Something to Make a Big Stink About
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ABC COVER STORY THE Poster girls: Yves Mood indigo: further CRITICS Klein’s 1960 performance FILM 9 | THEATRE 12 | TALK OF THE TOWN 13 | ROCK & POP 14 | CLASSICAL 16 | TV & RADIO 17 | CD REVIEWS 18 piece, involving meditations in blue naked models and lashings of International “Represented in musical terms, whole world. It was a feeling VISUAL ART Klein Blue light blue resembles the flute, also captured in popular vocals dark blue the cello, darker still of the day: by Frank Sinatra, the wonderful sounds of the Chet Baker or Nina Simone double bass.” So wrote the singing “Little Girl Blue”. painter Wassily Kandinsky – a You could say that Miles cellist himself – in 1912, by Davis patented his own Something to which time an interest in the musical formulation of the correspondences between colour with Kind of Blue in 1959, music and colour was in the greatest jazz album ever danger of becoming a little old made and the model for any hat. The sciences of Audition number of subsequent pop and make a big Colorée (colour-hearing) and jazz attempts to key the Chromotherapy (which noted emotions of the listener to a the calming effect of blue colour-field of deep cobalt light), the theories of Rudolf melancholy. Listen to the track Steiner and the Theosophists, “Blue in Green” for the full stink about and the continued ultramarine effect. The Blue so his marchand de couleur set about tinkering, dab- sponges dipped in International Klein Blue, de- development of various types Note saxophonist Ike Quebec’s bling with this and that until, meeting a chemist from scendants of the one filched from Adam’s shop win- of colour-organ – in which album Blue and Sentimental; ong, long ago, in the fabled Six- Rhône-Poulenc, he finds a polyvinyl acetate resin dow. (“Yves drew a square one metre by one metre musical notes were partnered Joni Mitchell’s Blue;Tim ties, Gilbert and George set to called Rhodopas M, used for waterproofing maps. on the shop floor and filled it with éponges,” Adam with projections of coloured Buckley’s Blue Afternoon L work on the project that was to Mixed with ultramarine, Rhodopas allows the pow- recalls. “Then he turned to my sponge dealer, a Greek, light, a little like Sixties light (especially the song “Blue occupy them for the next 40 dered blue to retain its granular look, its matt depth. and he said ‘I’ll have a hundred of those’. It’s the first shows – had already been Melody”), are a few the best years; namely, being Gilbert and George. In 1960, Klein patents the new pigment under the time art sponges had ever been sold by the square reflected in new total art-works examples of what followed. A studiedly Un-Dynamic Duo, the pair number 63471 and the name, International Klein Blue. metre.”) And he had surrounded himself by what by composers such as Scriabin These days, the legacy of dressed identically, like fugitives from It is quite possibly the only work of Klein’s you’ll Adam calls “un cinéma”: a claque of admirers – “hys- and Schoenberg. Magritte: off-the-peg suits, lace-up shoes, be able to name, by far the most famous thing he tériques,” says Adam – who sat at his table at La According to Franz Marc, Charles narrow ties – the model of dweebness in ever did. And, of course, he didn’t do it. We can’t Coupole and stoked his ego. Kandinsky’s partner in the art a day when everyone else was wearing hold that against him – nobody imagines Grace Kelly Klein’s real bequest to today’s art may not, in movement Der Blaue Reiter, the Darwent crushed velvet and flares. All too soon, ever stitched a Kelly Bag – but it does raise the ques- other words, be the cult of colour so much as the colour blue signified “the male though, the joke wore thin, and suits and tion of just what Klein’s legacy is. cult of celebrity. There is a straight line to be drawn principle, sharp and spiritual”. Gilbert and ties no longer spelt ordinariness but an un- homophobia, tikka touts and sexual threat. Lords of misrule: hole), pulling don’t-make-me-puke faces or from his Gelsenkirchen frieze to Tracey Emin’s bed, In antiquity, blue had been the expected kind of exotica. Gilbert and This is a pair who have regularly had their Gilbert and miming fellatio, but all the time triumphant. According to the Barbican’s new show, “Colour After from the blue Adam invented for him to the fac- colour of divine light, used to George George then looked other-worldly, which door kicked in, on whose step neighbours George’s ‘Ginkgo The feeling you get, looking at the “Gink- Klein” , it is the broad freeing of individual colours tory-made vitrines of Damien Hirst. It’s the K in provide the ground in British Pavilion spoilt things since the point of their prac- commonly leave turds. So alien from this Pictures’ at the go Pictures”, is of those comic demons in VENICE from the vassalage of function. Before Klein, blue IKB that matters. Byzantine mosaics. Later, it tice was to be laughably of this world, quin- context have Gilbert and George come to Venice Biennale Noh theatre; red-eyed, vampiric, funny and had to justify its place in art: delineate the Virgin’s I like to think of Klein’s blue alongside another became the colour of heaven, tessentially banal. By anno GG30, the pair look, though, that their take on it – a kind scary; utterly in control. robe, light the sky, suggest bucolic peace. After him bespoke colour, the Braunkreuz or “Brown-cross”, attaining a kind of perfection in had come to seem like parodies of them- of erotic rebelliousness – has lately been [email protected] it could just be, an existential thing, self-answering; run up for his fellow self-publicist, Joseph Beuys. medieval French stained glass. selves: same-ish in the wrong sort of way, hard to follow. or, in Klein’s word, “absolute”. Where Klein’s blue was joyfully synthetic (to the True blue was the colour of as shallow as the picture-space of their Now, in these 25 pictures in the British To 6 November, 00 39 041 521 8828 This is nonsense on several counts. Malevich had point, as it turned out, of being toxic to breathe), constancy, while by the middle ever-more egregious work. Pavilion, it’s as clear as day again; or as begun working in single colours a decade before Klein Beuys’s brown was made of eco-friendly rust and of the 16th century “to look So the couple’s “Ginkgo Pictures”, Britain’s night. One thing picky critics will note is was born and artists such as Robert Rauschenberg hare’s blood. Where the Frenchman’s ultramarine blue” invoked associations with contribution to this year’s Venice Biennale, that the boys’ fabled grey suits have been SOUTH BANK CENTRE LONDON were painting true monochromes a decade before draws the eye, the German’s shit-brown appeals to fear, discomfort and anxiety. are frankly an undiluted triumph. The first made over. In Cited Gents, they are print- HAYWARD GALLERY BOX OFFICE 0870 169 1000 WWW.HAYWARD.ORG.UK IKB. Klein’s blue – Adam’s blue – is lustrous and deep: the mind. And where Beuys’s brown remained ret- But at the time Yves Klein thing you notice about them is their discovery ed with photographs of street life in Brick but it is a finish as much as it is a colour, standard icently anonymous, IKB was IKB. patented International Klein of depth: a new, ambiguous pic- Lane; in Twelve they are dyed red synthetic ultramarine rendered granular and matt. What was Klein like? Edouard Adam mulls over Blue, blue and blueness were ture-space made possible by and patterned with ginkgo leaves; Youcan bring all kinds of metaphors to it, recall Klein’s the question and says, “A charmer, a seducer. He also inextricably linked to the the artists’ experiments with Their in Cowled, Gilbert and George are upbringing under a Mediterranean sky or his had those eyes, you know, that innocent smile: but musical form of “the blues”. In computer design. The second is relation to wearing – get this – jeans. Their amazement at Giotto’s frescos in Assisi. But each one he was ambitious beyond measure. He pushed him- the mid-Fifties albums by Miles that this depth is matched by a relation to the youths in hoodies makes his blue slightly less pure, marginally more self to be the best – took benzedrine at first so that Davis (Blue Haze, Blue Moods), parallel re-connection with the the youths who stand next to them – the kind, kitsch. As Edouard Adam recalls, Klein’s earlier in- he would win at judo and then, after he’d stopped but especially in the They got the blues: film- world–arediscovery of what presumably, who gob through terest in pink reflected his fondness for his tantine, the judo, he went on taking it, more and more. trumpeter’s Paris recordings maker Derek Jarman, top, Gilbert and George were about in hoodies is their windows – seems much Rose. It’s an unlikely basis for revolution. “While he was burning it up, he was OK; but af- for the soundtrack of Louis and Miles Davis in the first place, Jungian shad- more vexed more vexed than before. The question, really, is where the stress falls in IKB: terwards… hop.” Adam shrugs.