Rayonnement and the Readymade: Yves Klein and the End of Painting

Author(s): Nuit Banai

Source: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 51 (Spring, 2007), pp. 202-215
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Peabody Museum of
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202 RES 51 SPRING 2007

,-',* ?

Figure 1. Le Vide, interior view of Yves Klein exhibition at Galerie Iris Gert, April 28-May 13, 1958; entry doorway covered with
white curtains. Photo: Anonymous. Courtesy of Artists Rights Society (ARS), NewYork/ADAGP, Paris ? 2006.

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 Rayonnement and the readymade

Yves Klein and the end of painting

NUIT BANAI

On the night of April 28, 1958, his thirtieth birthday, Clearly, there was something valuable within The Void, a
Yves Klein initiated the most important "work" of his "sensibility" related to the realm of the aesthetic that
career at the Galerie Iris Clert, in an event-performance could potentially influence the emotional, corporal, and
known afc Le Vide or The Void. Originally scheduled for perceptive state of the spectator. However, within the
eight days, the show was extended for another week immaculately whitewashed walls of the gallery, there
because of the mass turnout, with more than three was no apparent trace of a traditional artwork and not a
thousand people congesting the rue de Seine on the single monochrome on display (fig. 1). Only a solitary
night of its inauguration and crowds of several hundred neon tube on the ceiling illuminated a carpeted room
each day.1 It was advertised through an announcement that seemed to contain nothing (fig. 2). Nevertheless,
written by Klein's foremost defender, Pierre Restany, this space of emptiness, originally known as La
which invited people to attend "the demonstration of sp?cialisation de la sensibilit? ? l'?tat mati?re premi?re
perceptive synthesis" that "sanctions the pictorial quest en sensibilit? picturale stabilis?e, was saturated with
of Yves Klein for an ecstatic and immediately "pictorial sensibility," the invisible, intangible aura that
communicable emotion."2 The invitation bore Klein's Klein had released from the monochrome paradigm.
official blue stamp and had actual monetary value?its In his statement about The Void Klein explains: "The
possession meant free entrance into The Void and its object of this tentative is to create, establish, and present
loss or forfeit condemned the visitor to pay an entrance to the public a sensible pictorial state within the limits
fee of fifteen hundred old francs per person. Klein of an exhibition space for paintings. In other words, [the
defended this tactic, stating that, ". . . the scheme is object is] the creation of an ambiance, of a real pictorial
necessary because, although the pictorial sensibility I climate, and because of this, [it is] invisible. This
exhibit may be sold either in bits or in block, visitors invisible pictorial state in the gallery space must literally
endowed with bodies or vehicles adapted to sensibility be the best definition that we have until today of painting
will be able?despite me and all my efforts to keep the in general: rayonnement/'4 As he makes clear, Klein
entire exhibition in place?to steal some degree of its wished to tap into the concentrated power embedded in
intensity from me by impregnation, whether consciously the object of painting, or in its originary myth, and
or not. And that, above all, should be paid for. . ."3 disperse it into a situational praxis. In this way, the
audience would bask in the limitless aura of painting, its
I would like to thank John Rajchman, Francesco Pellizzi, and an
ambience, without being restricted to obsolete
anonymous reader for their comments and suggestions during the conventions such as "line, contours, forms, composition,
preparation of this essay. opposition of colors, etc.," and without being confined
1. In an undated letter to his aunt Rose, Klein writes that five or to its rationalizing square limits, or its basic condition as
six hundred people attended the gallery each day. The letter from the
Gasperini archive is cited in Sidra Stitch, Yves Klein (Stuttgart: Hatje
Cantz Verlag, 1994), p. 139. Klein places the number of visitors at two seul bloc, les visiteurs dot?s d'un corps ou v?hicule propre de la
hundred in the text "Pr?paration et pr?sentation de l'exposition du 28 sensibilit?, pourront, malgr? moi, bien que je retiendrai de toutes mes
avril 1958, chez Iris Clert, 3 rue des Beaux-Arts, ? Paris," in Le forces l'ensemble de l'Exposition en place, m'en d?rober par
D?passement de la probl?matique de Fart et autres ?crits, ?d. Marie impr?gnation, consciemment ou non, quelque degr? d'intensit?." Ibid.,
Anne Sichere and Didier Semin (Paris: ?cole Nationale Sup?rieure des p. 86.
Beaux Arts, 2003), p. 93. 4. "L'object de cette tentative: cr?er, ?tablir et pr?senter au public
2. "Cette manifestation de synth?se perceptive sanctionne chez un ?tat pictural sensible dans les limites d'une salle d'exposition de
Yves Klein la qu?te picturale d'une ?motion extatique et peintures. En d'autres termes, cr?ation d'une ambiance d'un climat
imm?diatement communicable." Yves Klein, "Pr?paration et pictural r?el et ? cause de cela m?me invisible. Cet ?tat pictural
pr?sentation," in Le D?passement (ibid.), p. 85. invisible, dans l'espace de la galerie doit ?tre litt?ralement ce que l'on
3. "Cette manoeuvre est n?cessaire car bien que toute la a donn? de mieux jusqu'? pr?sent comme d?finition ? la peinture en
sensibilit? picturale que j'expose soit ? vendre par lambeaux ou d'un g?n?ral, 'rayonnement.'" Ibid., p. 84.

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204 RES 51 SPRING 2007

Figure 2. Le Vide, interior view of Yves Klein exhibition at Galerie Iris Clert, April 28-May 13, 1958; empty
vitrine. Photo: Anonymous. Courtesy of Artists Rights Society (ARS), NewYork/ADAGP, Paris ? 2006.

an object. As Klein writes: "There is, at the moment, no From this declaration, it is apparent that Klein wished
more mediation: One finds oneself literally impregnated to achieve a perceptual and physiological sensation of
by a state of pictorial sensibility, specialized and immediacy, the here and now freed from all secondary
stabilized beforehand by the painter in the given space, supporting apparatus and certainly from all object
and it's a direct and immediate perception-assimilation relations. He wanted to strip away all the unnecessary,
without any effect, trick, or deception."5
au pr?alable par le peintre dans l'espace donn?, et c'est une
5. "Il n'y a, ? pr?sent, plus d'interm?diaire: on se trouve perception-assimilation directe et imm?diate sans plus aucun effet, ni
litt?ralement impr?gn? par l'?tat sensible pictural sp?cialis? et stabilis? truc, ni supercherie." Ibid.

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 Banai: Rayonnement and the readymade 205

confining conventions that define and constitute the environment: On the one hand, The Void would
object of painting and present its affective aura, its function as abstract painting's tomb, a memorial to an
rayonnement. His goal was to fully dematerialize the art experience of modernism, which could no longer
object and remain with an unmediated experience of represent life in conditions of advanced capitalism. On
one's bodily presence in space, a state of perceptual the other, it would be a built territory for an incipient
attention that he described as "pure phenomenology," or form of post-modernist aesthetic and a new model of a
the "essential, pure climate of the flesh."6 This temporal public, which Klein was in the process of constructing
instant, Klein hoped, would function like a historical and which would find its fullest articulation in his
tabula rasa, a rupture from the quantitative context of collaboration with the architect Werner Ruhnau at
advanced capitalism and an initiation into a purely Gelsenkirchen between 1957 and 1960.
qualitative realm of life, which he baptized "sensibility." To prepare the space for the last rites of abstract
For Klein, sensibility is the ineffable sensation of the painting, Klein shut himself in the gallery for forty-eight
individual's communion with that which is beyond them hours before the opening of the show. During this time,
but which has always existed within them. It is a he removed "the impregnations of previous exhibitions"
paradoxical realm within which he sought a different by purging and cleaning the space with white paint. This
order of existence, one that would overcome the act of erasure was meant not only to purify the space
spiritual poverty of the reified, disenchanted world. This but also to make it into his "space of work and creation,
experience, alternatively coded in his writings as in a word, [his] atelier."8 In the testimony of art critic
"enthusiasm," or the "indefinable" of Eugene Delacroix, Pierre Descargues, Klein ". . . removed all the furniture,
is one: painted the walls white, [and] whitened one showcase
which contained no object."9 Iris Clert describes the
. . . with no more dimension, no more anything, no more
infinite, no more nothingness, no more divinity. Instead, the state of the gallery after Klein's purging as "incandescent
inconceivable, that which we refuse?crazy as we are?to white, vibrant, marvelous . . . sublime."10 With no
see and contemplate and utilize because it is too dazzling, objects on display, the focus of aesthetic experience
because it burns reason.7 became the gallery's framing perimeter and the spatial
whiteness it contained. This effect was heightened by the
In other words, the realm of sensibility is an aporia?
fact that Klein left a vitrine containing nothing within the
or a void. It is inconceivable to our rational minds yet
gallery. This empty container, in which the spectator
emerges from it. Unthinkable and unreachable as it is,
would expect to find art objects, pointed directly and
Klein transformed The Void into a laboratory to create
performatively to the larger condition of the empty
the conditions from which the Utopian state of sensibility
context of the gallery, with the spectator at its core. The
might possibly appear one day along with a public that
withdrawal of objects as the preeminent form of
would be ready to welcome and diffuse it. Paradoxically,
perceptual information altered the relationship between
to achieve the immediacy of experience that defines
the viewer and the gallery space. It transformed the
sensibility, Klein could only use an established
gallery into a zone for the production and legitimization
vocabulary of painting, an idiom of the readymade
of aesthetic experience. Art became whatever was
object. This language was already in place and ready for
placed within the four walls that enclosed the gallery ?r
easy deployment, and Klein was without recourse to a
whatever occurred during a viewer's passage throughout
new set of terms to express what he had in mind. In
it. It was the institution rather than the object that
order to get beyond the problematic of painting and into became the arbiter for the definition of art.11 The
a sphere of existence apart from object relations, Klein
understood that he would have to work through the
readymade object. The result would be a double 8. "... mon espace de travail et de cr?ation, en un mot, mon
atelier." Ibid., p. 88.
9. Pierre Descargues, "Yves Klein," in Yves Klein (New York: The
6. Yves Klein, "Chelsea Hotel Manifesto," in Le D?passement (see Jewish Museum, 1967), p. 22.
note 1), p. 295. 10. Iris Clert, in an interview with Dominique de Menil, March
7. ". . . plus de dimension, plus rien, plus d'infini, plus de n?ant, 1980, p. 2. The transcript can be found in the Menil Collection,
plus de divin, mais l'inconcevable, ce qu'on se refuse, insens?s que Houston, Texas. Exhibition History 10.120.
nous sommes, ? voir et ? contempler et ? utiliser parce que c'est trop 11. As Brian O'Doherty has noted: "Once completed by the
?blouissant, parce que ?a br?le la raison." Yves Klein, "Des bases withdrawal of all apparent content the gallery becomes a zero space,
(fausses), principes, etc. et condamnation de l'?volution" in Le infinitely mutable. The gallery's implicit content can be forced to
D?passement {see note 1), p. 23. declare itself through gestures that use it whole. That content leads in

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 206 RES 51 SPRING 2007

radicalism of this aesthetic shift could not be grasped by to unmediated existence. If The Void and the studio are
most people, and newspapers called the exhibition "a one and the same, then The Void turns into the living
white wall, like the one in a freshly lime-washed space of ambient abstraction. This fundamental and
cowshed," in other words, a joke.12 parodie elision between creativity and capital is a
While the habitual content may have been withdrawn motivating aspect of The Vb/af.15 Yet, what does it mean
from the "zero space" of the gallery, Klein's presence to have an empty space, devoid of paintings, as the site
remained essential, as it generated the meaning and for abstract creation and emanation? Is this a literal
quality of the ambiance. He writes: ". . . In indulging demonstration of the essence of abstract painting as
myself to [use] my unique facture, my gesture of emptiness or should we look further at the significance
painting, free and slightly deformed by my sensual of presenting abstraction as a space of non-production,
nature, I think that the pictorial space that I already of embedding creative death, or the end of painting at
managed to stabilize in front of and around my its core ... no more work?
monochrome paintings will be well established in the It was in The Void that Klein irreversibly joined the
space of the gallery. My active presence during the long genealogy of artists who, by longing for the death
execution in the given space will create the dazzling of abstract painting, also enact the end of modernism.16
pictorial climate and ambience, which habitually reigns I contend that The Void was the end game of modernism,
in the atelier of an artist bestowed with real power."13 a long awaited rehearsal of the convergence of
For Klein, the studio would not be a privileged site if it abstraction's goal of unmasking its own essence with
did not contain the body of the artist, who signified the advanced industrialization. Klein represented the end of
mythical process of creation itself. The fecund space of abstract painting, and with it the end of modernism, by
the studio was fetishized in the body of the artist, who manipulating an exhibition space where one expects to
becomes the critical point of convergence, or mediation, find art objects and filling it with nothing. The audience
between the white box and the urban fabric. More came looking for paintings, most likely the blue
important, in an uncanny transposition, Klein collapsed monochromes that were his trademark, and found only
the space of his studio, or atelier, with the commercial empty walls that clearly demonstrated Klein's refusal to
space of the gallery.14 In his formulation, the space of paint or create art objects. This was an eloquent
artistic creation was elided with the agent of validation statement about the finality of painting by an artist who
of the art object and its transformation into Art. wanted to liberate abstraction's essence from its
In this gesture, the aesthetic field merged with the historically formulated container. Once this essence?or
political-economic field in such a way that artistic value rayonnement?was revealed, abstract painting no longer
was assimilated with exchange value. In Klein's case, his had a raison d'?tre. It had played out its historical role
atelier was the site for the production of abstract within The Void.
monochrome paintings, which he posited as a passage This finality left a gaping absence in the realm of the
aesthetic, a space that Klein believed only he could
occupy through his physical presence. Much like his
two directions. It comments on the 'art' within to which it is German counterpart Joseph Beuys, Klein elided his
contextual. And it comments on the wider context?street, city, personal myth with his painterly work, even assuming
money, business?that contains it." Brian O'Doherty, "The Gallery as
the name of Yves Le Monochrome. The irony is that after
Gesture," in Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
The Void o? 1958, Klein's identification of himself as a
12. "Vernissage d'un mur blanc," Le Figaro, April 30, 1958, and an painter was not connected to the task of producing
untitled article in Aux Ecoutes, May 15, 1958. works. In fact, it emerged from a specific rejection of
13. ". . . En me laissant aller ? ma facture, ? mon geste de peindre, physical labor. As he himself explained, he wished to
libre et peut-?tre l?g?rement d?form? par ma nature sensuelle, je
"do nothing more at all .... I seek to 'just' be. I will be
pense que l'espace pictural que j'?tais arriv? ? stabiliser autrefois
devant et autour de mes tableaux monochromes sera, d?s lors, bien a 'painter.' They will say about me, 'it's the painter.' I will
?tabli dans l'espace de la Galerie. Ma pr?sence en action pendant feel like a real 'painter' because I will not paint....
l'ex?cution dans l'espace donn? de la Galerie cr?era le climat et
l'ambiance rayonnante picturale qui r?gne habituellement dans tout
atelier d'artiste dot? d'un r?el pouvoir. . . ." Yves Klein, "Pr?paration 15. This observation is made by Thierry de Duve, "Yves Klein or
et pr?sentation," in ?e D?passement (see note 1), pp. 88-89. The Dead Dealer," October 49 (summer 1989):73-90.
14. I am grateful to Brian O'Doherty, whose lecture "The Studio 16. The performance of the end of painting is treated by Yve-Alain
and Cube" at Columbia University, February 15, 2006, helped me Bois in "Painting: The Task of Mourning," in Painting as Model
develop these connections. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).

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 Banai: Rayonnement and the readymade 207

The fact that I exist as a painter will be the most

'exciting' pictorial work of our time."17 In this posture
of refusal, Klein did not make a single painterly
gesture?dismissing even a dry brush with which to
clean the walls?at the Hessenhuis exhibition at
Antwerp on March 17, 1959 (fig. 3). In the same vein,
assisted by Fran?ois Dufr?ne and Jacques de la Villegl?,
he emptied the Mus?e de la Ville de Paris of all its
paintings on January 26, 1962, and called the space The
Void (fig. 4). These actions suggest that Klein claimed
sole ownership of the concept of painting once
abstraction had reached its tangible end. In this logic,
painting was no longer connected to an authentic
physical gesture, but to the artist's charismatic appeal?
the cult and the myth becoming inseparable from the
work?and his careful management of his artistic
property rights.
It was also in The Void that Klein revealed the fusion
Figure 3. Yves Klein presenting a zone de sensibilit? pictural
of his notion of rayonnement with the historical form of
immat?rielle at the Hessenhuis exhibition, Antwerp, March 17,
the readymade. This elision and its relation to the 1959. Photo: Harry Shunk. Courtesy of the Estate of Harry
collapse of reductive abstraction was so blatantly Shunk.
apparent at the time that Guy Debord noted it in an
editorial of the International Situationniste of 1958. He
writes: "Within the context of the exhaustion of
traditional aesthetic categories, some reach the point of
making themselves known simply by signing a blank,
which is the perfect result of the dadaist 'readymade.'"18
In this editorial, which also takes to task John Cage,
Georges Mathieu, Michel Tapi?, and Simon Hantai,
Debord criticized the emergence of art practices that
produce absence because they do not participate in an
effort to direct the creation of life and its environment.
Indeed, if the monochrome had previously entered the
realm of mass production with Klein's use of readymade
paints and an industrially manufactured roller, The Void
stripped it of the last connection to the tradition of
handmade painting by undoing its very objecthood. No
more objects, only empty space. In this shift, Klein was
certainly eliciting Marcel Duchamp's Paris Air (50 cc of Figure 4. Yves Klein, assisted by Fran?ois Dufr?ne and Jacques
de la Villegl?, preparing Le Vide at the Mus?e d'Art Moderne
Paris Air) (1919), a chemist's ampoule emptied of its
de la Ville de Paris, January 26, 1962. Photo: Harry Shunk.
fluid and labeled S?rum Physiologique (fig. 5). While
Courtesy of the Estate of Harry Shunk.
Duchamp trapped the air of Paris in an empty

17. ". . . ce que je cherche ? atteindre . . . c'est de ne plus rien

faire du tout... Je cherche ? ?tre 'tout court.' Je serai un 'peintre.' On readymade container that only connoted the body, Klein
dira de moi: c'est le 'peintre' Et je me sentirai un 'peintre,' un vrai abolished the existence of the object altogether and
justement, parce que je peindrai pas .... Le fait que 'j'existe' comme made it the very structural condition of The Void, which
peintre sera le travail pictural le plus 'formidable' de ce temps." Yves
contained hundreds of bodies. Not only was the
Klein, "L'Aventure Monochrome," in Le D?passement {see note 1), p.
236. intemalization of the mass-produced into the project of
18. Guy Debord, "L'absence et ses habilleurs," Internationale modern painting fully externalized in this environment;
situationniste 2 (December 1958):6. it was made the very basis of aesthetic experience.

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208 RES 51 SPRING 2007

act of whitewashing the walls with paint rollers, The

Void was turned into Klein's atelier, a workspace for the
creation of ambient abstraction. In this reversal of terms,
Klein was pointing to the emergence of a new historical
context, one in which the idiom of use value is put to
the service of exchange value.
It is telling, furthermore, that even as The Void staked
itself as the apparition of a new form of aesthetic
experience, it actually mandated abstract sameness. As
Klein writes, "My active presence ... [will endow the
space with] an abstract yet real, affective density, which
will exist and live, by itself and for itself in the space."20
Klein abandoned the "material and physical Blue" and
contended that everything "will be white to receive the
pictorial climate of the sensibility of dematerial ?zed
blue."21 Within this new visual paradigm of The Void,
the same affective density of abstraction, its mystical
fetishistic nature, was absorbed, enacted, and repeated
by the density of regimented bodies in space. Thus,
in the same way that abstraction is internally
Figure 5. Marcel Duchamp, Paris Air (50cc of Paris Air), 1919. instrumentalized, the mode of being within The Void
Readymade: 50 ce of Paris Air in a glass ampoule (broken and was one of universal exchangeability. Every body stood
later restored). On printed label; S?rum Physiologique. 13.5
for another body, every gaze stood for another gaze, and
cm high and 20.5 cm circumference. Courtesy of Artists Rights
everything and everyone was infinitely replaceable. The
Society (ARS), NewYork/ADAGP, Paris ? 2006.
passage of the audience through The Void was one of an
undifferentiated mass. "The crowd is so dense," Klein
notes, "that one can't move anywhere."
The situation of mass sameness became so dire that
The simple exposure of this fact is not enough for Klein intervenes: "Every three minutes, I scream and
Klein. Rather, he fabricated a space in which the repeat in a loud voice to the people who have piled up
incorporation with the readymade becomes the starting in the gallery . . . Ladies and Gentlemen, please be so
point, or the zero degree, for any further aesthetic kind as not to stay for too long in the gallery so that
elaboration. Art's status as an autonomous, oppositional other visitors who are waiting outside [can] enter in
practice outside or apart from the market was negated turn."22 While the crowd is identified as a unified mass,
by its total fusion with the fetish, which, Klein suggested, the very experience within The Void was actually one of
had always been its essence. However, the materiality of isolated sameness. By canceling the subject's interiority,
the fetish, which Klein had exacerbated during the ten or material essence, in favor of their abstracted spirit,
years leading up to The Void, was finally undone.19 This The Void created a world of mirroring, image-based
perversion of the fetish's essential character led to its
new historical condition as an immaterial experience. It
is, of course, paradoxical, in true Klein style, that rather 20. "Une densit? sensible abstraite mais r?elle existera et vivra, par
than repress the process of the fetish's production, the elle-m?me et pour elle-m?me, dans les lieux." Yves Klein, "Pr?paration
et pr?sentation," in Le D?passement (see note 1), p. 89.
very condition that gives the commodity its
21. "J'abandonne le Bleu mat?riel et physique . . . Tout sera blanc
phantasmagoric quality, Klein insists on it. Through the pour recevoir le climat pictural de la sensibilit? du bleu
immaterialis?." Ibid.
22. "La foule est si dense qu'on ne peut plus bouger nulle part. . .
19. For a detailed analysis of Klein's exacerbation of the Chaque 3 minutes, je crie et r?p?te ? haute voix aux personnes qui
monochrome object until its ultimate dematerialization, see Nuit s'entassent dans la Galerie de plus en plus . . . 'Mesdames, Messieurs,
Ba?a i, "From the Myth of Objecthood to the Order of Space: Yves veuillez avoir l'extr?me gentillesse de bien vouloir ne pas stationner
Klein's Adventures in the Void," in Yves Klein, exhibition at Schirn trop longtemps dans la Galerie pour permettre aux autres visiteurs, qui
Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Sept. 2004-Jan. 2005 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje attendent dehors, d'entrer ? leur tour.'" Yves Klein, "Pr?paration et
Cantz Verlag, 2004). pr?sentation," ?n Le D?passement (see note 1), p. 91.

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 Banai: Rayonnement and the readymade 209

Figure 6. Le Vide, exterior view of Yves Klein exhibition at Galerie Iris Clert, April 28-May
13, 1958; windows painted blue and blue drapery hung around the carriage doorway that
served as an entrance. Photo: Anonymous. Courtesy of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York/ADAGP, Paris ? 2006.

surfaces. In this way, it gave visual form to the kernel of experience, manifested as space, is created by
experience of spectacle as defined by Guy Debord: It the market and yet manages to escape it. It is precisely
was "the appearance of a social organization of this grain of opposition that Klein nurtured in The Void
appearances"23 in which the "economic realm develops at the same time as his bureaucratic tendencies
for itself"24 and whose root is "the specialization of prevented him from allowing it to fully flourish. While
power."25 The Void was on the cusp of creating and diffusing
Moreover, the shock of this emergence of a new experience that evades object relations, it also shut
visual paradigm, identified by Walter Benjamin as down this possibility through Klein's strategies of
Charles Baudelaire's most important characterization of repression and his insistence on objectif ?cation.
modernity, was actually a case of the same old market This doubling of controlled sameness and alterity is
driven equivalence. In its uniformity, The Void suggested present in every aspect of The Void, starting with the
that spaces are actually produced by the same forces of spectator's movement from an everyday, urban context
abstraction that manufacture the commodity, and that into a heterotopia. The official entrance to the gallery
their value depends on something immeasurable, or as was sealed off and the storefront window was painted
Klein notes, "invisible and intangible."26 An authentic blue (fig. 6). Klein's trademark color officially sanctioned
the event but gave no indication of what to expect on
the interior. The doorway that adjoined the gallery,
23. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald normally an entrance for the inhabitants of the building,
Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), p. 14.
was swathed with flamboyant blue drapery. Visitors had
24. Ibid., p. 16.
25. Ibid., p. 18. to go through a small passageway, which served as both
26. Yves Klein, "Pr?paration et pr?sentation," in Le D?passement a reception area and a zone of preparation for their
(see note 1 ), p. 84. upcoming experience. A blue curtain was hung on the

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210 RES 51 SPRING 2007

Figure 7. View toward northeast corner of El Lissitzky's Raum f?r

konstruktive Kunst, Internationale Kunstausstellung, Dresden, 1926. Photo:
Alexander Raul Walther. Courtesy of The Research Library, The Getty
Research Institute, Los Angeles, California (950076) and ?Artists
RightsSociety. (ARS), NYA/G Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

left wall of this small passageway: It shielded the materialist (albeit masquerading as an adept of mystical
doorway into the exhibition room and served as the final cults like Zen, Catholicism, and Rosicrucianism) who
marker of differentiation between zones. exploited available conditions for an unapologetic
This series of spaces and thresholds transferred the celebration of the present.
spectators from the urban context into a heterotopia, a The most relevant precursor of the shift from painterly
real space that functions as a countersite, ". . . an abstraction to architectural space is, of course, El
effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the Lissitzky. His Proun Room in Dresden (1924) and
other real sites that can be found within the culture, are Abstract Cabinet in Hanover (1926-1928) contained and
simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted." constructed Utopian hopes for a revolution in material,
Significantly, heterotopias are ". . . mapped out between space, and creative activity. While existing in a real
existing Institutions .... [They are] places that are, architectural dimension, El Lissitzky's spaces were a
therefore, outside the spatial boundaries conceived of by rejection of the present in favor of the unknown
society, but whose actual position can be determined."27 possibilities of a time to come. It is for this reason that
In Michel Foucault's thinking, the spatial notion of his Proun Room in Dresden did not privilege an all
heterotopia structures the classification of real places encompassing or simultaneous environment like The
and not the Utopian fantasies of places to come, or "sites Void, but constructed a sequence of planes, raised
with no real place." Indeed, Klein was not a Utopian like wooden elements, and three-focal reliefs that had to be
his historical avant-garde predecessors, but an inveterate seen in a certain order (fig. 7). The fact that visitors were
to proceed in an anticlockwise direction around the
walls, in a planned progression, suggests a deferment of
27. Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," in Politics-Poetics, time and experience toward a nascent utopia just ahead.
Documenta X (Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz Verlag, 1997), pp. 262-272, p.
In the same way, The Abstract Cabinet in Hanover, with
265. For a further analysis of heterotopias, see George Teyssot,
"Heterotopias and the History of Spaces," in Architecture Theory Since its sliding panels and changing backgrounds, injected
1968, ed. K. Michael Hays (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), pp. motion into the architectural space suggesting its
296-305. transitory, transitional nature (fig. 8). For the historical

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 Banai: Rayonnement and the readymade 211

Figure 8. View toward walls 2 and 3 of El Lissitzky's Kabinett der Abstrakten,

Provinzialmuseum Hannover, 1928. Photo: Redemann. Courtesy of the
Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California
(950076) and ?Artists Rights Society (ARS), NYA/G Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

avant-garde, this Utopian aspiration?a function of The clear delineation of realms between exterior and
historical time?was to be necessarily accompanied by interior created an attenuation of the spectators'
critical reflection on the object's relationship to the expectations and increased the value of the secret that
institution of the public sphere. awaited them inside the ritual space of The Void. To
In contrast, Klein's project eliminated the Utopian control the masses of willing initiates, Klein called upon
kernel of the future in favor of the mystified present. two judo experts, who were stationed outside the
Always the present, inert and unchanging. But, in gallery, two Republican Guards, who checked
Klein's case, was the critical reflection on the part of invitations and maintained public order, and
the audience also eliminated or did the historical representatives of the Order of Saint-Sebastian, placed in
context of spectacle necessitate a different mode of the passageway to restrain the flow of people into The
criticality? If we realize that the foregrounding of the Void to ten at a time. Klein positioned himself within the
"now" is also an intrinsic aspect of the heterotopia, exhibition space and asked visitors to stay for no more
which in its very nature is a discontinuity in time, an than two or three minutes. For Klein, these severe
abrupt cut or rupture within the order of "knowing," mechanisms of control were necessary because he
then we may have a chance at securing criticality expected the manifestation of The Void to be
under different means. Through its spatial and temporal accompanied by "acts of vandalism."28 What might
abruptness, the heterotopia may pierce through and provoke anger from the public in this installation
effectively oppose the liquidation of historical time performance? Furious at having paid fifteen hundred
within spectacle. It this way, it may restore some francs to see nothing, some visitors complained to the
remnant of the dialectical thinking immanent to utopias police force that arrived to control the crowds. The Void
or at least point to its absence. As a heterotopia, The had frustrated the "natural" expectation that a tangible,
Void participated in the petrifaction of the present at material commodity form would be received in return
the same time that it opposed it; it constructed an arena
for the onslaught of spectacle at the same time that it 28. Yves Klein, "Pr?paration et pr?sentation," ?n Le D?passement
turned it on its head. (see note 1 ), p. 87.

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 212 RES 51 SPRING 2007

for a monetary exchange. Instead, what they acquired

through this transaction was the animated spirit of their
fetish ?zed existence, coded as a sacred life force.
This visible perversion of object relations was so
critical to Klein's project that he made it the subject of
Ritual rules for the transfer of areas of immaterial
pictorial sensibility in 1962 (fig. 9). In this ceremonial
procedure, a buyer could purchase a space saturated
with invisible blue in exchange for pure gold. If the
buyer decided to stop at this point, then Klein would
keep the gold and the buyer would receive a special
receipt that resembled a bank check. To fully
"authenticate" the transferal and receive a zone of
immateriality, however, the buyer would have to burn
the receipt while Klein, in the presence of a director of
an art museum, a well-known art dealer, or an art critic,
and two other witnesses, would throw half the gold
into a place from which it could not be retrieved,
such as a river or an ocean. Only then, through the
physical negation of the gold standard, would the
". . . fundamental value of the zone definitively belong
[to the buyer] and become embodied by him . . . ,"29
The destruction of the receipt as a legal contract (and an
art object) and the useless expenditure of pure gold left
the buyer in possession of nothing but burning desire
and his own body as a spatial zone in which affective
sensibility could diffuse itself.
The absence of a commodity form as the result of a Figure 9. Yves Klein and Di?o Buzzati engaged in the ritual
financial transaction could potentially leave the buyer in transfer of immateriality, January 26, 1962. Photo: Harry
an aggravated state. Yet if we recall that payment to Shunk. Courtesy of the Estate of Harry Shunk.
enter The Void was only a forfeit for loss of the invitation
card, then Klein's desire was to encourage the public to
act as both producers and consumers of art and life. As
Iris Clert notes, The Void was actually a paradoxical presence of a public in the gallery, The Void would not
event, both highly exclusive and free. It attracted a have existed. There would have been no one to fill it up,
crowd with certain pretensions who were excited about animate, or witness it. Klein negates the validity of a
getting something for nothing.30 Indeed, without the work of art as always-already-there, just waiting to be
stumbled upon, and suggests that aesthetic experience
needs to be reinvented each and every time. It exists
29. ". . . La valeur fondamentale immat?rielle de la zone lui only in its very immediacy, its moment of social
appartienne d?finitivement et fasse corps avec lui." Yves Klein, "R?gles unfurling. This privileging of the now signals the
rituelles de la cession des zones de sensibilit? picturale immat?rielle," emergence of "experience" as a fetish ?zed aesthetic
?n Le D?passement (see note 1), p. 278.
30. On the second page of an interview from March 1980 with
category. Such a shift in aesthetic practice gives an
Dominique de Men?, Clert muses, "j'avais envoy? une carte, ou je incredible creative, self-generative license to the
disais 'invitation pour deux personnes, ? pr?senter a l'entr?e' et les spectator, who is invited to translate their affective
personnes non munis de cette carte devront payer 1,500 francs, francs singularity into a collective public event?perhaps, even
anciens, c'est ? dire 15 francs. J'ai 3000 personnes dans cette salle . . .
a model of a new collective: the heterogeneous
eh oui, vous savez, quand les gens voient une choise gratuite, et que
?a co?te si cher, ils veulent en profiter, non? C'est moi qui a eu cette
id?e . . . ." ("I had sent a card on which I wrote 'invitation for two 3000 people in this room . . . you know, when people see a free thing
people, to be presented upon entry.' Those people without a card that costs a lot, they want to take advantage of it, no? It's me who had
would have to pay 1,500 francs, old francs, so that's 15 francs. I have this idea . . . .") (see note 10).

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 Banai: Rayonnement and the readymade 213

collective of the void. This emerging social mass would authenticity?fragmented the general condition of the
be based on a distributive authoring process, by which same within The Void, which was both the tool and
no one person is responsible for the entirety of the event consequence of capitalism. The graffito suggests that
but without whose presence the event would not exist. even within the readymade spaces created by universal
The dissolution of authorship into a network of sites equivalence, there exists the potential for a mode of life
would mean that there is no definitive point of closure, different from both use and exchange value. By
only continual pulsation of sensation between spatializing the fissure and multiplicity of the graffito,
coordinates in the situational environment. The The Void has the capacity to create a symbolic form of
activation of aesthetic experience through the creative, resistance. The fact that a "graffiti revolt" occurred once,
affective force of a collection of individuals clearly has on the very night of The Void's inception, suggests that
the potential to efface the single spectator or the unique at any time, instability could erupt within the Cartesian
author of the work. A total awareness of The Void could three-dimensional grid of rational and homogeneous
mean a total effacement of the self, an intertwinement abstraction. While Klein had preventive and preemptive
that aroused feelings of enthrallment and violence. powers of control to ensure that this misdemeanor was
While such a "public of sensation"?or any other public not repeated, one must imagine the possibility of
for that matter?could not actively cohere in The Void, repetition. Again and again, the fissured graffito can
Klein was testing the groundwork for its eventual project a space of difference, where the libidinal
emergence. mechanisms of authentic, individual expression might
Perhaps more jarring than these thwarted manifest themselves.
expectations of the public is the account of one young To attain this other state of being, the young man was
man who was asked to leave when found either drawing compelled to lash out against the notion of temporality
or writing on the gallery walls. In Klein's own words, promulgated by The Void. Insofar as the mark is infected
". . . while accompanying him to the small exterior door with the moment after its making as much as by the
where two guards are posted (the crowd in the gallery is moment of its inception, the graffito altered Klein's
silent and awaits to see what is going to happen), I shout privileging of the immediate.32 The internal Assuring of
to the guards who are outside: 'Seize this man and the event into both a present and future condition?a
throw him out with violence.' He is literally expelled past retained and a future to be announced in the
and disappears in the clutches of my guards."31 The present?extended the temporal experience so that the
young man's desire to deface the space and experience immediate was no longer present to itself but was
of The Void, coupled with the violence of the seizure transformed into the past and the ongoing. This shift
and expulsion are rather disturbing. Why did The Void inserted the possibility that the activity of meditated
provoke such an extreme reaction in the young man that contemplation might fracture the vacuum of abstract
he was compelled to desecrate it? What can we make of immediacy produced by the event. Through
the expression of this sacrilege in the form of graffiti? contemplation, the subject could maintain a self
And how can we digest Klein's retort whose ominous presence over and through time, a variability that
tone would not have escaped a crowd that was surely escaped the regimentation and reduction of the now.
sensitized by the recent historical trauma of the war to The use of the graffito?with its double temporal
such bellicose language? declaration of "I am here" and "I was here"?suggests
In my understanding, the young man's act of defacing that a mode of contemplative activity, a vestige of
The Void was an infinitesimal act of defiance against modernist conventions, still persisted, even if they were
the commodification of experience. It was the distorted. The act of writing not only replaced the
promotion of the differential function of writing, which security provided by objects, it provided the subject
could fight the promulgation of abstract spaces. The with a form of communication that connected him or
young man's individual expression?or demonstration of her with the external environment. Since language
contains an imagined internal audience, it projected a
community of people beyond the privatized limits of the
31. "En l'accompagnant jusqu'? la petite porte ? l'ext?rieur de
laquelle se trouvent les deux gardes (la foule dans la galerie est
silencieuse et attend ce qui va se passer), je crie aux gardes qui sont ? 32. I am employing Jacques Derrida's notion of la diff?rance to
l'ext?rieur: 'Saisissez cet homme et jetez-le dehors avec violence.' Il analyze the fissured model of the graffito mark. See Of Grammatology,
est litt?ralement extirp? et dispara?t happ? par mes gardes." Yves Klein, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press,
"Pr?paration et pr?sentation," in Le D?passement (see note 1), p. 92. 1974).

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 214 RES 51 SPRING 2007

subject. The inherent potential for solipsism generated important to note that the conditions of possibility for a
by the "space-time compression"33 of The Void may new public were in incubation in The Void and would
have been warded off by narrative. only be articulated during Klein's collaboration with
This temporal disjunction within the act of marking Werner Ruhnau at Gelsenkirchen.
has another consequence. Following Jacques Derrida's While violence reigned in The Void, it also provoked
formulation, the presence of the singular mark?or a gamut of other expressions. As Klein noted in his
subject?is splintered into an inter-subjectivity based on journal, "the human experience is of considerable
multiplicity. In this reasoning, all other subjectivities impact, almost indescribable. Certain [people] could not
within The Void inscribed themselves into the figure of enter, as if an invisible wall prevented them [from
the lone mark-maker. The Void was everywhere and entering]. One day, a visitor yelled to me from the door:
within everyone, as much a physical space as a I'll come back when the void will be full . . . .' I
metaphysical experience. The young man was different responded to him: 'When it will be full, you will no
from the rest of the compliant audience in his daring longer be able to enter.'" Klein also reported that
defacement of the space, yet his gesture belonged to the "[o]ften, certain people stay for hours inside without
collective, which bubbled forth in him and wiped out saying a single word and some of them tremble or start
his singularity. Indeed, The Void's identity as an inter crying."34 The small space, the dense crowds, and the
subjective social frame, where a subject is only freshly applied white paint must have led to extreme
completed by the presence of others, was one of its claustrophobia. But this is not the only reason for the
principal characteristics. The Void was a space in which crowds' sublime and paranoid response. These
the subject existed only insofar as he or she saw testimonies reveal that the magnetic attraction of The
themselves-seeing, in a simultaneous casting outward Void deeply affected spectators both visceral ly and
toward the collective gaze and inward toward a self emotionally, pushing them to experience the limits of
reflexive position as viewer. the sensation of their body. The removal of all objects?
This aesthetic of witnessing pointed to the limits of or social signs?which once provided a semblance of
human autonomy in that a person only emerged as a safety, left each spectator on their own, in their own
historical subject if he or she saw and was seen by presence, yet aware of the larger, highly regimented
others in a social context. A community might come collective presence in space. By eliminating all
into being from the power of shared gazes. Thus, the monochromes, Klein has dismantled any illusion that
aesthetic of witnessing within The Void points to the space is only an external construct, created by a
limits of artistic and individual autonomy and to the reciprocal relation to objects. If in the last four years the
necessity of forming a collective, situational monochrome served to anchor and unfasten the
environment. In this project, however, there is the risk spectator by entrenching itself more and more firmly in
that individuals will be turned into social signs and the incommensurable characteristics of the fetish, The
objects, to be consumed by a hungry, objectifying eye. Void set the spectator dangerously adrift. In this way, the
Again, such a community could not properly cohere in public was at one pushed to experience themselves as
The Void because of Klein's repressive strategies. While monadic beings, engulfed and possessed by their
the Parisian masses thronged to The Void, the space was bodies, and as social creatures fused with the
actually Klein's performance of the existing vacuum in collective, emptied from bodies that act as mere place
the public sphere. It was an intentional manifestation of holders for power.
the public disorder that characterized postwar France The destruction of the fetish as an external controlling
following the disintegration and discrediting of the organ and its ritualized inscription into the human body,
available prewar models of the public. However, it is its incorporation into the state system, took on both

33. David Harvey has coined the term "space-time compression" 34. "L'exp?rience humaine est d'une port?e consid?rable presque
to describe the simultaneity of time and space brought about by indescriptible. Certains ne pourront pas entrer, comme si un mur
capital accumulation and a revolution in communication. These two invisible les en emp?chait. L'un des visiteurs me crie un jour de la
factors create an experience in which "the world suddenly feels much porte: 'Je reviendrai quand ce vide sera plein . . . .' Je lui r?ponds:
smaller, and the time-horizons over which we can think about social 'Lorsqu'il sera plein, vous ne pourrez plus entrer.' Souvent, certaines
action become much shorter." See David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: personnes restent des heures ? l'int?rieur sans dire un mot et certaines
Towards a Critical Geography (New York: Routledge, 2001 ), pp. tremblent ou se mettent ? pleurer." Yves Klein, "Pr?paration et
123-124. pr?sentation," in Le D?passement (see note 1), pp. 93-94.

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 Banai: Rayonnement and the readymade 215

violent and mystical aspects. It was like being possessed What distinguished 77?e Void from Klein's later works
by a spirit, which meant dying a magnified ritual death is that it was a living space, different from all sites
and coming back to life interpenetrated with the image available at that historical moment, in which the
and content of The Void. The spectator inhabited relations between subject and object were made visible.
abstraction as complete plenitude, while sensing, if not Even if The Void was blessed by Gaston Bachelard's
fully confronting, their own alienation. While the mystical precept that "[flirst there is nothing, next there
violence of this suture may have been overwhelming, is deep nothing, then a blue depth," what it actually
The Void compelled the audience to claim this process reveals is that nothing?not space, not subjectivity, not
of self-abstraction by transforming death, or the void, spectacle?emerges ex nihilo, from itself. The Void was
into a performative event. The Void was a death space: a a historical construct and a historically determined
site that gave form to the end of abstract painting as visual paradigm, a category that emerged to make life
much as to the end of a type of humanity defined by coherent in the intertwinement between capitalism and
modernism. The revelation that the void exists within state formation. The "immaterial sensibility" of The Void,
both painting and the public sphere, through its the quality of being there in the spiritual silence of its
manifestation as a built environment, was a necessary strictures, was both the effect and exposure of the forces
passage from nihilistic, dead-end finality to a rebirth. and relations of power. Inhabiting this space meant
Only through this gesture of sacrifice and death would reveling in the ritualization of capital, in the
Klein-?and every painter after him and French society as fetishization of the subject and state, and inventing new
a whole?be able to return to a new aesthetic paradigm modalities of being within them. Isolated and separated,
and a new model of the public. While abstraction, as the spectators nonetheless evaded total regimentation
the emblem of modernism and the public sphere, may and the apocalyptic dread of annihilation by reification,
have to be bequeathed as a sacrificial tribute, this act of by staging the ritual of death, voiding or erasing
death within The Void is the very thing that creates the themselves from life, becoming immaterial.
possibility of its return.
In this light, it is fitting that a new type of human
subjectivity and a new type of art practice would both
emerge with mark-making. Just as the graffito signals the
passage from animal to man in prehistoric caves, such
as Lascaux or Altamira, here it announced the birth of a
type of humanity and aesthetic practice formed by
abstraction.35 The act of the lone graffitist within The
Void acknowledged that the faculty of painterly creation
was still present, despite Klein's abolition of paintings (or
d?passement de l'art) and his repressive strategies for
libidinal control. The destruction imposed by the mark
reclaimed the libidinal instincts of man and diverted
them to the creation of a new subject and object. This
gr/Yfonage-before-form, this infantile scarring that
precedes figuration, was the requisite vestige of sadism
and creativity necessary for aesthetic practice to be
reborn. It signalled the human desire to alter a wall?
and then potentially a canvas?into a space of
representation. It signalled, moreover, the human
capacity for affect, a capacity that could help constitute
a public of sensation.

35. Georges Bataille discusses these shifts in "Le Passage de

l'animal ? l'homme et la naissance de l'art" and "Au rendez-vous de
Lascaux, l'homme civilis? se retrouve homme de d?sir" in Oeuvres
Completes XII, Articles 2, 1950-1961 (Paris: Gallimard, 1988) and in
"L'Art Primitif" in Documents, ed. Bernard Noel (Paris: Mercure de
France, 1968).

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