ruins, Boltanski’s degraded compilations are both visually stirring and in grappling with loss, aid viewers in doing so.

Boltanski’s current work still honors the dead, but the mood is not melancholy but poignantly charming. Inside the museum, the single stationary camera of Boltanski’s wall size video “La Forêt des Murmures,” 2016, captures the gentle effects of chiming bells and glinting glass permanently installed on the Japanese island of Teshima. Take in as much of the 12 hr, 52 minute recording that your meditation, muscles, or the museum hours will allow, its darkness is a poetic simulacra inverting the direct experience of the soothing sunlit resonance outside.

Beneath the broad canopy of the huge katsura tree, native of Japan and grown from Noguchi’s planting in the mid-1980s, around his abstract stone sculptures and natural boulders, Boltanski’s Animitas animates. Bells are ringing, this timely installation calls us to tranquility – and to remembrance of souls lost.