Tuesday, December 26, 2006
the artist doesn't get dirty hands
In 1958 Yves Klein, an early performance and installation artist, created Le Vide (The Void) at a gallery in Paris. He painted the gallery white and led groups through his empty space. Was that experience infuriating, irritating, funny, sarcastic, brilliant, or all of that to the art crowd and general public at the time? It would be interesting to hear from someone who was there.
Joseph Nechvatal has written about Klein and his innovative practice. A video of Klein's well-known work, "Anthropologies", shows the artist directing 3 nude women covering their bodies in blue paint and imprinting their forms onto canvas. Klein never touches the women and he directs them verbally. It seems to me that this prefigures the contemporary high-art tendency to outsource the physical production of art objects to other professionals.
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We can take the freedom to say that it could also prefigure, which is perhaps more interesting, the work of an artist who self acclaimed himself the immaterial art emperor, and who sells what he called human pictures (or living pictures), which consist in selling time spent with him, and if you want, with his friends or acquaintances.
This could seem to be strange at first sight, but it's as serious as it can be. All you have to do is to get in accord about the meeting point with him, and then you will spend together the time you pay for.
You can see this at http://www.iaemperor.com/en/living-pictures.html
Even if the immaterial art emperor doesn't use paint during this period, do you think that we can still say that he doesn't get dirty hands, that he is not, more than most of the painters, taking a risk?
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