Walsh wanted his visitors to ascend to the museum from the water, as the ancient Greeks did to their temples. He is alternately charming, bullying, or silent. He jerks, he scratches, and his pigeon-toed gait is so pronounced that he bobs as he walks. His silver hair is sometimes rocker-length long, sometimes short. At fifty-one, Walsh has the manner of a boy pharaoh and the accent of a working-class Tasmanian who grew up in Glenorchy, one of the poorest suburbs of the poorest state in the Australian federation. “But I don’t think it’s ethical to organize it.”Īttempting to describe Boltanski’s devil is like trying to pick up mercury with a pair of pliers. “It would be absolutely great if he died in his studio,” Walsh said when asked by the New York Times about Boltanski. He says that he is constantly anticipating that moment. But I’m going to try to survive.” He added, “Anyone who never loses or thinks he never loses must be the Devil.” In another interview, Boltanski described Walsh as being “fascinated by death.” “Ultimately, he would really like to view my death, live. He’s probably right,” Boltanski told Agence France-Presse in 2009. “He has assured me that I will die before the eight years is up, because he never loses. But if Boltanski dies within eight years the gambler will have purchased the work at less than its agreed-upon value, and won. Should Boltanski, who was sixty-five years old, live longer than eight years, Walsh will end up paying more than the work is worth, and will have lost the bet. But the payment was turned into a macabre bet: the agreed fee was to be divided by eight years, and Boltanski was to be paid a monthly stipend, calculated as a proportion of that period, until his death.
Walsh agreed to pay Boltanski for the right to film his studio, outside Paris, twenty-four hours a day, and to transmit the images live to Walsh, in Tasmania.
There, other than lurid rumors of a fortune made by gambling, little was known about him. Walsh was a mysterious figure even in his homeland, Tasmania, an island the size of Sri Lanka that lies a hundred and fifty miles south of the Australian mainland. David Walsh first made global headlines in 2009, when he gambled on the life of Christian Boltanski, a French artist whose installations often focus on death.
0 kommentar(er)
