Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Yves Klein: Conquistador of the Void,” 1982 PART 1 SUSAN HIRSCHFIELD I’d like to welcome you. The program this afternoon will center upon Yves Klein, who, as you know, is the subject of the retrospective upstairs. The discussion will, we hope, provide you with some new insights, some historical perspective, and perhaps a positioning of Yves Klein’s work within the context of contemporary art. The panel this afternoon includes critics, art historians, and artists, some of whom knew Klein in the ’50s, and others who have come to know his work since then. The program this afternoon is a collaboration between the Guggenheim Museum and the Maison Française of Columbia University. I’d like to thank our colleagues at the Maison Française for their collaboration this afternoon. [01:00] Right now I would like to introduce Professor Gerald Silk, of Columbia, who will be moderating the panel discussion. Thank you. (applause) GERALD DOUGLAS SILK Thank you, Susan. I welcome you all. I think Yves Klein would have been pleased that an investigation of the void filled to the house. Of course the notoriety of the panel is obviously an attraction, and I’m delighted — and even a little humbled — to share the podium with so distinguished a group. I first want to introduce them to you, just identify them, and then before their remarks, which will come a little bit later, I’ll tell you a little bit more about them. Arman, Nan Rosenthal — this is in order, from — would be your left to right — Arman, Nan Rosenthal, Thomas McEvilley, Olivier Mosset, Julian Schnabel, and Joseph Kosuth. And as Susan suggested, we have in this case [02:00] an artist who knew Klein intimately, two scholars who have researched and written on Klein with great sensitivity and insight, and three younger artists whose work suggests the inspiration, and in perhaps some ways the rejection, of Klein’s art and life. The panel is entitled “Yves Klein: Conquistador of the Void.” With this as the subject, I am reminded of Guillaume Apollinaire’s description in his novel Le Poète Assassiné, of 1916, of the creation of a monument for a dead poet. In a discussion between the characters Tristouse and the Bird of Benin, Tristouse inquires as to what material the statue will be made out of. “Out of marble, out of bronze?” he asks. The Bird of Benin replies, “No, no, that’s too old-fashioned. It is necessary that I sculpt for him a profound statue out of nothing, like poetry and [03:00] glory.” “Bravo, bravo!” says Tristouse, clapping his hands. “A statue out of nothing, out of the void. That’s magnificent.” Now, like the Bird of Benin in Apollinaire’s novel, Yves Klein, who would’ve been intrigued by this character suggestive of primitivism and flight, exalted emptiness, for in it, he believed, lay fullness. By eliminating form, the spirit is unleashed. Ah, we have our final panelist, Pierre Restany. (pause) Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 1 of 24 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Yves Klein: Conquistador of the Void,” 1982 By eliminating form, the spirit is unleashed. This obsession with the void perfuses Klein’s art and life, the boundaries of which were often indistinguishable. Among its earliest manifestations were the monochromes, first appearing in the 1954 booklet Yves le [sic] Peintures as inked papers posing as reproductions of works whose existence at the time as full-fledged paintings appears [04:00] doubtful. The gesture was self-propagandizing, and Klein, in the manner of other great avant-garde self-promoters, such as Marinetti, Tzara, and Breton, cleverly knew how to mix public relations with personal mythology. Apart from this, however, we have an allusion to works that are not physically palpable, that are instead imaginative and immaterial. When the monochromes do appear in 1955, first with different colors for different pieces, eventually in 1957 painted in his patented pigment called IKB — International Klein Blue — they represented color’s victory in a perhaps (inaudible) battle — one that was waged with great vehemence in the nineteenth century — color’s victory over that enslaving, incarcerating element in art: line. To Klein, line bounds, limits, divides, defines. Only is color [05:00] limitless, unifying, expansive, visionary — the stuff of the soul, prime matter. These pieces, inaugurating Klein’s blue period, were hung at a distance from the wall, as if floating. Identical as they may have appeared, they were to be sold at varying prices. We ask, wherein resides the distinctions amongst these works? Obviously in the intangible, the immaterial, the spiritual: what Klein labeled “pure pictorial sensibility.” He would later sell immaterial zones as works of art. In exchange for gold, Klein issued receipts for the zones. The purchaser was required to burn the receipts; otherwise the zones would be expunged of the spiritual essence. In return Klein promised to toss half the gold into an irretrievable place. This “pure pictorial sensibility” is precisely what Klein [06:00] supposedly invested the rooms with at his infamous exhibition The Void of 1958. All the paraphernalia at the Iris Clert Gallery was removed. The inside walls were painted — or, might we say, purified — in white. Klein began meditating, pumping pure pictorial sensibility into the vacant gallery. Opening-night crowds arrived. They were served blue cocktails impregnated with Klein’s blue void, which they would urinate for some time after the exhibition. In a similar vein Klein produced his blue sponges because they best embodied the notion of impregnation with pure color. These sea animals drenched in color were akin to viewers who, after having encountered Klein’s monochromes, soaked up their sensibility. Maintaining his ambitiousness while escalating his daringness, Klein consorted with the elements in his cosmogonies, incorporating [07:00] fire, air, earth, and water into his works. In defiance of gravity and in an effort to interpenetrate with the void, Klein staged a leap from a second-story window, documented in a slyly montaged photograph entitled “A man in space: the painter of space hurling himself into the void.” Sandwiched in time between Sputnik’s catapult into orbit and cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becoming the first spaceman, the photo of the leap was published in Klein’s Dimanche, The Newspaper of a Single Day, in which he transformed the events of the world into a theater of the void. Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 2 of 24 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Yves Klein: Conquistador of the Void,” 1982 But in ensuing activities the scales tipped more toward theater and away from the void. His anthropometries were Happenings of a sort: nudes basted in paint, rubbing and imprinting their bodies on canvases, leaving haunting smears and vestiges. [08:00] Accompanied by the strains of Klein’s Monotone Symphony, witnessed by formally attired spectators, this performance further blurred the boundaries between art and sensationalism in Klein’s oeuvre. Moreover, what’s happened to the void? Although he called the anthropometries the product of immediate experience and not-form, it appears as if all that was taboo — contour, form, line, shape — has returned. In addition, we should consider Klein’s role as a predecessor to Monochromism, Minimalism, Happenings, Performances, Environments, Conceptualism, and Process Art. If we are to credit Klein, we must, in turn, recognize his debt, unwitting or otherwise, to Duchamp, Malevich, and others. While I’ve asked the panel to address Klein’s relationship to the void, I’ve suggested that they also consider his achievement in general, the self-mythologizing [09:00] aspects of his career, and in the midst of a current art fashion emphasizing imagery and expressionism, what his significance today may be. Until recently, Klein has been somewhat neglected in the United States. In our attempt to redress this situation, we should be cautious, however, about becoming unsuspecting heirs to his self- promotion. Let’s evaluate Yves, for the same conquistador of the void who steeped himself in comic books, Rosicrucian texts, and Bachelard was also a religious mystic who made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Rita, the patron of hopeless causes, depositing an ex-voto. In one breath he prayed that his works become ever more beautiful; in another, that his recently opened major retrospective in Krefeld be the greatest success of the century and be recognized by all; in yet another, that he and all his works be made totally invulnerable. [10:00] Now to our speakers. Each will give a brief introductory statement. We will then have discussion among the panelists. Then the floor will be open to questions — and I might insist on this — not statements — from the audience. In a review of the Yves Klein exhibition in the Friday New York Times, the critic Grace Glueck lamented that one element seemed to be missing from the show, and that was the presence of Klein himself. In this regard, it is fortunate to have as our first speaker the provocative critic and the founder of Nouveau Réalisme, Pierre Restany. It is Restany who, one commentator remarked, “wanted to become Yves”; and Restany himself, musing on Klein, said, “I owe him very, very much. I owe him both the structure of my thought and the conduct of my life.” Pierre Restany. (applause) [11:00] PIERRE RESTANY Since the (inaudible) beautiful and brilliant speech, let us say, this kind of possessive assertion of myself towards Yves Klein. I think I will talk to you about cannibalism.