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Klein & Tinguely - Phil Desmarais

     Although Yves Klein's artistic career only lasted eight short years, from 1954 to 1962, he was a seminal figure of Pierre Restany's Le nouveau realisme.  Klein was one of the exceptional talents of the postwar period, whose early death stopped a career still full of promises.  Klein was a restless and imaginative innovator with a genuine, original fantasy that lent authenticity to his most outrageous displays.  In 1958 he attracted many people to an exhibition of nothingness, the void, bare walls that were offered to the patrons to be paid for in gold.  Klein's single coloured blue paintings are the best known of his works.  Klein adopted the monochromatic aesthetic and the colour blue in order to remove all expressive and representative elements from the work.  Blue signified indefinableness and immaterialness.   Klein's work is often viewed as an attempt to reconcile life with art.  Klein's aim was to use art as a way of bringing people closer to life.  Life, as Klein saw it, was not at all something that man owned, but was something that belonged to a higher order.  In his beliefs it was possible to gain possession of ones life, however, this could only happen if your body was in touch with the cosmic. Klein did not restrict himself to one medium, as his means of offerings an intimation of higher things, but pondered at many different levels about techniques for achieving closer being with the cosmic in everyday life.  It is through this avenue that he was able to work with other artists.
 

     Now that Klein decides that working with other artist is beneficial for his pursued to achieve a higher conscious.  Klein turns to Jean Tinguely for collaboration in moving sculpture.  Like Klein, Tinguely was also apart of nouveau realisme, for Tinguely, mechanized motion is the medium for creation of new art.  After preliminary efforts and the formulation of metamechanic reliefs and what he called "meta-matics", which exercised the use of motion within a sculpture.  Tinguely was so impressed by the void room, that he felt that him and Klein shared a new outlook on art and the world.  The two soon became very good friends, and an artistic collaboration followed.  In November 1958, at the Gallery of Iris Clert, Sheer Speed and Monochrone Stability was exhibited.  The effect of the objects in the show depended on a reciprocal amount of paint support and mechanical apparatus, as in Space Centrifuge it was rendered even more dramatic by blue sparks thrown off by the overheated motor beneath the spinning disk.  The idea that when the disk would spin the colour would be so captivating that one would be emcompassed by the space of the piece.  The pieces were all made in Klein's mind to reflect a portion of the void, and a tangible reality. The reasons for the disk go back to his belief that the world is flat and that it is only through rotation that it gives us the impression that it is a sphere.
 

     In the joint projects to follow, Tinguely was responsible for conceiving the space in terms of stasis of the speed, while Klein concentrated on dissolution of colour by means of mechanically produced vibrations.  The disks ranged in size from nine centimeters to fifty centimeters in diatmeter, and hwould rotate at a speed of either 450 turns per minute all the way up to 10,000 turns per minute.  The pieces activated the small gallery with energy and stimulated all sorts of perceptual experiences in its visitors.  Theses objects brought the void concept and monochromes into a tangiable existence.  Many of their ideas never left the drawing board.  The next year, Klein, yet despite his longing for agreeable company, continued to insist on staking out his own personal set of ideas ended the collaboration with Tinguely.
 

     Yves Klein was an artistic genius overflowing with possibilities and vitality, a magician who turned everything upside down in the art world, by his touch or his presence.  Klein was a man that could make people believe that everything in the world was art, and did so to an extent.  Klein emphasized that there was particular spiritual being to art.  As Klein, rejected the past in the way art was created, he sought a new way of creating a new form of art production.  By rebelling against conventional attitudes, which threaten to restrict the concept of art.  In which the art world squeezed art into a rather confined definition, Klein exploded the narrow concept of Modernism and paved the way for the future.
 

     In trying to recreate the feel of what Yves Klein wanted, I must first either accept him as a fraud or a genius.  In my mind, his technical ability was not perfect but his ideas were very avant garde.  In this writer's mind Yves Klein was no Charlatan, No one will ever know if he would have turned into one though, cause he died so young, but his career up to his death, he showed the art world many new things, even if they were not paying attention.  The final outcome is that if he were a charlatan, we as a society and art students would not be studying him in so much depth. But that is only the view of this writer.  But the problem with recreating his work is that, you must almost become him and share his ideas, thus thinking you are creating something that will change existence, but the fact that I merely fine many of his works challenging in a technical manner, I'm only mimicking his style.  The ideas are what make his work, and I have neither the ego nor the outlook as he, to create it in that way.  Klein put so much energy in his work that, I feel now that I'm doing an injustice to his work to reproduce it.  I enjoy the process of learning how his works were constructed, but in fact many are not that difficult when thinking back.  There are a few works that I think would be very interesting to recreate, but "Complete speed" is not one of them. All it took was a hobby motor, and a small disk painted blue mounted on the axle of the motor.  Sorry, I can't justify writing 2 pages on that, nor can I on the "Planetary relief" or "Cosmogony". The only thing I can say is that if Klein had not died and continued creating art, I think the art world would be a very different place to be.



 
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