Artists notes :
Some thoughts on the influence of Yves Klein’s with respect to the work Jump contemporary Klein.
2008

I began writing this note sure in the knowledge that my work 'Jump contemporary Klein' was intended as a criticism of Yves Klein’s action ‘Leap into the void’ from 1960. Whilst it was clear that the work owed a debt to Klein it was equally clear to me that I wanted to distance myself from the man who described himself as the ‘Painter of space throwing himself into the void’. Such theatricality seemed out of place to me in 1999, and the horrors of 9/11 that were soon to follow only served to emphasize the point. The fact is that nobody in his right mind, given the choice, leaps ‘horizontally’ from a second floor window onto solid ground without some hidden ‘card-up-their-sleeve’. Klein’s hidden card; was the several jujitsu, holding the mattress onto which he would safely land. All of which, after the event, he would have skilfully removed by Harry Shrunk who took the photograph.

That I did not realize this concealment within the image until someone pointed it out to me is significant, it turned my initial sense of amazement and wonder into a kind of moral indignation. H.G. Wells, cleverly points out that moral indignation is nothing more than ‘jealousy with a halo’. This subtle jealousy, or as exponents of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein might say, ‘Kleinian envy’, became the root of my problem with Klein. My response was to close the book on Klein. However the image ‘Leap into the void’ remained firmly lodged in my brain.

My own leap took place on a Saturday afternoon in Glasgow during May of 1999. Like many works from that period it was a response to a given situation that would create an opportunity. The situation, was the ‘take-down’ of an exhibition at Transmission Gallery in which I had suspended from the roof of the gallery a climbing-wall below which several mattresses where placed to safe guard the public should they fall while climbing. The opportunity, lay in the knowledge that after the show had closed the mattresses would be piled one on top of the other on the side-walk outside the gallery to await collection by the city refuse department. Given the spirit of the exhibition that had taken place within the gallery it did not take much imagination to realize that this was a good moment in which to re-enact Klein’s leap.

Just as Klein had, I asked a friend Kevin Kelly to bring his camera so as to record the jump. This he did and the resulting image was entitled ‘Jump contemporary Klein’. The difference, as I saw it then, between Klein’s image and my own was that whilst Klein had removed the safety precorsions from his image, I had not. The mattresses and ladder from which I jumped (it was not possible to reach the window ledge) remained clearly visible in the final image.

A side from any sense of envy, what I saw as a kind of wilful fakery, a duping of the public, within ‘Leap into the void’ had always been my bone-of-contention with Klein. It was as a subtle response to this that I used the term ‘contemporary’ within my title. My point being that in our present attempts to enter the ‘void’, our ‘return to the real’, we did not need to fake it, or create fictions. To present life as it is, without concealment of the safety nets that we put in place to protect ourselves, seemed to me to be the better way. And I still hold this view.

But I see now that whilst ‘Leap into the void’ did influenced ‘Jump contemporary Klein’ it is not possible to make a comparison between the two, their contexts in time, culture, and personality are different. They are totally different works. What is acceptable for one artist at one time is not for another in a different time. Both are correct. In researching this text it was necessary for me to re-open the book on Klein and in doing so I began to gain a sense of what lay behind the theatricality and bravado of ‘Leap into the void’, a sense of a man whose desire for a realism beyond the pictorial and a merging of life and art, touched on ideas not so different from my own. I found myself admiring this flamboyant pretender who proposed under the banner ‘Theatre of the void’ and ‘Blue revolution’ a ‘Sunday for everybody’; of which he wrote...

” ... I wish that on this day joy and wonder will reign, that no one will get stage fright, and that everyone, conscious as well as unconscious actors-spectators of this gigantesque presentation, should have a good day. That everyone will come and go, move about, or remain still. ...
The theater should be or at least rapidly attempt to become the pleasure of being, of living, of spending wondrous moments, and with each passing day of better understanding the beauty of each moment.
Everything I write in this journal represents my own steps towards this glorious day of realism and truth: the field of operations of my proposed conception of theater is not only the city, Paris, but also the countryside, the desert, the mountains, even the sky, and even the entire universe. Why not? I know that everything inevitably is going to work out very well for everyone, spectators, actors, stagehands, directors, and others....”
Yves Klein. Dimanche. Sunday 27 November 1960.

Few today would dare write such an optimistic and utopian manifesto and hope to be taken seriously, even fewer at the close of the 1950’s. Even with a mattress and jujitsu’s, to leap requires a certain courage, but to step outside the art of ones time, to risk the void, survive and come out on top with style, requires something that few posses. Klein, to use a phrase from the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke, was a ‘natural born world shaker’, an artist who with others laid the foundations for the 1960’s; a part of the epicentre of an explosion, the ripples of which where to have profound effect on the generations to come.

It is within this ‘ripple effect’ and not the jump that I know prefer to think of Klein’s influence upon the making of Jump contemporary Klein. By aiming criticism at Klein I was unwittingly criticizing the foundation of an artistic freedom that enabled my own leap to take place. If there is any debt owed it is in this. RIP. Monsieur Klein.

neal beggs October 2008.