Independent Projects

Yves Klein’s idea of 1957 was one of the very first examples of what has since come to be known as “relational aesthetics.” The visitor is invited to put their hand through the holes on the sides of the box and feel what is inside the box without seeing it. The tactile and sensuous and yet simultaneously uncanny experience of touching the nude skin of a stranger that one cannot see is what completes the box as a work of art. Since then several variations of this work have made their marks in the history of avant-garde performance art from the Japanese Fluxus artist Ay-O’s “Finger Boxes,” to Valie Export’s Tapp- und Tast-Kino (Tap and Touch Cinema), in which the artist wore a tiny “movie theater” around her naked upper body on the streets of ten European cities between 1968 and 1971, so that her body could not be seen but could be touched by anyone reaching through the curtained front of the "theater."

The other component of Dominique Lévy’s Independent Projects exhibition is an excerpt of the recording of Klein’s own voice having a dialogue with himself, Dialogue avec moi-même (1961), which begins with the extended D major chord of the first part of the Symphonie Monoton-Silence. Dialogue avec moi-même is a spoken sequence of introspective self-critique by Klein, with the artist musing on the nature and enigma of artistic creation and his own practice. The English translation of the excerpt of the dialogue is played on continuous loop on a video screen with the voice of Klein synchronized. The dialogue video is displayed side by side with a small close-up picture, photographed by Harry Shunk and János Kender, of Klein’s face engulfed in an intense gaze.

Image: Sculpture tactile (1957) prototype. Installation view of the exhibition With the Void, Full Powers, Walker Art Center, October 2010. Courtesy of Yves Klein Archives, Paris 2014.