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The first artist I would like to visit in this raison d'être of all things art is Yves Klein the only artist in the modern milieu to have invented his own colour. Some might delineate between art and life but honestly, where does one start and the other end?
In this image we see two of his seminal works. Hanging on the wall in the background, is the much misunderstood and elegantly titled ‘blue shite at night, shepherds delight’. Klein, of course, is noted for linking the ethereal nature of the sky with the visceral sexual and less cerebral nature of the earth in elements that make up his trademark colour. This theme recurs, some say spuriously, throughout his work, blurring the boundaries between reality and exposition. Post modernists claim that Klein is simply an archivist, rehashing disparate styles in a kind of mishmash of contemporary expression. This is most definitely not a view to which this commentator ascribes.
In the foreground of this image, we see his most provocative work, entitled ‘just blue dust in flux’. Somewhat controversially, Klein added his dead dog’s ashes to his trademark pigment as a catalyst to express life through art. Comprising of one metric tonne of raw powdered pigment (and dead dog) encased in a titanium raised box, ‘just dust in blue’ screams out the transient nature of life through its contained fluidity. The emotion is palpable when considering this work, we can imagine the months Klein spent in a monastery, flagellating his genitals in an act of attrition for running over his beloved dog Binky. This piece releases an expressive cathartic aesthetic in the beholder, tantamount to losing a beloved pet, and a raging anguish equal to genital flagellation.
In Kleins work ‘Fart in the Wind’ we see an expression of juxtaposition as his own creation myth is played out on canvas! Klein first registered his trademark pigment in 1960 after years of painstaking experimenting. Finally, in the winter of 1959 he struck gold, or blue in this case, when he mixed a carefully measured pigment with base liquids before self-administering an enema with a length of plastic hose. The resulting explosion gave birth to, what some say is his gift to the world and what Klein himself describes as ‘his only child’. It is still a matter of authenticity to this day that all true Klein pigment sold, has to be mixed in this way. Kleins belief that the anus is the seat of all creation is well documented throughout his career, in a rare interview in 1960 he said he views us all as both emerging and returning to the arse. This gave birth to the, now long abandoned, cult for anal genesis, which Klein, quite rightly, dismissed as absolute popularist jingoism.
This interpretive instillation is simply called ‘fire in a wasteland of ideas’ and you can see why! The strong image of modern fire control technology is watered down by the deep aquamarine of both the paint and lighting. This speaks of a strong yearning for the unattainable, exemplifying his warring sides. As life imitates art and art imitates life, so it was with this artist. Klein was noted as saying that he felt “more experimentation with fire should be attempted beneath the sea.” This led to him taking up scuba diving which eventually led to his death, tragically young, in a methane related accident in 1962.
The final piece under consideration today shows Kleins ambivalence to traditional art forms. He is noted as saying “it’s not art unless we can interpret it as being anything.” This sculpture, entitled ‘breathe cloud face tree’ wallows in sarcasm, as the message is abundantly clear. Throughout his life, Klein railed against the rigid doctrine of classical art to represent one thing clearly and concisely. Famously, in 1955 he was ejected from the Louvre for standing naked in a cardboard box in front of the Mona Lisa shouting a random list of furry animals at the crowds and the painting. This blurring of the lines between performance art and public indecency continued throughout his short career when he stripped naked at the opening ceremony of the Cannes film festival in 1956 and proceeded to hop around like a rabbit with a plastic hose as a tail, depositing explosions of Klein blue with each exuberant leap. It has been theorised that ‘Breathe Cloud Face Tree’ is actually his most non-interpretive work, as many critics say it is clearly a cloud. Klein’s affinity with the sky is well documented and it is believed, although he never confirmed or denied this, that the blue sky was the influence for a lot of his art. One thing is certain, his fierce devotion to monochromism and refusal to bow to the redactive commentary of postmodernist doctrine, mark Klein as a disruptive catalyst in modern interpretive art.
