Bodybuilding – Howlings in favour of Klein

In collaboration with the conference Breathless Days: 1959-1960, organized by the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, the UBC Curatorial Lecture Series is pleased to present a talk by Régis Michel, Chief Curator at the Musée de Louvre.

March 9th, 1960. A chic soirée at the Gallery d’Arquian, rue Saint Honoré, Paris. Yves Klein changes a woman into paintbrush, the public into voyeurs, and art into spectacle: a high mass of anthropometry. Nietzsche affirmed that art is never more than a (tragic) farce. Klein demonstrates that art is never more than the artist (a clown): Narcissus in seventh heaven. Klein is a flighty knave: a genius joker, for whom art is life – la vie en rose (Rrose Sélavy): a theatre of… the void. Let us build this organless body which surges up without warning, between Godard and Glauber, Vienna and Kantor, Debord and Deleuze + Guattari: a mere display of conceptual levitation …

The Curatorial Lecture Series presents lectures on contemporary curatorial practice organized by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in collaboration with the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory; the Museum of Anthropology, and the Department of Anthropology; with the support of the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies; and the Faculty of Arts at The University of British Columbia.