A Field Guide to Getting Lost Page 12
This formula he eventually patented as IKB, International Klein Blue (and he recognized and celebrated the monomania of hundreds of paintings of the same color, writing a symphony that consisted of one note and relating a parable of a flute player who for years played only one note—but the right one, the beautiful one, the one that opened up the mysteries). “With this blue,” writes one critic, “Klein at last felt able to lend artistic expression to his personal sense of life, as an autonomous realm whose twin poles were infinite distance and immediate presence.” He claimed his blue work heralded the beginning of l’époque bleu, the Blue Age, and his first significant show bore this title. Held in Milan in 1957, it featured eleven blue paintings, each featureless, each the same size, each with a different price—thus the work operated in the empyrean realm of ideas and as subversion within the world of commerce. When the same show was held in Paris, a thousand and one blue balloons were released into the evening sky.
The blue paintings were both objects that could be made and sold and windows into the boundless realms of the spirit. But there were more direct ways to reach that realm. For his second Parisian show, Le Vide (The Void), he purged the small gallery of everything it had contained and cleaned it thoroughly. After paying his first visit to Saint Rita’s shrine—“I think this exhibition of the Void is rather dangerous”—he had painted the gallery pure white over a two-day period while mentally summoning immaterial forces. These he described as “a palpable pictorial state in the limits of a picture gallery. In other words, creation of an ambience, a genuine pictorial climate, and therefore, an invisible one. This invisible pictorial state within the gallery space should be so present and endowed with autonomous life that it should literally be what has hitherto been regarded as the best overall definition of painting: ‘radiance.’” Two or three thousand people attended; members of the Garde République, who normally guarded only high dignitaries, were stationed at the entry; the police and firemen came because of the crowd; it was a hugely successful event, though what viewers thought they were seeing in the empty gallery remains open to question: Albert Camus wrote in the guest book, “with the void, full powers,” punning on emptiness and fullness. The blue dye in the cocktails served at Le Vide caused all the drinkers to piss blue for days afterward.
He sold two immaterial pictures at this exhibition and later developed a formal transaction for selling access to the immaterial: the price for a Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility was paid in gold, half of which he immediately threw into a river, the ocean, “or in someplace in nature where this gold cannot be retrieved by anyone” to return it to life. To complete the ritual of disappearance and letting go, the buyers were obliged to burn the receipt filled out with his name and all the details of the purchase, so that they ended up with precisely nothing. Several Zones were sold. His work anticipated many of the concepts and gestures of art movements yet to be born, of conceptualists, minimalists, performance artists, and the Fluxus movement. His Leap into the Void of 1960, in some ways the culmination of all his work, was in many ways the most typical, since it combined the most sublime gesture of transcendence with prank, stunt, and self-promotion.
A plate of Waldseemüller’s 1513 atlas depicts the central Atlantic, Spain, and the western bulge of Africa recognizably, but the upper right-hand shoulder of South America is nothing but a coastline full of small names and mouths of rivers and, in far bolder letters, across what is now Venezuela and Brazil, “Terra Incognita,” unknown land. The phrase was common on old maps—even a 1900 atlas of mine marks out a part of the Amazon as “unexplored”—and is seldom found now. Between words is silence, around ink whiteness, behind every map’s information is what’s left out, the unmapped and unmappable. One of those in-depth local or state atlases that map ethnicity and education and principal crops and percentage foreign-born makes it clear that any place can be mapped infinite ways, that maps are deeply selective. A new map of the city of Las Vegas appears every month, because the place grows so fast that delivery people need constant updates on the streets, and this too is a reminder that maps cannot be commensurate with their subject, that even a map accurate down to blades of grass would fall out of accuracy as soon as the grass was grazed or trampled. The Great Salt Lake cannot be mapped with any degree of accuracy, because it lies in a shallow basin without drainage: any slight change in water level becomes an extensive change in shoreline.
Jorge Luis Borges wrote a parable about some cartographers who eventually created a map that was 1:1 scale and covered much of a nameless empire. Even at 1:1 scale, the two-dimensional map would be inadequate to depict the layers of being of a place, its many versions. Thus the map of languages spoken and the map of soil types canvas the same area differently, just as Freudianism and shamanism describe the same psyche differently. No representation is complete. Borges has a less-well-known story in which a poet so perfectly describes the emperor’s vast and intricate palace that the emperor becomes enraged and regards him as a thief. In another version the palace disappears when the poem replaces it. The descriptive poem is a perfect map, the map that is the territory, and the story recalls another old one about a captive painter who at the Chinese emperor’s dictate paints so wonderful a landscape that he is able to escape into its depths. These parables say that representation is always partial, else it would not be representation, but some kind of haunting double. But the terra incognita spaces on maps say that knowledge also is an island surrounded by oceans of the unknown. They signify that the cartographers knew they did not know, and awareness of ignorance is not just ignorance; it’s awareness of knowledge’s limits.
The eighteenth-century mapmaker Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville pronounced, “To destroy false notions, without even going any further, is one of the ways to advance knowledge.” To acknowledge the unknown is part of knowledge, and the unknown is visible as terra incognita but invisible as selection—the map showing agricultural lands and principal cities does not show earthquake faults and aquifers, and vice versa. About a hundred and fifty years after Christ, a Roman named Crates made a globe based on the theory that the earth had four continents, three of them unknown. Around the same time Ptolemy drew up the atlas that was for a millennium and a half the standard source on the geography of the world. Says one map historian, “Ptolemy departed from the standard Greek conception of the inhabited world. He abandoned the idea of a world encompassed by water (in the restricted sense employed by Homer), of a circumfluent ‘oceanus’ relatively close by. Instead, he recognized the possibility and probability of Terra Incognita beyond the limits of his arbitrary boundary lines. In other words, he left the matter open to further investigation.” Before Crates and Ptolemy, maps depicted a known world surrounded by water, and the complacency that must have gone with this sense that the world was, as the navigational term has it, encompassed must be our smugness now that maps of earth are so unlikely to say “Terra Incognita.”
On Sebastian Cabot’s 1544 map of the Americas, the whole of South America is drawn in, and so is Central America and the eastern coast. It’s a beautiful map in the mode of the time: dark people as tall as provinces walk across the southern continent, a pair of white bears far larger than Cuba and Haiti walk in the opposite direction, west, across the northern continent, and clumps of grass that would dwarf mountain ranges dot the landmasses. But the west coast begins to dissolve where California starts. Beyond Baja California the line simply stops as though the world there was not yet made, as though it were neither land nor water, as though the Creator had not yet finished this part of earth, as though substance and certainty together dissolved there, and the phrase “Terra Incognita” spreads across this unmarked expanse. On a map drawn up by Gastaldi two years later, Asia is fit like a puzzle piece into the blankness of the North American west, so that it looks as though you could walk from Tibet to Nevada (which is not yet named or marked) without any detour to the north. Strange woolly shapes like caterpillars or clouds dot the continent
, and more clouds boil off the edge of the round earth. The Pacific proper appears on later maps, but a mythical island of Java sometimes appears on it, far larger than the island that would finally be saddled with the name. Brazil, the Amazon, and California are also real places named after imaginary ones. In that Pacific, California was long portrayed as a huge island just off the west coast of North America, and the northwest coast of that continent remained undrawn, one of the last expanses of Terra Incognita to the Europeans mapping the world.
To imagine that you know, to populate the unknown with projections, is very different from knowing that you don’t, and the old maps depict both states of mind, the Shangri-las and terra incognitas, the unknown northwest coast and the imagined island of California (whose west coast was nevertheless drawn in with some accurate details and names). When someone doesn’t show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don’t—and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown. Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown.
In ancient Greece, Herodotus spoke of the Atarantes in the African desert, a tribe who did without names, without meat, and without dreams, and reported that eastern Libya (as northwestern Africa was then called) sported “dog-headed men, headless men with eyes in their breasts (I don’t vouch for this, but merely repeat what the Libyans say), wild men and women, and a great many other creatures by no means of a fabulous kind.” Several centuries later, in the third century after Christ, Solinus located horse-footed men whose ears covered their bodies in place of clothes in Asia, birds that gave off light in Germany, and hyenas whose shadows stole the bark away from dogs in Africa. Even in 1570, Abraham Ortelius made a map of the world showing that grand imaginary continent, Terra Australis, giving it a River of Islands, a Land of Parrots, and other wholly fabricated features. Terra Australis was only definitively dispelled by Captain Cook’s second expedition in 1772-75, just as the mythical Northwest Passage was done in by his final voyage. (Global warming may yet make it a reality.)
Into the nineteenth century, people continued to seek places that had been made up out of imagination and desire. It had already been discovered that the magical Cibola, whose name appears above New Mexico in the old maps, was only Kansas, that Paradise was not located in Central America as Columbus thought, once he admitted that the topographies he had bumped into were not Asia. But even in the 1840s John C. Fremont claimed to be looking for the Buenaventura River that led from the Great Salt Lake into the Pacific. A water route across or, as the long fantasy of the Northwest Passage had it, above the continent, was long desired and grudgingly abandoned, and the Donner Party died in part of a bad description of a shortcut across the salty western stretches of Utah in the uncharted region long called the Great American Desert. Long afterward, south-central Nevada remained unmapped and unexplored, one of the last parts of the lower forty-eight states to be filled in by surveyors, and into the early twentieth century it is strangely blank, though in 1900 the state was full of mining towns that no longer exist, Manse and Montgomery and Midas, Belleville and Reveille and Candelaria. Afterward, when a great swath of it the size of Wales became Nellis Air Force Base with the Nevada Test Site inside, the place where a thousand nuclear bombs like small incendiary suns were detonated over the decades, civilian maps often left the region entirely blank, as though it had gone back into the unknown.
The last map of California as an island was probably drawn up after Captain Cook’s voyages, though the theory that the Sea of Cortez continued on up to rejoin with the Pacific, rather than being the strait that ends when Mexico’s Baja California becomes the U.S.’s Alta California, had been dispelled earlier. Strange it is to look at the old maps of the world and see my part of the continent as island and a void: Nicholas d’Abbeville’s 1650 map shows California as an island off a coast that becomes neither land nor water; Henrious Seile’s 1652 map shades in more of the northwest coast, but refrains from drawing the sharp line of certainty. “Terra Borealis Incognita” say the block letters across a vast expanse. Even Pedro Font’s 1777 map of the San Francisco Bay Area leaves the inland area north of the Golden Gate (as Fremont would later name it) blank, so that the territory of my childhood is terra incognita there.
During the buildup to the recent war on Iraq, whose two great central rivers come as close as anything on earth to the biblical paradise with four rivers flowing out of it, one of the vultures making the case for bombing Baghdad’s civilians said, “There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” This third category would prove crucial in the spasms and catastrophes of the war. And the philosopher Slavoj Zizek added that he had left out a fourth term, “the ‘unknown knowns,’ things we don’t know that we know, which is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the ‘knowledge that doesn’t know itself,’ as Lacan used to say,” and he went on to say that “the real dangers are in the disavowed beliefs, suppositions, and obscene practices we pretend not to know about.” The terra incognita spaces on maps say that knowledge too is an island surrounded by oceans of the unknown, but whether we are on land or water is another story.
In 1957, Yves Klein painted a globe his deep electric blue, and with this gesture it became a world without divisions between countries, between land and water, as though the earth itself had become sky, as though looking down was looking up. In 1961, he began painting relief maps this same trademark blue, so that the topography remained but the other distinctions vanished. Several of these maps depicted sections of France but one showed Europe and northern Africa together. Painted into one continuous mass, the distinctions vanished, even between Algeria and France, which were at war at the time. “Klein used color,” writes art historian Nan Rosenthal, “as though it could be an explicit and overtly political tool for ending wars.” He had always been against making distinctions and divisions, fulminating even against the line in painting and celebrating the unifying force of color instead. And his work is a reminder that, however beautiful, with their ships and dragons, those old maps were tools of empire and capital. Science is how capitalism knows the world, a friend remarks to me, and the distinctions and details these maps marked out were first of all for merchants and military expeditions. What was marked “Terra Incognita” was also what remained unvanquished. Painting the world blue made it all terra incognita, indivisible and unconquerable, a ferocious act of mysticism.
Throughout his work, Klein sought to transcend or annihilate representation itself, which is always about what is absent, for an art of immediacy and of presences, even if it was the presence of the immaterial, the void. He sought to erase the many for the sake of the one—images for pure color, music for a single note, the material for the immaterial. His principal paintings were without subject, and even those artworks showing the human figure were traces of contact—the plaster on the male body, the paint on the female body—rather than representations. What was material was at least not representational, and he pursued dissolution, disappearance, and the dematerialized more directly with the exhibition Le Vide, with the flames that were, as gas jets, works of art themselves, or he scorched and pierced canvases to leave the mark of fire, with the gold thrown in the river, and with the Leap into the Void. Mystical because he was concerned with the dissolution of the rational mind, of expectation, of the industrial era, perhaps, and thus with erasing the map of reason and entering the void of pure consciousness that had been the subject of his first Paris exhibition.
The Leap into the Void of 1960 is a subject of some controversy. What remains of it is the official photograph. It shows a quiet Paris street with stone walls, an old sidewalk, leafy t
rees above the wall, and from the mansard roof of the wall or walled building on the left, Klein leaping. Not falling, but leaping upward, his body arced, his hands out, a few bits of hair flying up from his forehead, far above the street below, a dozen feet at least, leaping as though he need not even think of landing, as though he would never land, as though he were entering the weightless realm of space or the timeless realm of the photograph that would hold him up above the ground forever. The white sky of a black-and-white photograph, the dark suit—Klein was always impeccably dressed—and the upward curve of his back make it a formal and celebratory act, not just a crisis of gravity. A train runs by in the background, a bicyclist pedals away down the right side of the otherwise abandoned street. Like Bruegel’s painting of Icarus falling into the sea while a farmer plows, Klein was flying and no one seemed to know or care, or so says the photograph (which is, of course, evidence that at least photographers were present).
He published a single edition of a four-page newspaper, Le Dimanche (Sunday), whose front page was dominated by this photograph of the leap and whose various newspaper-formatted texts were a description of and manifesto for his work. “A Man in Space!” said the headline for the photograph, parodying the space race that sought to put a man into orbit, and a caption read, translated, “The Monochrome [Yves le Monochrome was his nom de guerre], who is also a fourth dan black belt judo champion, regularly practices dynamic levitation! (with or without a net, at the risk of his life). He means to be in shape to go into space soon to join his favorite work: an aerostatic sculpture composed of 1,001 blue balloons, which, in 1957, escaped from his exhibition into the sky over Saint-Germain-des-Pres never to return. To liberate sculpture from the base has been his preoccupation for a long time.” The text is quintessentially Klein, a mix of astute engagement with artistic practice and contemporary events, good-humored prank, and mysticism. It continues, “Today anyone who paints space must actually go into space to paint, but he must get there without any faking, and neither in an airplane, a parachute, nor a rocket: he must go there by his own means, by an autonomous, individual force: in a word, he must be capable of levitating.” Thus did the Rosicrucian and judo studies of his earlier years come to a culmination. “The Blue Revolution Continues,” says a bold caption above the masthead.