Merry Christmas May All Your Teeth Be White Shirt
Merry Christmas May All Your Teeth Be White Shirt, Hoodie, Longsleeve tee, And Sweater
Merry Christmas May All Your Teeth Be White Shirt! The third of three brothers, and with a sister later adopted, Christian and his family live with the horror of having to part with a legacy of their wartime experience. Their house was spacious, but the boys slept soundly at the foot of their parents' beds in their teens, only rarely venturing past its walls alone. At the age of 12, Christian gave up his formal education and left most of his devices to his own devices. Childhood and autobiography are among the major themes of his work, but the autobiography is always presented through a veil of fiction, and childhood is something irretrievably lost. The unshakable drumbeat of chance, fate, and death rounded up his list of obsessions. However, as he likes to state, was a “good guy,” with an iron memory of every restaurant meal he had eaten. He also has the ability to block tenderness. So I found myself on my way to the Place de la Concorde in Paris just after dawn on a foggy October morning. Following instructions that had been sent from the Marian Goodman Gallery a few days earlier, I boarded a bus waiting there to take me to Versailles.
For Christian, the exploration of specific installations has always been an integral part of the work. Sitting inside was a spirited team of people I consider accomplices, including one group of middle-aged men who are French art critics? and two well-dressed Japanese women, with different appearances, conversing thoughtfully. Nobody talks to me. Merry Christmas May All Your Teeth Be White Shirt! About forty minutes later, looking out the bus window, I noticed, in the mist that flew over Versailles, a golden cross winking at me from the top of the castle. Upon arrival, we were ushered into the Royal Chapel, an 18th-century gilded sanctuary of soaring domes and columns, with a depiction of Christ atop, ascending to Heaven. with the angels. (The chapel recently reopened after more than three years of renovations.) There we were with the president of Versailles, Catherine Pégard; artist Annette Messager (Christian's widow, although she later told me she hated the name); and dozens of others who had arrived by car from Paris, we were all reeling as a non-stop recorded voice was announced, dry and for brief periods of time, hours, minutes and seconds as they pass. The architecture suggests transcendence; The voice tells a different story, about mortal beings on the shelf of time.
