Friday, December 15, 2006

Where Others Fear To Leap




Yves Klein (1928-1962) - Leap Into The Void, 1960


"All sins are attempts to fill voids."

"Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only be one who is detached."

"I can, therefore I am."

"In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish."

"Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure."

"The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know."

"The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest."

"The role of intelligence - that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions - is merely to submit."

"To be a hero or heroine, on must give an order to oneself."

"Every separation is a link."

"We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise."

"When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know it is really a door."

"A mind enclosed in language is in prison."

"Humility is attentive patience."

"Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life."

Simone Weil (1909-1943)


"As in his carefully choreographed paintings in which he used nude female models dipped in blue paint as paintbrushes, Klein's photomontage paradoxically creates the impression of freedom and abandon through a highly contrived process. In October 1960, the American photographer Harry Shunk made a series of pictures re-creating a jump from a second-floor window that the artist claimed to have executed earlier in the year; the figure and the surrounding scene were then collaged together and rephotographed to create its "documentary" appearance. To complete the illusion that the event had actually taken place, Klein distributed a fake broadsheet at Parisian news-stands commemorating it. It was in this mass-produced form that the artist's seminal gesture was communicated to the public and also notably to the Vienna Actionists."

From Timeline of Art History