Absolute Effort: The "Total Art" of Yves Klein
Anthropometries (1960): Philosophy in Practice?
During an interview with an American radio station, Klein stated: “In my paintings, I have succeeded in suppressing the space that exists in front of the painting; in the sense that the presence of the painting invades both the space and the viewer” (Klein 2016, loc 610). Gaining notoriety in the art world from the exhibition of his blue monochromes, the space that Klein references and sought to eliminate represents an exploration of perception, immanence, and manipulation. By “eliminating” the space in front of the viewer, both the spectator and the exhibited work enter a quasi-spiritual state, as Klein has articulated, a translation of the immaterial into material. The presence Klein intended to eliminate was a space that radiated with a power he believed could manifest as transcendence. However, how would this transcendence be felt, experienced, and appropriately represented? Could a painting fulfill all his requirements, or were there more effective means to realize his vision?
Although Klein’s metaphysical notions may appear intangible or, as some might suggest, ill-defined, the concepts underlying Klein's work broadly comment on the extent of power that an artist wields and the tradition from which they originate.1 Primarily, how do artists and their work exert control over or manipulate the space? One could infer that any object brought into existence manipulates the surrounding space. However, for an individual to exert control over a space, there must be some application of power, some discernible presence (either in the artwork or the artist) that brings reality into proximity with the work, creating an immanence. This notion warrants a digression into one of Klein’s philosophical contemporaries, Michel Foucault; however, that topic is reserved for another essay. Instead, we shall briefly touch on, yet not deeply explore, the ideas surrounding power, further emphasizing Klein’s methods of manipulation.
The ethos of Klein’s radio statement is exemplified by a gathering of invited guests assembled at the Galerie Internationale d’Art Contemporaine in 1960. They attentively listen to a band performing Klein’s “Monotone Symphony,” which consists of a singular orchestral note sustained for a duration of 20 minutes. Before the audience, three nude women are positioned, each holding a bucket of Klein’s distinctive International Klein Blue (IKB). Klein, attired in a black tuxedo complemented by a white tie and gloves, directs the women to apply his signature blue to the white sheets that have been arranged, exercising his artistic vision in the manner of his choosing. This so-called “ritual” was conducted in private prior to its public unveiling; however, the public remained unaware of its prior existence, nor did they comprehend the nature of what they were observing.
Amelia Jones, in “‘Clothes Make the Man’: The Male Artist as a Performative Function,” cites that Klein “would rather put on my tuxedo and wear white gloves… [than dirty his] hands with paint.’” (Jones 1995, 25). The act of withdrawing from physical engagement signifies a significant exercise of authority and manipulation within the parameters of the Anthropometries. The depiction of women directed by a man attired in aristocratic clothing, who holds both an internal and external role in the artwork as both commander and creator (deus ex machina & deus in machina), accentuates not only the artwork itself but also the performance of Klein, alongside the multidimensional field that he concurrently manipulates and reinforces. This compels the viewer, both in that moment and in our era, to contemplate the multifaceted ways in which the artist transcends our perceptions through their manipulations.
Achieivng a level of power through the artistic manipulation, Jones continues in the same essay: “[G]iven Klein’s own investment in spiritual notions of artistic creation, his irony performs a double function: he is both modernist hero (he who transcends the everyday to produce great art) and postmodern critic of artistic machismo” (Jones 1995, 26. Emphasis added). Many critics have found themselves battling over Klein because of this juxtaposition between “hero” and “artistic machismo.” In the difference, Klein’s aesthetics take a backseat, and questions of authority arise—modernity’s cursed pursuit to diagnose revealed in full.
Oliver Watts, in “Yves Klein and Hysterical Marks of Authority,” summarizes through a Lacanian lens and Klein’s manipulation of the legal system that “Klein’s work helps us look at how, even in modernity, irrational beliefs are an important factor in our society from art to the law” (Watts 2010, 58). The unfounded belief that Klein would target the essence of authority presents a conflation of playfulness and mastery.
In crafting his performances, Klein positions himself both as a challenger and a proponent of existing systems, showcasing his supposed revolutionary aesthetics within a defined framework of cultural norms and regulations. His Anthropometries occupy a previously unexplored realm, “the conceptual,” wherein personal philosophies, practices, and perceptions are revealed with renewed impact, emphasizing subjective experience despite an orchestrated exercise. However, what distinguishes Klein’s Anthropometries from the socialist aims of Wagnerian total art is Klein’s emphasis on an elite clientele: an aristocratic clientele that may possess little inclination to appreciate such a revitalization of the spirit and instead seek capital value and cultural conflagration. Within the context of “total art,” the connection between the viewer and the work appears disconnected in Klein’s work from the socialist ideals inherent in Wagner’s vision. Nonetheless, this observation does not diminish Klein’s exercise of authority and cultural influence in aiming for the great, total art.
Robert Motherwell, an abstract expressionist from the New York school, as cited by Jewell Homad Johnson in “Hiding in the Open: Religious Art after Abstraction with Joseph Beuys, Yves Klein, and Andy Warhol” stated, “the modern artist tends to become the last active spiritual being in the great world” (Johnson 2020, 163). Yves Klein took up that role in total, but he was not the only one. Contemporaries like Beuys built an entire artistic system around Christian themes, and Warhol built a temple to the eccentricities of capitalism and ego.
Klein’s aesthetics evolved into an extension of his transcendent objectives, wherein he could exercise his individualized authority through the transformation of the immaterial into the material. By compelling women in the Anthropometries to serve as “living brushes” and apply paint at his discretion, alongside his notorious correspondence with the International Conference for the Detection of Atomic Explosions, requesting that A and H-bombs be represented in IKB blue, as well as his letter to President Eisenhower in 1958 lobbying for the reformation of France’s governmental structure, Klein both asserts and subverts his position through a playfully ironic interplay that oscillates between authority, deception, and innovation. By positioning art as an intrinsic political medium, Klein's persona manifests not only as the creator of artworks but also as an innovator in the perception of individuality. Nevertheless, this tradition does not originate with Klein.
The critic Yves Alain Bois notes, “[Klein] shows us how to deflate the spectacle of the culture industry by staging an even greater hoax” (Watts 2010, 62). By staging an even greater hoax with no inclination as to what the hoax may be, Klein follows in the steps of Marcel Duchamp—the infamous renderer of the “ready-made.” But are Duchamp’s “ready-mades” close to Klein’s Yves Peintures, Monochromes, or Anthropometries?
Johnson follows in a similar vein to Bois, replying that Klein “thus negated and undermined the classical work of art object, dissolving art into action and thus styling himself into an artistic personality in a way that anticipated the strategies of [further contemporaries]” (Johnson 2020, 174. Emphasis Added). Although Klein portrayed himself as an artistic personality that effectively dissolved the work itself by transforming it into a conduit for his beliefs, his emphasis on the philosophical underpinnings of the work’s aesthetic positioning does not diminish the manner in which his ideas resonate within the viewer or participant. Both the act and the creation were extensions of his philosophy, in contrast to Duchamp, who presented an object devoid of a dedicated system of aesthetics or philosophy; Klein distinguishes himself from his predecessors and contemporaries by aspiring to a higher ideal: a state of perception linked to the metaphysical – a spirituality integral to his work and paintings. Consequently, the controversy surrounding Klein raises a profound inquiry regarding spiritual authority: Can immanence be intrinsically connected to the material?
The answer to this inquiry is not answered in the materiality or performance of the work, but rather in Klein’s vision, which aligns with his pursuit of the total art. From Yves Peintures, Klein exhibits the demeanor of a free agent, unencumbered by the constraints of his era and the traditions preceding him. Operating within a system characterized by established laws, norms, and various' isms, particularly those of the art world, along with the associated formalities and customs, Klein acknowledges the legacy of those before him by engaging in dialogue with Delacroix’s “line” and Duchamp’s “ready-made” while simultaneously subverting their influences to assert his individuality as the principal vehicle of reinvention. To Klein, he is the originator of many of his concepts. Although this assertion is not unprecedented in a historical context, recalling Nietzsche’s call for the Übermensch, and when compared to other artists who similarly sought to define their work as transcendent, the totality that Klein aspired to create ultimately manifested with considerable success during his time and continues to resonate through its cultural impact and present significance.
When giving a speech at the commissioning of the Gelsenkirchen Theater, Klein revisited sentiments from his 1956 exhibition at Galleria Apollinaire in Milan, where he displayed his blue monochromes for the first time and “[t]he rather passionate controversy that arose from this manifestation proved to me the value of the phenomenon and the real profundity of the upheaval that comes in its wake to those unwilling to submit passively to the sclerosis of accepted ideas and set rules” (Klein 2016, loc 953. Emphasis added). Always looking ahead, one can sense that the responses generated by Klein’s blue monochromes, again, did what he set out to do with Yves Peintures: disturb the way a viewer has viewed an object and the space in which the object is presented. Essentially, Klein was delineating a segment of his creation, or in his own words, “a representation of freedom in the first material state” (Klein 2016, loc 996). This first material state refers to a primordial domain of intangible ideas waiting to become material, similar to Ernst Bloch’s utopian theory of the “yet-to-be-revealed.”2
By disrupting previous conceptions, the total art Klein pursued diverts from the physical object into the experiential substance of the space between the viewer and the object. In his essay “Overcoming the Problematics of Art,” Klein proposed to have found a solution to the problems posed by the uniform dimensionality of the art of his time:
“Then I immersed myself in the monochrome space, in everything, in the boundless pictorial sensibility. I did not immerse myself in my own personality, not at all. I felt myself, volumetrically impregnating myself beyond all proportions and dimensions, in EVERYTHING.” (Klein 2016, loc 1054. Bold is mine).
Through this immersion in a material space, Klein’s concept of “beyond” became attainable, despite its questionable nature for external viewers or spectators. Recognized as a “genius” by colleagues such as Pierre Restany, who authored the text for Klein’s inaugural display of blue monochromes, and perceived as a prankster by spectators and other critics of the era, the debut of Klein’s Anthropometries disrupted the mechanisms of the art world. By shifting from the material object to a synthesis of performance, spectacle, and aesthetic philosophy, the Anthropometries blurred the distinction between what might be classified as art and what could be regarded as a means toward spiritual transcendence.
Operating within the aristocratic circles he did, critics like Ann Marie Perl in “Succès de ‘Scandale’ and Biblical Scandals: Yves Klein,” spend a majority of their essay discussing the “parody” of Klein as a “modern male artist… in which artistic virtuosity was demonstrated increasingly ostentatiously during the postwar period, through physical virility” (Perl 2015, 14. Emphasis added). However, while this may be read into the larger framework of the postmodern machismo mentioned above in the postmodern likes of Lyotard or Foucault, Klein’s “virility” in the Anthropometries is not based on his physical appearance (despite his presence and his movements within his performances) but his charismatic potency to change how we experience/view a “work of art” through an aesthetic exercise—an exercise of cultural influence.
For Klein, “the work of art” was a malleable term to reach his true goal. The potency of his work resides at the juncture of perception and immanence. By affirming aristocratic representations through his portrayal of a woman in a three-piece suit and redirecting the physical performance with an aesthetic philosophy, the Anthropometries may be viewed as an exercise in ritual and drama. This work positions the artist as a deity, creating through his essence by means of the extensions of the surrounding world. Exercising authority through his verbal and gestural expressions, Klein transcended the boundaries of the work while simultaneously being within it. He eliminated the spatial divide between the artwork and the observer, infusing the scene with his presence.
Though critics like Oliver Watts have linked Klein to the tradition that Duchamp started – that of “the artist [who] conflates [themself] with the power of the sovereign; the artistic genius as a godly creator” – Klein’s use of social theater moves beyond an exercise of power on the social scale to the space where existing authority is annulled and the freedom of the artist is uplifted (Watts 2010, 66). Debuting his work before the elite who received their invitations to this private ritual, the legacy of Anthropometries has gone on to represent the limits of an artist’s ability to weave a conceptual space where previous modes of perception were thought solidified, questioning those perceptions or changing them outright.
Though it continues in the same vein as Yves Peintures, the question of Klein’s pursuit of the total art still dangles in the “everything” he wished to deliver. This begs the question of Klein and his target audience. Why display it to a few when the goal of total art was previously the liberation of the whole? In “Jamming the Machine: Yves Klein’s Blue Monochrome and the End of the Avant-Garde,” J. Stephen Murphy writes:
“Art is not, of course, living organism, yet it exhibits many of the characteristics peculiar to organic structures. The artwork is a machine… Art exists in the interaction between people, between people and objects, between objects… [b]ecause [Klein’s work] did not conform to accepted definitions and conventions of art… they broke all the rules which art organizes itself.” (Murphy 1996, 146-147, 149. Emphasis added).
Murphy’s assertion posits that Klein possessed a comprehension of the mechanics of perception, as well as the interplay between art, individuals, and objects during his era—and likely beyond. Nevertheless, may this comprehension be characterized as a manifestation of genius or satire? Is it not the objective of intellectuals and artists to challenge/modify/appropriate the “machines” they engage with, particularly those that endeavor to influence or manipulate one’s perception of value?
Klein’s Anthropometries integrated spectacle, painting, music, and performance to elevate the viewer's experience, aligning with an aspiration towards total art. However, Klein did not cease his endeavors at this juncture. The drama, spectacle, and nuance inherent in Klein’s aesthetic philosophy extended beyond the immediate audience of the Anthropometries. Instead, it reshaped the narrative surrounding Klein subsequent to the advent of Le Vide, wherein the ‘machine of art' was forcefully disengaged by Klein from its predecessors, creating a realm that sought to suspend both the material and the immaterial in terms of value and perception.
To view excerpts from the Anthropometries, visit the Tate’s video here: https://youtu.be/gj9nHa7FtQQ?si=spDHn8M5hBfRVpU8
Part Four to come next Saturday
For more, read T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1921)
For more, read Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope (1954)