He was a ‘conquistador’ of the void, not of nothingness but of the active emptiness found in the oriental tradition.

(Ledeur 1999: 24)

…profit comes from what is there;

Usefulness from what is not there.

(Lao Tsu 1980: Chapter 11)

On 28 April 1958, an unusual opening took place at the Galerie Iris Clert, Paris. Entitled ‘Epoque Pneumatique’ (but subsequently generally referred to as Le vide or ‘The Void’) the exhibition by Yves Klein comprised a room emptied of all furniture and painted a brilliant white. Visitors to the opening were presented with blue cocktails (that reportedly dyed their urine blue for several days) (Weitemeier 1995).

The French artist Yves Klein is associated with ‘the void’. We have the photograph of the besuited artist walking away into the dazzling emptiness of Le Vide. Or the famous photograph by Harry Shunk, Man in Space! The painter of Space Throws Himself into the Void! (1960), showing Klein apparently launching himself from a balcony into the empty street – suggesting flying upward as much as falling downward. But what is this ‘void’, this ‘space’, that Klein implies and utilises in his work? This article is an attempt to shed some light on this question.

Writing about Yves Klein, Jean-Paul Ledeur (1999), (see above) declares that Klein’s void is not simply ‘nothingness’ and points to the ‘Oriental’ tradition of an active emptiness. We should not be surprised to encounter an influence of Zen in the work of Yves Klein, who spent time in Japan in 1952 and 1953 where he studied Judo, achieving a Black Belt and 4^th Dan grade (Weitemeier 1995)., The void In Zen Buddhism is not nothingness. It represents ‘absolute reality’, and ‘freedom from selfhood’ (Seymour 1987: 24), or the ‘complete freedom’ attained when the mind is no longer clinging to attachments (Alan Watts, in The partially examined life 2021). This concept of an emptiness full of potential is also found in 6^th century BCE Taoism: ‘Profit comes from what is there, usefulness from what is not there’ (Lao Tsu 1980).

But Klein’s ideas are not solely ‘Eastern’. He was a Rosicrucian – a Christian order that had assimilated alchemical traditions – and Christian theology runs powerfully through his work. A clue here is his initial titling of ‘Le Vide’ as ‘Epoque Pneumatique’. The scientific or technical term ‘pneumatic’ originates from the Greek, Πνευμα (pnevma), meaning spirit or breath, and in Christian theology was equated with the breath of God, the ‘Holy Spirit’. Klein’s void, it is implied, is not truly empty, but filled with the Holy Spirit. It is interesting that in the ‘West’ the notion of a vacuum became controversial with the invention of the air pump in the mid-seventeenth century. The very possibility of a vacuum was contested because it implied a space empty of everything, and devoid of an omnipresent God (Burtt 1967: 137ff). This controversy is dramatized in the 18^th Century painting by Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768), in which a white bird, resembling the Paraclete (παράκλητος) – symbol of the Holy Spirit, is struggling for breath in the bell jar evacuated of air. Is science destroying the Holy Spirit? Yves Klein’s reference to the ‘pneumatic’ is arguably a reference to this pre-scientific idea of nothingness filled with Holy Spirit.

But we should not forget that Yves Klein was a Modernist, not simply looking back to the past, deeply engaged with the culture forged by science and technology. His treatment of the void may also be placed in the context of recent and contemporary physics. The 19^th century theory of the aether, a medium for the propagation of the waves theorized and detected by physics, had become discredited by the 20^th Century. However Einsteinian and Quantum physics further complicated this notion of aether-less, truly empty space. Albert Einstein announced that space and time were relative to the observer and formed an integrated entity, space-time, that could be shaped by gravity. While in quantum physics, David Bohm (1983) postulated that what we consider to be empty space is actually a sea of energy, out of which matter emerges as ripples on the surface of that sea. Bohm used the ancient Greek term Plenum, after the school of Parmenides and Zeno, to describe this space – a space that is not empty, but full. And so, we see that Klein’s concept of the void – an empty space full of potential – could strike a chord with contemporary physics as well as with Zen.

As an artist Yves Klein used the emptiness and potential of the void not only on a conceptual level but as a matter of direct experience, in keeping with the Zen tradition. He dealt with materiality, but also with what he called ‘immateriality’, and, much like the Abstract Expressionists, he used materiality to refer to the immaterial. For example, his use of the particular blue (International Klein Blue) which he patented, created monochrome paintings, sponges, and other objects that, when directly experienced, appear to hover mysteriously on the edge of materiality and immateriality. Seen close to, they appear to dissolve and rematerialize in front of our eyes. Paradoxically, material existence is questioned through direct sensory experience of works of art.

The Yves Klein who leaps into the void in a suburban street, to become the ‘Man in Space’ of the photograph by Harry Shunk, leaps literally, as, one year later in 1961, Yuri Gagarin, the first ‘man in space’, was literally propelled into the vacuum above the atmosphere of our planet. But Klein’s leap is poetic. It is mysterious inasmuch as it is a photograph purporting to show an objective reality that appears impossible, startling, even absurd. But it is also able to suggest the existence of this void that lies within the realm of our very, everyday existence. This productive emptiness that, through his work, he wished to reveal to us all.

Bibliography

Bohm, David (1983). Wholeness and the implicate order. London: Ark

Burtt, Edwin Arthur (1967). The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science: a Historical and Critical Essay. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul

Lao Tsu (1980). Tao Te Ching (Translated Gia-fu Feng and Jane English). London: Wildwood House

Ledeur, Jean-Paul (1999). Yves Klein: matter and the immaterial / matierisme et immateriel. Catalogue of editions and sculptures edited / catalogue des éditions et des sculptures éditées. ISBN 90-71598

Seymour, Anne (1987). Transformation and prophecy. In: Anthony d’Offay Gallery. Beuys, Klein, Rothko. London: Anthony d’Offay Gallery. Pp. 9-28

The partially examined life (2021). Alan Watts: The Void (1959) [Full Length]. <Video online>  YouTube. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PFxAiVwfis. (Accessed: 27 July 2021)

Weitemeier, Hannah (1995). Yves Klein, 1928-1962: International Klein Blue. Köln: Taschen

Art, Creativity, Culture, Imagination