Nothingness
INTO THE VOID OF IVES KLEIN
Why are you so petrified of silence? Here, can you handle this...
—“All I Really Want,” Alanis Morissette
Ives Klein harnessed the palpable tension many individuals associate with emptiness as the principle medium for Le Vide, a walk-through exhibit consisting of nothing more than a whitewashed room.
Artists throughout history, from ancient Japanese gardeners to postmodern minimalists, have made use of empty space to purposefully call attention to an object of interest. Klein, however, took this concept one step further by focusing the observer on the emptiness itself; the experience is purposely unnerving.
Sigmund Freud wrote volumes on the human tendency to fear “the shadow.” Many fear the unknown that may lurk in the darkness. “From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties, and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us,” prayed the pious inhabitants of rural Cornwall and Scotland.
In Le Vide, Klein presents us the inverse of the shadow—the fearsome sterility of empty, white light. The void threatens to reveal to us that, in the unknown recesses of the universe, we may find neither beast nor fiend, but rather cold, indifferent nothingness staring back at us. —DJS
La spécialization de la sensibilité a l’état de matiére premiére en sensibilité picturale stabilisée, Galerie Iris Clert, Paris, France, 28 avril–mai 1958.