I didn’t say that. Yves Klein did.

In the continuing series of my mind over matter essays, I present to you the fabulously neo-Dadaist Yves Klein. Right now having his own retrospective at the Pompidou, Klein is famous for his the International Klein Blue, for throwing ingots of gold into the river, and using naked women as paint brushes.

I’ve been a fan of Klein for years, he’s cited as one of my heroes on *horror* myspace, after first being baffled by this photograph early on. Saut dans le Vide is an image of the artist apparently in mid jump.

Klein’s idea was that "to paint space, I owe it to myself to go there, to that very space… without illusions or tricks, nor with a plane or a parachute or a rocket ship: [the painter of space] must go there by his own means, with an independent individual force, in a word, he must be capable of levitation." The question of the reality of the image is a moot point. The idea is key. Klein uses the photograph not only to create "un spectacle," but to romanticize the artist’s quest. What is important is the intention of the painter working towards the void, and the fascination of us as we watch him leap. The artist making art has become the art and we watch him with deadly fascination, holding our breaths. "Amongst other innumerable adventures, I have caught the precipitate of a theatre of the void."

Klein spent most of his life working through the idea of the immaterial, the intemporal, while grounded in an almost obsessive sensuality of the moment. The intellectual play and wonderful joy in his work always leaves me breathless and ebullient.

For example, in the 1958 he had an exhibition called The Void. In it, he painted the walls an obsessive white then projected the International Klein Blue. The light, itself immaterial, was so palpable in the space as to make it almost the sole sensory object available. Hence, the space is filled with something immaterial, or what he would called le Vide.  "The real blue was inside, the blue of the profundity of space, the blue of my kingdom, of our kingdom! … the immaterialisation of blue, the coloured space that cannot be seen but which we impregnate ourselves with … A space of blue sensibility within the frame of the white walls of the gallery." So moved was Albert Camus by this exhibition that he left this note in the visitor’s book: "Avec le vide, les pleins pouvoirs" (With the void, full powers).

Of course, my favourite piece is the one with the gold ingots, Zones de sensibilité picturiale immatérielle [Zones of immaterial pictorial sensibility]. This piece alone would probably be the cornerstone in his argument on immateriality. The situation is thus: 10 February 1962. M. Blancfort gives the artist 160 grams of pure gold in 16 ingots in exchange for a certificate for "zone" No.1, Series 4. The paper is given to M. Blancfort, who burns the paper the afterwards, and Klein, who tosses the gold into the river. The zones are of pictorial sensibility, thus of potential for visual stimuli. The ritual aspect of Klein’s work, his creation of a parallel world of values is present, and the intractability of time is emphasized. I love this piece because absurdism highlights the absolute factuality yet mystification of what is exchanged between artist and spectator. Nothing remains except the formula for the exchange, and some random photographs.

Obsessively monochromatic in his paintings, Klein favoured three colours: rose, blue and gold. In the second room of the exhibition is one of his blue paintings. It is huge, rectangular, rich in density, matte, and vibrating warmly for all its monocromatic flavour. I saw someone take a picture of it and all she ended up with was a blue screen. The representation cannot convey the immediate impact of this wonderful blue painting.

The key to Klein’s work is in the free interplay between the plastic and the conceptual. No object exists without purpose, without intention. And yet the paradox is that it is the documentation of his making, in the ritualistic performance and the mediatization of its "being" that Klein’s work is fully actualized. Object alone, nor idea alone, can stand fully without each other. This is the ourobouros of Klein’s work. Often branded as conceptual, the weight of that one monochrome alone would state otherwise.

The thing had existed so it exists. He proclaims himself an painter and thus everything that follows must be painting. He doesn’t touch his canvas for the anthopometry paintings, and he acts as host to his performances. It is the being, not doing, which is of primordial importance. For the individual, being is infinite. It is neither bound by time nor space. As he himself says, "If I existed, then I exist!" Coetzee once said that "what survives the worst of barbarism, surviving because generations of people cannot afford to let go of it and therefore hold on to it at all costs - that is the classic." Well Mr. Klein, you exist.

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On a side note: also went to the Rauschenberg exhibition on the same floor. In and out in under ten minutes. Rauschenberg looks dated and his works are aging badly. Stuff bad art students copy, though I suppose he did it first.