Christian Boltanski takes a big chance with installation at Carriageworks

OUR culture is surprised by death because we spend so much time trying to ignore it or pretend it isn’t going to happen.

Details from the three sections that make up Christian Boltanski’s massive installation,

OUR culture is surprised and even scandalised by death because we spend so much time trying to ignore it or pretending it isn’t going to happen. The great French essayist Michel de Montaigne, on the other hand, suggested in the title of a famous piece that the essence of philosophy may consist in learning to die.

All great art and literature too arises from our apprehension of mortality, and is, in the end, all that survives the universal entropy that overcomes our bodies, to demonstrate that humanity has been capable of understanding and reflecting on its own condition, not merely suffering mutely like an animal.

The durable achievements of culture are acts of resistance against the tide of entropy, but they begin with a clear recognition of the fate that awaits all of us; consumer culture, whose futility is pitilessly revealed by the chill blast of death, can sustain itself only by denying the facts of time and age. Hence the relentless celebration of youth in commercial entertainment and advertising.

Yet, because this is denial rather than confrontation of reality, few of us take any of the measures that can actually help prolong life and, above all, the quality of life. People eat and drink too much, smoke, take drugs, behaviour that hastens decay. Hence the shocking disjunction between the purportedly ideal bodies presented in the media environment and real ones.

The recent epidemic of tattooing is likewise a denial of mortality, a refusal to recognise that smooth taut flesh will one day be wrinkled and flaccid. At the same time, it clearly appeals to people whose lives are narrowly circumscribed by economic necessity, allowing them to imagine that some part of them is actually wild and free. A soundtrack of commercial music piped into the mind through earphones similarly forms a defence against disturbing thoughts and helps everyone imagine themselves as the protagonist of their own movie.

Into this world of self-deception, Christian Boltanski’s colossal installation in the foyer of Sydney’s Carriageworks intrudes with irresistible force yet a surprising serenity, to remind us of the incontrovertible and relentless cycle of birth and death, of coming to be and ceasing to be. Or it would intrude into that world if the people with the tattoos and the iPods came to see it, or if they - and even many aficionados of contemporary art - were capable of paying attention long enough to recognise the challenge it poses to the unspoken premises of their day-to-day existences.

Boltanski’s installation comprises three works. Two function in a synergistic way while the third represents a kind of coda or corollary to the other two. The first of these works, titled Wheel of Fortune, consists of an enormous scaffolding structure, about 40m long and 8m high, and occupying almost the whole of the vast foyer space in the old industrial hangar. Through this edifice of pipes runs a continuous ribbon of images, up and down and diagonally, turning around steel rollers to go back on its tracks in a restless zigzagging of animation that recalls the machines that carry newly printed newspapers to the loading dock for dispatch. The immediate impression conveyed by this huge metaphoric structure is one of endless activity with connotations at once of novelty and of transience. It is almost simultaneously apparent that the ribbon that is being processed through this machine in an endless and complex loop is composed of the faces of babies. A wall panel informs us that the photographs have all been taken from the birth notices in Polish newspapers and converted to the grainy black-and-white transparencies of the loop, in turn suggesting another metaphor, that of the film strip racing through a cinema projector.

The hundreds or even thousands of newborn faces that pass before us are a poignant enough reminder of the number of infants that come into the world, the anonymity of their beginnings and the mystery of their potential to develop, to achieve and to suffer in ways that are statistically predictable but individually aleatory - Boltanski’s overall title for the installation is Chance - or at least impossible to foresee.

From time to time the whole machine shudders to a stop and a warning bell goes off, so that viewers at first imagine it has broken down or that the ribbon has jammed. In fact there is a little video screen on one side of the construction, across which the faces on the transparencies pass in a blur while the machine is running; now, as it stops intentionally but at random, we watch the little faces glide more slowly over the screen until, just like the wheel of fortune of the title, it finally settles on one.

It is the image of an election made without reason, without motivation or justification, and a poignant, yet unsentimental allegory of the way that fortune chooses a different - often dramatically different - fate for each of us. Chance or necessity? The ancient Stoics believed the world was ruled by ineluctable necessity and ultimately therefore by reason, while the Epicureans, like Boltanski, declared that our lives were determined by chance; for each, however, this realisation was an aid to achieving detachment from illusion and desire and the peace of mental composure.

In case the meaning of this first work was not quite clear enough, it is reiterated in a different way by the two digital displays at either end of the hall. Huge numbers are counting up at a dizzying pace before our eyes, green at one end and red at the other. As we could infer even without the aid of the explanatory text, these panels are registering births and deaths respectively - human beings exploding into life on the one side and vanishing into oblivion on the other.

The counters are designed to register the number of births and deaths in the world at a rate that represents the daily average, and they are reset every 24 hours, so the figures we are looking at represent as closely as possible what has actually happened and is happening in real time as we watch, on the day we are in the gallery. The numbers are as daunting as the speed with which they turn over, and it is clear that the births are adding up far more rapidly than the deaths.

It seems, in fact, that there are about 200,000 more births than deaths every day, so while Wheel of Fortune focuses on the randomness of individual fates, Last News from Humans - in French dernieres nouvelles has the double meaning of latest as well as last - invites us to contemplate the disaster of overpopulation. It is like watching water running into a bath more quickly than it can escape down the plughole; the outcome, at this collective and statistical level, is as predictable as it is inevitable.

And it is not just an ecological catastrophe that threatens us; more subtly our ability to empathise with people diminishes proportionally as their numbers grow, as we can all see from our response to being in a crowd, or the difficulty we have in understanding the human dimension of suffering in populations that already defy imagination.

The third work in the exhibition, Be New, consists of two screens on which segments of human faces - divided vertically into thirds - alternate at random. The segmented faces come from 60 of the Polish newborn photographs and 52 pictures of deceased adults taken from Swiss newspapers. Foreheads, eyes and noses, mouths and chins cascade down the screen in endlessly varying permutations - a baby’s mouth with an elderly person’s eyes, a baby’s eyes with wrinkled lips and a moustache, a bald head that may be that of an infant or an old man.

A form that recalls gambling machines serves to convey Boltanski’s bleak view of the determining power of chance - paradoxical, since, as we have already seen, it is not a determinism of necessity, in which outcomes can theoretically be predicted, but the determinism of the random, in which we are at the mercy of something that has no reason or purpose.

Specifically, the work evokes the lottery of genetics, the way each of us is composed of genes that have come from each side of our parentage, and which may have combined in very different ways in our own siblings. And so it also has another layer of significance, in suggesting that the present is always a recombination of material from the past.

The work is interactive; viewers can press a button to halt the rush of changing facial segments at any point and can then contemplate the features they have unwittingly composed, or at least selected, for a few seconds before the flow resumes. I stopped after my third or fourth attempt ended up with a combination of newborn and deceased features that disconcertingly resembled Hegel, the great philosopher who understood time and history as integral to metaphysics.

A final aspect of Boltanski’s work that is worth pondering is its low-tech, mechanical nature. The very scale of the main piece may distract us from the fact it is ultimately an ingenious but structurally quite straightforward piece of bricolage, all of whose workings are perfectly transparent to the viewer. This is in sharp contrast to the functioning of digital technology, which is literally invisible and strictly speaking unintelligible to all but trained technicians.

The effect of the installation is certainly inseparable from this technological form, and the choice is therefore deeply significant on the artist’s part. The reason behind it, no doubt, is that digital technology is the quintessential medium through which delusion, unreality and deception are manufactured and distributed today: digitally produced or enhanced images, digital musical files - all are fundamental to the culture that fosters narcissism and the denial of mortality.

This is particularly true because digital technology conceals the process by which illusion has been contrived. It is in this context that Boltanski’s choice of technology is particularly suggestive. His massive construction creaks and rattles with the old-fashioned and unfamiliar sound of reality.

Christian Boltanski: Chance

Carriageworks to March 23