Yves Klein’s Void, Reality and Representation

Saut Dans le Vide (Leap Into the Void), 1960 © Yves Klein / Photographer: Harry Shunk French artist Yves Klein is classified by New York critics of his time as being “neo-Dada, but other critics, such as Thomas McEvilley in an essay submitted to Artforum in 1982, have since classified Klein as an early, though ‘enigmatic,’ Post-Modernist.” Whatever the classification, I’d say he certainly has an interesting philosophy behind his work:

Klein used the photograph [above] as evidence of his oft-mentioned unaided lunar travel. In fact, “Saut dans le vide” was published as part of a broadside on the part of Klein (the “artist of space”) denouncing NASA’s own lunar expeditions as hubris and folly. Klein’s work revolved around a Zen-influenced concept he came to describe as “le Vide” or in English: the Void. Klein’s Void is a nirvana-like state that is void of worldly influences; a neutral zone where one is inspired to pay attention to ones own sensibilities, and to “reality” as opposed to “representation”. Klein presented his work in forms that were recognized as art - paintings, a book, a musical composition - but then would take away the expected content of that form (paintings without pictures, a book without words, a musical composition without in fact composition) leaving only a shell, as it were. In this way he tried to create for the audience his “Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility”. Instead of representing objects in a subjective, artistic way, Klein wanted his subjects to be represented by their imprint: the image of their absence. Klein’s work strongly refers to a theoretical/arthistorical context as well as to philosophy/metaphysics and with his work he aimed to combine these. He tried to make his audience experience a state where an idea could simultaneously be “felt” as well as “understood”.