The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Yves Klein · a photomontage of 1960, made for Yves Klein by the photographers Harry Shunk and János Kender from two negatives joined in the darkroom · gelatin silver print · a man in a dark suit leaping outward and upward from the top of a garden wall over an empty suburban street, a cyclist riding away down it · published in a newspaper of one day that Klein printed himself · the unit scored is the photomontage, the image as printed and as published: a performed act of which the photograph is the only form the public ever had; no single print is the work
Mode
A performed act made into a photograph and the photograph made into a fiction: two negatives joined and published as news, in a newspaper of the artist’s own making
Mythos
The flight and the fall, Icarus, the leap of faith, the saint’s levitation; built in the arrested instant and in the indifferent witness, not quoted
Phase
One instant at the top of an arc, before the fall that the picture never shows; made in 1960, two years before the maker’s death
Presentation
One frame from two negatives, gelatin silver; no fixed print size; seen mostly in reproduction
Register
Exaltation held over peril, calm and almost comic in a quiet street
Scale
One figure, one wall, one street, one house front, one cyclist, one sky
Governing Proposition
In 1960 Yves Klein leapt from a garden wall into a tarpaulin held by judo colleagues, and the photographers Harry Shunk and János Kender printed that exposure together with one of the same street left empty, so that the catchers vanished and the paving lay open beneath him. The image was then published as news, in a newspaper Klein printed himself. The wager of the frame is that a still photograph can hold a body at the top of its arc for good, where flight and fall are the same, and that the authority of the press image can be made to certify an act that never took place as shown, leaving in the record only the faith and none of the safety.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Yves Klein (1928 to 1962) made the image in 1960, the year of his Anthropometries and two years after Le Vide, the empty gallery he showed at Iris Clert in 1958. His work by then was a programme of the immaterial: the monochromes, the blue he patented as International Klein Blue, the void put on show. In the same year the Nouveau Réalisme group was founded, with Pierre Restany. All of this is context for the leap, and none of it is scored as the work.
The work scored is the photomontage, the image as printed and as published. A man in a dark suit, arms spread and back arched, leaps outward and upward from the top of a garden wall over an empty suburban street; down the street a cyclist rides away. The medium is gelatin silver, and there is no fixed print size. The act shown was performed, but it was never meant to be seen except here: the photograph is the only form the public ever had, and the image is the work.
The photographs were taken and joined by Harry Shunk and János Kender, who worked together as Shunk-Kender. Their part lies within the making, and it is credited or charged to the work, not to Klein alone. The image is given its French title, Le Saut dans le vide, beside the English; Klein’s own claim to an earlier, unrecorded leap is context only.
Movement II
Two exposures were made at the same spot. In one, Klein leaps from the wall into a tarpaulin held by a group of his judo colleagues; he was a trained judoka and knew how to fall. In the other, the street is shown empty, without the catchers. The two negatives were printed together, by hand in the darkroom, so that the tarpaulin and the men who held it vanish and the paving lies open beneath him. The join is clean, and most viewers never saw it.
The removal is the work’s whole procedure. What is taken out of the picture is the means of safety, and what is left is a man trusting the air above a hard street. The deceit obeys the picture’s law: the safety is erased to leave only the ordinary street, and the ordinary street becomes the ground of the extraordinary act. Faith survives in the record, and nothing else from the event does.
The montage is a known darkroom operation of its time, not an extension of the medium’s means, and the command it shows is narrow: one frame, one effect. Within that range the decisions are exact. The wall is high enough to frighten and low enough to survive; the viewpoint is low enough to set the figure against the sky; the body is held in an open line from fingertips to feet. The Made stands at 7.9.
Movement III
The frame catches the body at the top of its arc, where it seems neither to rise nor to fall. The arms are spread like wings, the chest lifted, the face turned to the sky; it reads as flight. Below is the paving, hard and near, and the certainty that the next instant is injury. The picture holds the two in suspension and stops there, at the one instant in which flight and fall are the same, and leaves the viewer to supply the end.
This is what the form knows that no other form could. As a painting it would be one image of flight among many; as a film the jump would end, and the tarpaulin or the ground would appear; as a performance before witnesses it would be a man jumping onto a mat. Only the still photograph holds the body at the top of the arc for good, and only a photograph carries the claim to have been there that the montage turns against itself. The single frame is the instrument by which the leap is never completed.
Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, the other leaping man on the desk, stands at 8.1, and holds The Living Form at 8.7 against this frame’s 8.2: a found instant of the eye, more achieved as a photograph. The leap is the larger swerve, at 8.2 against 7.8. The elevation here is real and comes once: one image, one moment, small in its prints and seen mostly in reproduction, where it is striking and also familiar.
Movement IV
Far down the street a cyclist rides away, his back to the event. He is the most indifferent thing in the picture and the leaping man the most charged, and the two obey one law: the ordinary made the ground of the extraordinary. The street, the wall, the suit, the bicycle and the plain daylight are all of one everyday register, and the leap is placed in it without a sign of theatre. The range between the farthest elements is real and well governed, and it is small.
The cyclist also builds the second half of an old pattern: the world going about its business while a man falls from the sky. Icarus, the leap of faith and the saint’s levitation are all in the gesture, and none is quoted. The archetype bears load in the structure of the frame, but it rests on one gesture, and much of its depth is supplied by what the viewer already knows.
Remove the cyclist and the picture loses its witness; remove the wall and the figure floats; remove the paving and the fall has no floor; remove the suit and the jumper is an acrobat. What could change without loss is the furniture: the house front, the fence, the cyclist’s exact place, the street itself. The orders the frame holds are the body and its peril, the suburb, art and the artist’s claim, the sacred by gesture and the world of the press, integrated in one leap; family, labour, the state and history are absent. The Encompassed stands at 6.4.
Movement V
The image was published in a newspaper of one day that Klein printed himself, in the form of a Sunday paper, and it was set there as news, the news of a man in space, months before the first man went into orbit. The most ordinary of printed things carried the most extravagant claim. The press image, with its authority of witness, certified a fiction, and the fiction was presented as fact. That disclosure about the documentary photograph has held, and it holds more sharply in an age of digital alteration.
The swerve was paid for: Klein offered himself to ridicule and to the charge of fraud, and the trick was soon known. Staged and combined photographs were old, from Bayard’s drowned self-portrait of 1840 to the photomontage of Berlin Dada, and Duchamp’s Fountain, at 8.0, holds The Swerve at 9.4 and founded the turn this image belongs to. Bas Jan Ader answered the leap in Fall I and Fall II of 1970, and the staged photography of the decades after followed; much of the turn belongs to the decade at large, to Kaprow’s happenings, to Fluxus and to Manzoni.
Sixty-six years on, the image survives whole, in its prints and in the newspaper, and its presence has been continuous since 1960; the act was never meant to survive any other way. Its questions stay open: performance, photograph or fiction; mysticism, publicity or joke; and what its maker’s death at thirty-four, two years later, has done to its reading. The summit is closed to it at the Epochal Gate, where The Unconcealment, The Archetypal Deep, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition fall short. It stands at 7.9, in Tier III, at the line below Tier IV.
Act III · The Twelve
Run the subtractive test on a picture of very few parts. Remove the wall and the figure floats, a trick shot; the wall is the point of departure, and it must be ordinary, a suburban garden wall and not a cliff. Remove the street and the paving and the fall has no floor: the hardness below is the whole risk. Remove the cyclist and the picture loses its indifferent witness, whose back is turned on the event and who makes the leap a private act in a public place. Remove the suit and the jumper is an acrobat. Each part bears load. What yields is the house front, the fence and the exact placing of the cyclist, and the making shows the image could have used another street. Necessary in principle, contingent in its furniture.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Two things are brought into the open, and both can be stated. First, that the photograph’s claim to have been there can serve an act that never took place as shown: the press image, with its authority of witness, here certifies a fiction, and the fiction was published as news. That disclosure about the documentary image holds, and holds more sharply every decade. Second, that the artist’s body and belief can be the material of the work: the leap declares a faith in the immaterial, staged so that only the faith survives in the record. Held below because the human condition disclosed is narrow, a claim about art and about the artist, and because the deceit needs the account of the making: the eye alone sees a man about to be hurt.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The elevation is real and of two kinds, met in a single moment. Upward: the arms spread like wings, the chest lifted, the face turned to the sky, a swan dive that reads as flight, the body caught at the top of its arc, where it seems neither to rise nor to fall. Downward: the paving below, hard and near, and the certainty that the next instant is injury. The two pull against each other and the picture holds them in suspension, while the quiet street and the departing cyclist turn the exaltation calm, almost comic. What holds the axis is frequency and scale: one image, one moment, small in its prints and seen mostly in reproduction, where it is striking and also familiar. It rises once, to a real height, and does not rise again.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The work builds more than it evokes. The pattern is the flight and the fall: Icarus, the leap of faith, the saint’s levitation. The particular stays wholly particular: a man in a suit, a provincial street, a garden wall, a bicycle. The archetype bears load because the picture stops at the one instant in which flight and fall are the same and leaves the viewer to supply the end. The cyclist riding away builds the second half of the old pattern, the world going about its business while a man falls from the sky, without quoting any source. The newspaper adds a modern myth, the conquest of space. Held below the gate because the myth rests on one gesture, and much of its depth is supplied by what the viewer already knows of the pattern.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance is double: photography’s document, the press photograph that proves; and the avant-garde gesture, from Dada provocation to the action painting of the 1950s, in which the act stood behind the canvas. The departure is to make the act itself the work and the photograph its only body, then to fake the photograph while presenting it as record, in a newspaper the artist printed himself. That reverses the documentary claim and anticipates by a decade the problem of performance documentation. The stake was real: Klein offered himself to ridicule and to the charge of fraud, and the trick was soon known. Held below the gate because staged and combined photographs were old, from Bayard’s drowned self-portrait of 1840 to Berlin Dada, and because Le Vide had already pressed the immaterial further.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Would a different form change what the work knows? Almost wholly. As a painting it would be one image of flight among many. As a film the jump would end, the tarpaulin or the ground would appear, and the act would become a stunt with an outcome. As a performance before witnesses it would be a man jumping onto a mat. Only the still photograph can hold the body at the top of the arc indefinitely, and only a photograph carries the claim to have been there that the montage turns against itself. The newspaper extends the knowledge: the image is news, and the news is false. The single frame is the instrument by which the leap is never completed. Held below the top because the deceit lives in the account of the making more than in the print.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Evidence over promise: sixty-six years, and the image has sustained real questions. Is it a performance, a photograph or a fiction, and what is the work if the act shown never happened? Is it sincere mysticism, self-promotion or a joke, and can it be all three? What does a document of performance owe to the event? What is its relation to Klein’s death two years later, at thirty-four, which has coloured its reading? Its meanings have shifted with the decades: a joke in 1960, a founding image of performance in the 1970s, a lesson about the faked image in the age of digital alteration. Held because return to the picture itself yields less than return to its questions: once the gesture is read, the image gives its effect again but rarely something new.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of European and American art of the early 1960s, at the turn from painting to the act and the body. Intrinsic force: a real reorganisation of the photograph’s place in art made by action, from incidental record to the work’s sole and constructed body, and a statement of the artist’s body as medium before Fluxus and performance art made it common. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Bas Jan Ader’s Fall I and Fall II (1970), films of the artist falling from a roof and riding a bicycle into a canal, answer the leap directly; the staged photography of the following decades follows. Discounted because much of the turn belongs to the decade at large, and fame as an emblem runs ahead of what it redirected.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at sixty-six years. Form: whole. The image survives exactly as published, in multiple prints and in the newspaper, and no single loss would take it; the performed act was never meant to survive except as this record, so nothing that made the work is lost. Presence: continuous and wide since 1960, in exhibition, in the histories of performance and of photography, and in reproduction without end; fame is presence and earns at most a tenth. Fabric: gelatin silver prints are stable when kept well, and the newspaper, an edition on cheap paper, is fragile, but the image depends on no one print. The figure sits in the usual band for its span, a tenth below the widest: form whole, presence continuous, and decades are not centuries.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged as command of the medium, which here is staging, photography and the darkroom together, and credited to the work, not to Klein alone. Credited: the choice of the wall, high enough to frighten and low enough to survive; the moment at the top of the arc, the body in a held, open line from fingertips to feet, the work of a trained judoka who knew how to fall; the viewpoint from the street, low enough to set the figure against the sky; the seamless joining of two negatives by hand, so that the join went unseen by most viewers; the cyclist, placed or found, set deep in the distance as counterweight. These decisions are exact and load-bearing. What holds the axis is range: one frame, one effect, and a montage that is a known darkroom operation of its time.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the leaping figure, the most charged thing in the picture, and the cyclist, the most indifferent. They obey one law, the ordinary made the ground of the extraordinary. The street, the wall, the suit, the bicycle and the plain daylight are all of one everyday register, and the leap is placed in it without a sign of theatre; even the deceit obeys the law, since the means of safety are removed to leave only the ordinary street. The law reaches the publication: a newspaper, the most ordinary of printed things, carrying the most extravagant claim. Nothing in the picture contradicts it. Held because narrowness is not coherence: the territory is one frame and one gesture, and the range between its farthest elements, though real and well governed, is small.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The orders held are few, and held in one gesture. The body and its peril. The everyday order of a suburb: house, wall, street, a man on his way somewhere. Art and the artist’s claim, in the suit and the act. The sacred, in the pattern of levitation and faith, by the gesture rather than by any sign. The world of the press and of public event, in the newspaper and its news of a man in space, in the year of the space race. These are integrated, because the one leap touches all of them at once. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, no labour, no state but by implication, no history but the date, no nature but the sky. The figure describes the form, a single photograph of a single instant.
Score: 6.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.9, then The Swerve and The Living Form at 8.2. An image that survives exactly as published, in its prints and its newspaper, with a presence continuous since 1960, the performed act never meant to survive any other way; the act made the work and the photograph its only body, then faked and published as record; and a single still frame that holds a body at the top of its arc and never lets the leap be completed.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.4: the body, a suburb, art, the sacred by gesture and the press are held in one leap, and family, labour, the state, history and nature but the sky are absent. Next above it, The Unconcealment, The Sublime and The Bottomless Well at 7.8: a disclosure about the documentary image and the artist’s body that needs the account of the making to be seen, an elevation that rises once, and a well whose questions outlast the picture’s return. They are one fact: the work is a single gesture in a single frame.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.2, The Made at 7.9, The Inner Law at 8.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 8.9 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.2 falls short by three tenths, The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition at 8.0 by five, and The Unconcealment at 7.8 by seven. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.8; The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.4. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 94.9, an average of 7.91 that displays 7.9. The work stands where its aggregate places it: in the band of Tier III, five tenths of the sum short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins, and far below the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the photomontage as printed and published: well as an image, one of the most reproduced photographs of postwar art; with confidence as to the making in outline, the two negatives, the tarpaulin, the judo colleagues and the newspaper; thinly as to dates, dimensions and holding collections, so that where a judgment turns on them it is held more loosely. The work scored is the image of 1960, joined from two negatives by Harry Shunk and János Kender, gelatin silver, with no fixed print size; no single print is the work, and the performed act is scored only as this record. Klein’s monochromes, Le Vide of 1958, the Anthropometries, Nouveau Réalisme and his claim to an earlier leap are context and are not scored. No words are quoted: the newspaper’s headline is described, not quoted, since its wording could not be checked. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the street and the town where the exposures were made, the month and day, the newspaper’s title, date, length and sale, the exact words of its headline, Klein’s rank in judo and where he trained, the dimensions of the prints, the collections that hold them, and the use of the image as a standard case in the theory of performance.