PARIS - The conversation with Christian Boltanski took place in the office of the Grand Palais, where his mammoth installation "Personnes" was on view at Monumenta 2010, a massive annual art event staged in Paris for the third time, and which closed February 21.

"Personnes" means both "people" and "nobody" in French. Accordingly, a visitor entering the installation - with the constant hubbub, the repetitive movement of a machine in the center of the nave, and the hordes of people - feels as if he were in a weird and alienating factory, the operator and purpose of which are not clear.

The Grand Palais is a gargantuan steel-and-glass structure built in honor of the Paris Exposition of 1900. For the first Monumenta event, in 2008, the building's 13,500-square-meter nave was given over to the German artist Anselm Kiefer (who lives and works in France); last year the event featured American artist Richard Serra. This year's installation by Boltanski, which was on display for less than six weeks, drew more than 700,000 visitors.

The invitation to show at Monumenta is among a long list of honors bestowed on Boltanski since the start of his artistic career in the late 1960s. These include the de Gaulle-Adenauer Prize (2009), Japan's Praemium Imperiale Prize (2006) and the Kunstpreis Aachen (1994), among many other awards. In 1968, at age 24, he had his first solo exhibition in Paris. It was the year of the student riots for social change. In the show, Boltanski presented sketches and a film entitled "La vie impossible de C.B." In the following decade, he continued pursuing an interest in fictional biographies, making use of objects that were, or were not, from his childhood, and real or staged photography. Preoccupation with fictitious biography was at the center of the piece he showed in 1972 at Documenta V in Kassel, Germany, his first major international exhibition.

Beginning in the second half of the '70s, and especially after 1984, he created a series called "Monuments," which consisted of photographs. It was in these pieces that a preoccupation with the Holocaust became explicit. Since then, Boltanski has created mainly installations - often in spaces usually reserved for religious rituals - and he has stood out as an artist who does not view art as entertainment, but rather, as he has stated, as a substitute for prayer, or at the very least as a place for contemplation.

Boltanski's art declines to be pigeonholed. He is not afraid of being dramatic and direct, or of stretching the spectator's range of emotion to a point where one feels that every photograph, every shadow, and every empty garment could have been his, and could have been part of his personal memory. Boltanski manages so well at awakening this specific sensation of anxiety and making it "present" that it becomes universal.

Heartbeat sounds

Boltanski has been married for many years to Annette Messager, a highly successful French artist who represented France at the 2005 Venice Biennale. He has been chosen to represent France at the 2011 Biennale, making this the first time that a husband and wife have both been selected to represent their country at the prestigious event. At the entrance to Monumenta, Boltanski erected an enormous wall of rusty cookie tins of the same size, each of which is numbered. Items of winter clothing are spread on the floor in neat squares, separated by broad pathways for people to walk along. At the center is a pile of clothes three stories high; an electronic crane scoops up and drops the clothes over and over. Playing in the background is a recording that sounds like the hum of machinery, but is actually a manipulation of the heartbeats of various people from the archive of heartbeat recordings Boltanski has been collecting in recent years, including at Monumenta.

At his request, Monumenta was rescheduled from June to the winter months, and the Grand Palais is not heated. The temperature hovered around 0 degrees Celsius and was part of the installation.

Young people dressed in thick black sweatshirts with white logos identifying them as official exhibition guides milled about the hall. They guided groups and individuals in French, English and Spanish, and the text they recited ever so amiably dealt with such concepts as collective memory, chance and divine intervention, colorfulness and the erasure of the individual. By the end of my tour, I could only marvel at the acrobatics to which our guide had resorted to refrain from using the word "Holocaust." When I asked her about this, her response was somewhat embarrassed. She said that almost everyone she had guided through the installation had related it to the Holocaust, and to the piles of clothes as symbolizing those of murder victims at the German death camps. However, she added, the guides were told during their two-week training that they should allow visitors their own freedom of association.

Boltanski was born in Paris in early September 1944, less than two weeks after the city was liberated from German occupation. He grew up in the house where his father, a Jewish doctor of Russian descent, had spent World War II hiding underneath the floor, while Boltanski's mother, a Catholic woman of Corsican origin, supplied all his needs.

When asked why there was deliberately no mention of the Holocaust, Boltanski replied with a measure of ambivalence: "This work is about fate and divine intervention. It's open, and if someone thinks that it is about the Holocaust, that's fine. The Holocaust is particularly strong in my memory. But to someone from Africa it looks like a refugee camp ... Naturally when you see so many clothes, it looks like the Holocaust."

The installation's remarkably orderly architectural structure was actually inspired by mosques, Boltanski says: "In a mosque there are carpets and there is low lighting, and my idea was - contrary to the artists who preceded me at Monumenta, who worked with the height of the space - to work with the floor, to emphasize the flatness. The emphasis on the floor was the first aspect in my thinking about the whole project, and after that I thought of the name 'Personnes' - 'people' and 'no one.' In each square of clothes that I created, you can see people through the way they represent themselves, and hear heartbeats of living people from a sound system at a slightly lower volume than average. In the mountain of clothes the individual is gone, and that of course has to do with the Holocaust - the destruction of identity, the dehumanization."

The sheer magnitude of the installation, which made creating it a challenging task by all accounts, interested Boltanski mainly because of the immense scale of human presence it enabled him to display, in keeping with his previous works. The permanent collection of Paris' City Museum of Modern Art includes three rooms, none very large, that Boltanski created: The first room contains shelves along the walls crammed with clothes; the second contains black-and-white photographic portraits; the third has a library of telephone books from various countries (including Israel).

"I created the rooms over 10 years," he explains. "Most important for me are the telephone books. My pieces always have lots of people. At Monumenta there are 30 tons of clothes. The phone book library has the names of millions of people. The group versus the individual - that is a topic that has always occupied me. When they say that 300 people are killed by war every day, it's not really '300'; it's one who likes soccer and another who likes cooking and so on. My work deals with the big numbers and the individual; with the question: Why am I alive and my friends are dead? Questions of this sort."

You define "Personnes" as a work that talks about God, the address for such questions ordinarily.

Boltanski: "I am not a believer. I think there is no relationship between us and God. We don't have an explanation for why we will or won't survive. The idea of the clothes mountain was the matter of random choice, the mechanical arm that lifts clothes. It's not evil; it's simply blind and totally indifferent to what it lifts up. That is how, with no intention whatsoever, we kill a bug that we don't see. The explanation that there is no explanation is what is important to me."

Fate or chance

The question of fate or chance has accompanied him since childhood: "As a boy, all of my parents' friends were survivors and they were constantly dealing with the question of why they survived. All I heard were stories about the Holocaust."

Boltanski's career began after he dropped out of school at 13 (he never again attended an educational institution). "I grew up in a traumatized home: We were afraid to walk in the street by ourselves, and even though it was a big house, the whole family slept in one room. We were always afraid that something would happen, and we lived with the constant thought that everything could be undermined. I went by myself in the street only when I was 18. As a teenager I was taken to school and picked up from there. Maybe that's why I didn't want to go to school."

Art saved him, he adds: "One day, my brother said that a drawing of mine was good, and I decided that this would be my direction."

Boltanski carved out an artistic path for himself, and in the course of his career he has managed to work in numerous media - painting, photography, video, shadow art, and primarily installation art. Today he is pursuing the question of how to be a "sentimental minimalist."

Your projects from the '80s and '90s that included photographs, particularly "Autel de Lycee Chases" ("Altar to Chases High School") from 1987 [blowups of a picture of the graduating class of 1931 at a Jewish school in Vienna, nearly all of whose subjects were murdered in the Holocaust], helped shape the historic memory.

"I came across the photograph in a book. It was a very small photograph, in which, when I enlarged it, all of the faces looked like skulls. As far as I'm concerned, the clothes and the photographs are identical. I don't use photographs anymore, it's too sentimental."

He is now getting ready to create two new versions of "Personnes," which will be on view in New York in May (part of the Park Avenue Armory Show) and in Milan in June. Boltanski, who announced in advance that the clothes displayed at Monumenta would be recycled, likens the installation's next two incarnations to "a musical piece that is performed again. Each time it is something new. The form will change but the idea will remain the same."

Meanwhile, his "Les archives du coeur" ("Archives of the Heart") is set to open this July on the Japanese island of Tashima. The library, which Boltanski has been working on since 2005, will contain recordings of beating hearts, cataloged in a way that will accommodate requests for hearing the heartbeat of a particular person. "Over time the heartbeats will be from dead people, so it will be the island of the dead," he says.

"I already have 50,000 people. The library will open in July, but the unit with the recording machines will continue to travel, and recently I sent a recording setup to the Haifa Mediterranean Biennale."

By situating the archive in Japan are you making a statement about cultural relations between the West and Japan?

"It was important to me that it be somewhere far away."

The question is always, far away from what? The notion that Japan is "far away" is the epitome of Eurocentricism.

"Yes, that is true, far away for me. It was important to me that it be somewhere far from Europe. It is part of my effort to create permanent projects, present but not ephemeral."

Does this stem from the inflation in the images we experience?

"I wanted to escape the marketplace of images, in which a lot of artists create in order to sell. I destroy about 80 percent of what I create. Fortunately, I do not have to sell [my work] because my financing comes from foundations. I have no assistants, no secretary. As you grow older, you want work that is not ephemeral. I cannot create a piece today for a collector who will put it on a wall in his house. I did that in the past, but it does not interest me as much."

Boltanski began dealing with explicitly Jewish topics only after his father died in 1984. Since then he has had exhibitions at the world's major art museums (from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, to the Tate Modern, London), but also at a series of Jewish and Holocaust museums, including Paris' Museum of Jewish Art and History, the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In 1998 he created "Kaddish," a book of black-and-white photography that runs to more than 1,000 pages.

"I was raised as a Catholic and sometimes I create pieces that I'm told are close to the Jewish tradition," he says. "I am the most Jewish in my family [Boltanski has two brothers]. I have an internal memory of my Jewish forefathers, mainly in the sense that my work deals with posing the question and does not propose an answer.

"It would have been easy for me if my parents had moved to Israel in 1946," he muses hypothetically: "I was always amazed that they stayed. I think my father, a successful doctor, was afraid to start over. He also wanted so badly to be French."

Boltanski has been to Israel twice on brief visits, but says he never made it to Tel Aviv.

"If I am alive, I will come to Israel in another two or three years. Right now I am too busy, but I have an idea for a big project at the Salt Sea, the Dead Sea."

Boltanski taught for many years at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. "I told the students that there is nothing to teach or learn in art," he explains. "What I did was talk to them about their topics. Art is the place where you can talk about anything. The first topic that occupies you as an artist is important."

What was your first topic?

"Massacre. My first paintings dealt with mass murder. I was talking about the Armenian holocaust, not the Jewish."

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