Can I Borrow Your Mixtape? #2

Monument Odessa, 1991

"We are all so complicated, and then we die. We are a subject one day, with our vanities, our loves, our worries, and then one day, abruptly, we become nothing but an object, an absolutely disgusting pile of shit. We pass very quickly from one stage to the next. It's very bizarre. It will happen to all of us, and fairly soon too. We become an object you can handle like a stone, but a stone that was someone."

-Christian Boltanski

New year, new mixtape-- plus one of French contemporary artist Christian Boltanski's haunting "missing children" photography installations. I was lucky enough to see Boltanski's installation pieces in the basement galleries of the Musée d'Art Moderne-- which included one room completely lined in slightly-blurred newspaper-quality photographs of anonymous missing children, one room nearly filled with stacked articles of clothing, and one filled with weathered phone books and Yellow Pages from each and every nation--during my stay in Paris. Boltanski handles the concepts of loss, death, memory and nostalgia with a eerily delicate transcendence. His work is definitely worth looking into-- as well as that of his partner, Annette Messager (more on her to come)!

Some of what I've been listening to lately:

Can I Borrow Your Mixtape? #2