| Abstract | The "reserve" series contributes a third element to the conception of Dernières Années. According to [Christian Boltanski]'s Abécédaire, the word "reserve" is "linked to the idea of the body in the cupboard, to the thing that is hidden and that we possess, but also to the idea of everything we conserve...our souvenirs and our secrets."(9) In works like Reserve: Canada (1988) and Reserves: The Dead Swiss (1989), Boltanski plays with the impulse to preserve and make public what was once personal and private. But he adds to the imagery of storage and containment more visceral and personally evocative objects such as abandoned (or confiscated) human clothing and photographs. The photographs of human faces in this series are often spotlit by small metal lamps and photo-mechanically reproduced so many times that their identifying features, now almost skeletalized, seem to dissolve. The juxtaposition of these elements in the reserve series produces frequent associations with World War II concentration camps, even when there is no explicit reference to them.
Dernières Années makes use of all of these forrns -- the photo works, the archives, the museum vitrines and the reserves. It is at once a unified installation and a retrospective of works dating from the last two decades, as the title implies. The artist's recycling and refraining of everyday objects as human salvage or as the evidentiary remains of a culture of surveillance has prompted critics such as Nancy Mariner to speak of Boltanski's installations as "metonyms for Auschwitz or Treblinka."(10) But it is through a larger, structural context that we experience the residual affect of the Holocaust -- as one hideous extreme of an ideological spectrum of rationality, knowledge and power that is, as it is in Dernières Années, at once familiar and repellant. As Didier Semin writes: "We might perhaps say that all of Christian Boltanski's work deals not with the memory of the Holocaust but with the extraordinarily complex mechanisms that have made horror possible, that which enables us to conceive the inconceivable."(11)
Boltanski's recent work examines the uneasy relationship of visual and textual representation to the past by underlining the compulsion to overvalue and overread. The past whose representation Boltanski regularly invokes, and then provocatively evades, is that of World War II, the historical frame through which he claims it is impossible for someone of his generation not to see. But unlike the commemorative imagery with which his art is frequently compared, Boltariski's installations do not seek to represent the Holocaust or do the work of mourning. They are, in fact, suspicious of such enterprises. Though some critics argue that commemoration is inexorably bound to narrative -- that names and dates and stories are essential to the recovery of memory and the restoration of life -- for Boltanski, narrative and historical writing seem to hold as many dangers as promises. "We are a culture of story builders," says Boltanski, "and the more we tell the more we lose."(15)
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