ABSTRACT
The aesthetic and political power of child play imagery underpins the work of contemporary Paris-based artist Christian Boltanski’s 2004 public art installation in Vitteaux, central France. When darkness falls, a Halloween shadow theatre comes to life to haunt and amuse the town´s inhabitants only to be dissipated by the morning sun. The images that come and go enact a playful dynamic with the lost world of childhood and its intermittent presence in adult life. Boltanski´s flickering shadows dramatize loss as a ritualized rhythmic play. Disappearance and reappearance are here taken as artistic gestures connected to play, embodying philosophical concerns with death, the passage of time and the status of the past in the present, of childhood in adulthood. These ghostly silhouettes reborn from childhood as surviving images bring back forgotten ways of making and experiencing art, following Walter Benjamin: “But when a modern poet says that everyone has a picture for which he would be willing to give the whole world, how many people would not look for it in an old box of toys?” Bringing Boltanski and Benjamin together shows how aesthetic practices drawn from the world of child play can bring about new ways of making, feeling and sharing a common environment.
