Kevin deForest, Drawing after Yves Klein’s Architecture of Ai r, photoshop, 2003.
The Architecture of Air Yves Klein’s leap into the social void Kevin deForest
t he legacy of Yves Klein is often identified through the filter of a strategically self-generated media sensationalism which overshadows his nuanced utopian exploration of the immaterial as a reflection of social freedom. The contemporary relevance of Klein’s all too short career is manifold, both in his wily social engagement in the presentation of his work, as well as with his level of enigmatic material innovation. Klein’s medium of choice for the Architecture of the Air projects (1958-1962) was the elements. He proposed a series of large scale outdoor projects with walls of fire and water and a roof of air made by pressurized air streams that arch over a vast ground plane.The air emanated from blowers and was then gathered with collecting pipes. This enclosed micro-climate became the epitome of Klein’s use of the immaterial void as a reflection of social space.The air roof is anti- architecture, the dematerialization of the Miesian glass wall taken one step further in a playful and positive destruction of the Modernist grid. Innovatively using the atmosphere as a construction material, it precedes Diller and Scofidio’s Blur Building in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, by nearly a half century. The elemental purity of these projects was tied to a complex social engagement. As a hybrid strategy located on the boundary between pure and impure, Klein very consciously presented much of his materi-
ally elemental work through the populist vehicle of bad taste. His notoriety was established in the public eye by a sensation-hungry news media through which he strategically garnered publicity around many of his exhibits and performances. As social critique, the Architecture of Air project proposes a model of radical societal restructuring. In his New Eden, the open plan organisa- tion of the ground surface delineates unwalled zones of residential, leisure and work areas. All mechanical components of the design are placed underground, metaphorically burying the technological aspects of civilisation, concealed from view.Thus the open ground surface of these environments reflects a sense of boundless freedom.The absurd playful - ness of this freed society without walls advocated a radically impersonal state of being, abolishing both personal and familial privacy. The majority of this work was never realised due to financial restraints and Klein’s death in 1962 at the age of 34.The medium throughout his diverse body of work is the immaterial, the void as a potential space of societal freedom. His work survives as the traces or remnants of this hybrid notion, merging high with low, metaphysics with public relations, and the everyday with the fantastic.
Kevin Ei-ichi deForest has been a participant at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, Holland (1989-1991) and a resident artist at Seika University, Kyoto, Japan (1997-1998). Recent exhibits include Summer Jam at Satellite, New York City (curated by Franklin Sirmans) and Americas Remixed at La Fabricca del Vapore in Milan, Italy. He currently lives in Montreal.
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