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Yves Klein at the MAK Center
Art in America, Dec, 2004 by David Ebony
A modest but tightly focused and enthralling museum exhibition, "Yves Klein: Air Architecture," centered on the artist's architectural projects, which preoccupied him from 1957 until the time of his death in 1962, at age 34. Curated and designed by Francois Perrin, a young architect and Klein scholar, the show was installed in a series of small galleries in the MAK Center's landmark 1921-22 Schindler House. The modernist structure, inspired by Japanese design, with low ceilings and intimate spaces, proved the perfect setting to explore Klein's offbeat building schemes. Featured were some rarely exhibited items from the Yves Klein Archive, including drawings, photos and other documentary material placed in low-lying blond-wood vitrines designed for the occasion. A number of sculptures were also on view, as well as several videos, which ran continuously on monitors placed on the floor.
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Klein's architectural foray, like much of his work, was inspired by the writings of Gaston Bachelard, the philosopher of space, matter and the immaterial, who died at age 77, the same year as Klein. Bachelard's famous quote that "Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need," was taken to heart by Klein, whose extremely hypothetical architecture concepts are sensuous reveries filled with utopian ideals akin to sci-fi fantasy.
Among the highlights of the exhibition were drawings that Klein produced in collaboration with the architect Claude Parent in 1961. The drawings illustrate Klein's scheme for a town with transparent dwellings whose walls are made of pressurized air and jets of water and fire. Bathroom and kitchen facilities would be located underground. The large ink-on-vellum Air-Conditioned City (Air Roof and Fire Walls), 1961, shows stylized figures lounging in such a house. Even the furniture is immaterial; inhabitants would float upon cushions of air instead of chairs and beds. Living in close harmony with the earth, denizens would enjoy perfect climate and living conditions, having no need of clothing or any manufactured goods.
While Klein's proposals might be wildly impractical on a functional level, his vision has something in common with experiments by artists such as James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson, which often touch upon notions of immaterial architecture. Accompanied by an excellent catalogue that includes several of Klein's key essays and documents, the exhibition illuminates one of the most profound and provocative facets of the artist's exceptional oeuvre. The show is projected to tour Europe next year in a slightly altered form; venues and dates are to be announced.
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