Christian Boltanski's Monuments series explores the themes of loss and death perceived through the prism of memory. These installations memorialize unknown persons at the same time that they raise questions about the veracity of the photographic medium. Using appropriated images and mundane objects, Boltanski follows the tradition initiated in Paris in 1913 by the iconoclast Marcel Duchamp, who abandoned the conventional tools of art by using a bicycle wheel for his first ready-made sculpture. Challenges to orthodox media and exhibition venues continued in the 1960s with the international Fluxus group, which sponsored mail art, concerts with audience participation, and improvised performances by Joseph Beuys and others. Breaking down the barrier between life and art culminated with Andy Warhol, the Pop Art master who transformed journalistic photographs of movie stars as well as anonymous accident victims into cool but dazzling silk screens. Boltanski situates his practice between the irony of Pop Art and Fluxus and the pathos that Beuys reinscribed into his manipulated found objects.

In 1985, Boltanski began his Monuments installations, currently grouped under the title Lessons of Darkness, focusing on vernacular photographs of children as the means to convey the transience of life and awaken a collective consciousness of the dead. Here, childhood assumes a vanitas role, representing temporality and an irrevocable loss reclaimed only by memory. Characteristically shown in semidarkness in museums and churches, these poignant works effect a haunting atmosphere and quasi-religious tone with their altar like design and incandescent lightbulbs substituting for votive candles. Although the subjects are anonymous, the children in Monument (Odessa) have all been identified from a group snapshot as Jewish students celebrating Purim in France in 1939. The artist customarily reshot and manipulated the original photograph with croppings, facial enlargements, and dramatic variations in shading to create a less personal, iconic image. Knowing the religion of these children and the year in which they were photographed inevitably links them to the Holocaust and evokes thoughts about their unknown fate. Now the lights illuminating their images beg another interpretation, namely, Yahrzeit candles, to honor and remember the dead. The empty, rusted tin biscuit boxes, a fixture in Boltanski's works, hold more than childhood treasures and memories-they hold unwritten histories of unrealized lives.

Born in Paris, of Catholic and Jewish heritage-Odessa refers to his grandfather's place of origin-the artist has said, "My work is about the fact of dying, but it's not about the Holocaust itself." However, for Boltanski, having grown up in France with the knowledge of his father hiding in fear during the occupation, the reality of genocide was never far nor forgotten. Certainly, the six children in Boltanski's altar offer a silent elegy for six million they suggest.