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This research project investigates the cultural relationships between medieval artists and performers of religious theatre and pilgrimage, and the lives and works of contemporary performance and installation artists Franko B and Christian Boltanski, who appropriate representations of religious ritual and relic as metaphors for societal loss and personal longing. Drawn forth by social death awareness, both the collective Christian fanaticism of the Middle Ages and the existential angst of the modern age inspired similar creative outputs, each representative of similar quests for immortality, through depictions of religious symbolism and iconography. Yet, while medieval artists left behind relics of their belief system to impart knowledge of spiritual immortality to future generations, contemporary artists leave behind relics of themselves in a quest for personal immortality, through museum collections, monographs, and the memories of those who have been affected by their art. This project examines how the work of these two groups of artists is reflective of the individual and social death anxieties of the particular cultures within which their acts were, and are, performed, utilizing religion-based visual art and theatre as coping mechanisms in the face of widespread mortality salience.

 

In late-medieval Europe, the ubiquitous possibility of abrupt and painful death contributed to a rise in the religious desire for penitence and, thus, to an increase in the performance of mystery and passion plays, as well as the prevalence of memento mori in theatre and visual art. This research project analyzes the interrelationships between medieval artistic responses to famine, war, and disease and those of two contemporary artists, whose work has been directly affected by twentieth-century variants. Born in Paris in 1944 to Catholic and Jewish parents, Christian Boltanski experienced the tragedies of World War II first-hand, and his work often serves as a forceful reminder of human experiences of loss, suffering, and mortality. Many of his installation works elicit clear comparisons to medieval shrines and reliquaries, albeit designed for the veneration of the anonymous, through the preservation of recontextualized found relics. Similarly, Franko B, born in Milan in 1960, experienced his twenties as a homosexual in London during the height of Western AIDS paranoia. Since the mid-1990s, his performance art has focused heavily on the ritualized violation of his own body, enacting metaphoric representations of religious pilgrimage, penance, stigmata, and crucifixion, and leaving behind personal blood relics for contemplation and veneration by witnesses and subsequent viewers. These contemporary works serve as modern mirrors of the late-medieval Dance of Death allegory, as well as the earlier Three Living Meet the Three Dead legend, unifying us all through poetic reminders of the fragility of our individual lives. This project demonstrates correlative artistic endeavours, as parallels are drawn between the socio-psychological effects of the Hundred Years’ War and World War II; fourteenth-century famine and prisoner starvation in concentration camps during the Holocaust; and the Black Death and HIV/AIDS epidemics on the respective European populations of each time period.

 

When viewed through the lens of terror management theory, the conclusion can be drawn that these practices take on an encompassing universal meaning. Motivated by reminders of mortality, artistic production becomes a symptom of the human desire to fortify symbols reflective of one’s cultural worldview, enforcing and preserving them as representations of endurance and indestructibility. In this way, the memento mori of the Middle Ages provides not only a visual reminder of death, but an incentive to believe in something greater than oneself—a meaning system that promises symbolic immortality through one’s identification with the system and “genuine” immortality through religion. However, in a post-Enlightenment age of uncertainty and existential angst, the path to immortality is not so easily achieved. Perhaps, then, under modern conditions, art may provide an alternative to religion, offering an equivalent system of methods and beliefs through which one’s creative acts may be conceived, carried out and preserved, in perpetuity. Christian Boltanski and Franko B, in particular, invert the medieval convention of art in service of religion, employing religion as metaphor in service of art. Through this inversion, one is able to draw analogies between the medieval Church and the modern art museum; the religious relic and the contemporary work of art; illuminated manuscripts and artist monographs; priests and curators; congregations and museum-goers; Christ and The Artist. By appropriating and poeticizing the language of a comparable cultural belief system, Christian Boltanski and Franko B imprint themselves on the future. Adapting to centuries of social change, artists such as these have long since abandoned the collective anonymity characteristic of medieval artistic production. However, as this research project illustrates, the religious rituals so depended upon during the late Middle Ages continue to persevere in contemporary art, symbolically, as viable conduits for immortality.

STEPHEN MUELLER

Immortalizing Death:Reflections of the Medieval in the Works of Christian Boltanski and Franko B

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