Willoughby Sharp
2007 Flash Art interview
I first met Yves in January 1958. I was a twenty-one year old, deeply curious, trust-funded American art history student at the University of Paris... Even at this early date, I believe that I had a premonition of his preeminence and importance to my life. When I learned that he taught judo at the American Artists and Students Center on Boulevard Raspail where I took tea daily, I made my move. His classes were taught in the club’s basement on thick mats surrounding a large swimming pool. Yves, dressed in blue-and-white, had just finished his class and was gathering his gear to go home. I introduced myself, saying that Schmela had shown me some of his works and that I wanted to see more. Then he invited me to his home/studio which was just around the corner at 14, Rue Campagne-Première. Yves was a strikingly handsome, highly imposing, energy-filled human being. Surrounded by his brilliant blue paintings and radiantly pigmented sculpture, isolated in an almost furniture-free, all chalk-white environment, he was animated and incandescent. Being with him in this special space which seemed to exist apart from most of the material universe I had previously inhabited, I experienced a transcendent, life-transforming esthetic epiphany.
[My mother hired a man, Joe, to wash the windows. He was like the piano-tuner. She felt a tenderness towards them because they were evidence of "the way things are." He had heavy boots and skin that shined and hair with a little gray. In the kitchen, letting this rest in the air between us, she'd say "what do you think of the human experience?"]
Yve-Alain Bois Klein's Relevance For Today
Winter 2007 October
On reading Adorno's book, we find ourselves asking what he could really have said differently about Klein: for example, when he speaks of Wagner's 'social character' (the rebel who becomes a beggar; the spoiled child who identifies with the established order he is nevertheless persuaded to fight); of his 'dilettantism' (which according to Thomas Mann, is the mark of his lack of formal education and the very foundation of the very idea of a 'synthesis of the arts'); of Wagner's poetic need for hyperbole; of how labor is eclipsed in his theatrical productions (essential to what Adorno calls the phatasmagorical aspect of theater in his operas, the goal of such eclipsing is to engender 'the illusion of the absolute reality of the unreal'); of the fascination with the prank possibilities of technology and the skilled tricks involving theater stunts as magic; of the often sadistic manipulation of the audience that combines with his allegiance to it (the most poignant symptom being perhaps the quest for success at any price); of his ascetic ideal (the self-immolation necessary for any martyrology); of the constant reference to myth (myth of a return to a prehistorical past paradoxically seen as an eternal present and thereby as an abrogation of the future); of the dream, finally, of a frozen time that is nevertheless forever restless.