LEAP INTO THE VOID

« with the void, total empowerment »
Albert Camus to Yves Klein
1958

Cession de Zone de Sensibilité Immatérielle - Rituel
Juillet 1962, Paris.
Sur l’île de la Cité, Yves Klein organise la cession d’oeuvres strictement mentales réalisées –un espace céleste saturé de bleu invisible- sous forme de zones de sensibilité picturale immatérielle échangées dan le cadre d’actions symboliques contre de l’or pur avec le nouveau propriétaire. Yves Klein remet alors un recu portant la mention de l’échange et jette l’or à la Seine.
Yves Klein affirme : pour que la valeur fondamentale immatérielle de la zone lui appartienne définitivement et fasse corps avec lui, le propriétaire doit brûler solennellement son reçu.
Il ne restait plus qu’au collectionneur qu’à s’exécuter.





“Following the Ritual Rules for the Transfer of areas of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, in 1962, a buyer could purchase a space saturated with invisible blue in exchange for pure gold. If the buyer decided to stop at this point, then Yves Klein would keep the gold and the buyer would received a special receipt that resembled a bank cheque. To fully “authenticate” the transferral and receive a zone of immateriality, however, the buyer would have to burn the receipt while Klein, in the presence of a director of an art museum, a well-known art dealer, or an art critic, and two other witnesses, would throw half the gold into a place from which it could not be retrieved, such as a river or an ocean. Only then would the “…fundamental value of the zone definitively belong [to the buyer] and become embodied by him…” The destruction of the receipt as a legal contract and the useless expenditure of pure gold left the buyer in possession of nothing but burning desire and his own body as a spatial zone.”