Yves Klein Speaks! Lecture
Performance Lecture, 60 minutes, 2004 - 2006
Performance History:
Kunstarkaden, Hans Seidl Stiftung, Munich, Germany, July 2004
San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, February 2004
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, January 2004
Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada, October 2006
Formally, this performance is very similar to the Cornell performance – we use the same theatrical conventions of listening to sound in the dark, pairing slides that provoke odd resonances with the audio being played, and offering a gloss on the Yves Klein séances and the experience of conducting them in museums. The trajectory of the performance is closer to a biographical narrative than the Cornell piece is. The key theme that emerges is Klein’s feelings about how his work is now treated, shown, and collected; most uncanny, perhaps, is the figure of Klein’s widow who was frequently referred to during the séances, and who we later worked directly with during our dealings with the Klein estate.
For more on this project, please visit the page devoted to our compact disc, Yves Klein Speaks!, Volume 2 of our Art After Death series.
