Sewn in the Sweatshops of Marx: Beuys, Warhol, Klein, Duchamp by Thierry De Duve

Author:Thierry De Duve
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Klein, Ex-voto dédié à sainte Rita de Cascia (recto), 1961. Photograph courtesy of Yves Klein Archives, Paris. © ARS, NY

Yves Klein, Ex-voto dédié à sainte Rita de Cascia (verso), 1961. Photograph courtesy of Yves Klein Archives, Paris. © ARS, NY

The three excerpts resemble Freud’s kettle argument all too well ([1] The kettle is intact; [2] The kettle was damaged already when I borrowed it; [3] I never borrowed your kettle to begin with), as if in order to be the first, one could gamble on the Evangelist’s word (the last shall be first), as if true fidelity to oneself did not demand a readiness to endure all reproach, as if it were an act of piety in Job to sit calculating on his dung heap. Grace, if we believe in it, can be received but never requested. Between Klein the mystic and Klein the mystifier there is no choice. He is both of these at once, the first because of the second and the second because of the first, but he incarnates neither. If he is a mystic it’s because his greatest talent lies in self-mystification to the point of credulity. And if he is a mystifier, it’s because he is wholly sincere in making others believe that he is a mystic, and even more so in making them doubt his sincerity. His life and work abound in ex-votos because everything in them is on the order of vows and wishes, and because the kettle argument is, with a tedious regularity that bespeaks a certain genius, the mainspring of his artistic wishful thinking. When in 1954 Klein published a little monograph titled Yves Peintures, supposedly his first “retrospective,” the question whether he really painted and exhibited in his hotel rooms in London and Tokyo the monochromes he now reproduced by means of cut papers—whose sizes (reading in millimeters rather than centimeters) referred to themselves rather than to the putative pictures—is a red herring. If he really made them, he demonstrates his precocity and the authenticity of his mystique of the monochrome. If he didn’t do them, he shows the clear irony with which he makes fun of art informel. If we accuse him of fraudulence, the work retorts that all the hallmarks of fraud were there to be read; and their presence is proof that the artist doesn’t cheat. The episode of the cyclist, sometimes present, sometimes absent, from the various publications of the Painter of Space Jumping into the Void photograph is cut from the same cloth. Either Klein is flying and is gifted with supernatural power, and we must believe the photo; or he jumps and breaks his nose, and we must admire his courage or his talent at landing, like the good judoka he is. Did he trick the photograph? What’s the big deal? Either he has constructed an image like any other artist, and the art is in the symbolic power and the magic of his fiction; or he wanted us to notice the fakery, and the art is in the doubt and the reflection sustained by it.

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