an image of death in post-war europe

Death is an image. Life and death are tied irrevocably together, each informing the meaning of the other. The ways that we conceive death will always be fundamentally based in thought that is alive, or not-dead. That said we cannot objectively understand or value death. Because death cannot be understood rationally it is imagined both on an individual and on a cultural level. This image of death could be said to be a cousin to Deleuze's famous 'image of thought' in that it rhizomatically develops from the influence of multiple systems (familial, societal, national, etc.) and that it is based on a point in time.

Death is constantly being reinvented. The death-for-a-cause, the Christian martyrdom, is a spectre that haunts Western thought. True meaning in the modern world could be considered 'that which is worth dying for,' both in the sense of every moment being that in which we are dying and the act of martyrdom itself. To go along with Bataille, we could say that martyrdom is the ritualization of dying.

Modernity and industrialization radically changed the way that the Western world conceived of death. Death itself became industrialized: machine guns killed dozens in the time it took to fire and reload a rifle; tanks and grenades destroyed groups of men, thousands were killed in battles and millions were exterminated in the holocaust. Where Marx saw monetary value systems as viral and destructive to other value systems, Adorno saw the pointless extermination of the Jews as destructive to pre-modern Western conceptions of death. The holocaust became the historical Real event that proved death's meaninglessness.

If death itself can only be an image, then dying is its interaction with reality. There are several aspects to dying that humans as living organisms face. Our lives are contingent, and at any moment we could cease to be. There is a sense that, because we age, we are perpetually dying. It could be said that we are 'progressing' toward death with each day. Heidegger argues that until we understand our status as a dying organism and recognize the contingent nature of our existence, we can never fully value or understand life.

The art of Christian Boltanski captures the tensions and interactions between singular and collective conceptions of dying in post-war Europe. Death is a reoccurring theme in Boltanski's work. His genius may be said in collecting the debris and refuse of this industry of death. The installation of clothing taken from the Jews during the holocaust shows how a number like six million can cloud the realization that each of the six million died separate, individually. Each article of clothing takes on significance as a trace and reminder of this dark time in human history. On the other hand, Boltanski avoids a direct condemnation of the Nazis by his humanizing installation of pictures of Germans in the 1930s at weddings, parties, and in uniform. He says, “It is a work that gathers together 1,600 images of human beings, it is above all a work about loss of identity.”

Boltanski’s art presents the effect of mass movements and industrialization: a loss of human identity, the 'small memory' that is “...everything that forms us and creates us.” No longer able to recognize ourselves within the context of a state, an army, or a family, we lose the ability to recognize the other's identity. Boltanski's art presses against the viewer's own conception of themselves amongst their imagined communities. We, too, are but an image, a scrap of clothing, a handwritten note eventually to be among the articles of the dead to one day disappear completely from the minds of men.

His art is an attempt at the impossible to close this gap between death and dying. The more we detach ourselves from death itself by our denial of dying, the more susceptible we are to living thoughtlessly or living through our collective imagination, the same collective imagination that exterminated millions of people. Fundamentally Boltanski's work is a symptom of Europe still coming to grips with and understanding the Second World War and its implications in the Western understanding of the human mind and soul.