In this series of photographs, entitled Writing. Self-portrait, Kimiko Yoshida seizes the reflection of Henri Matisse, at the moment when the painter renounces the illusion of the third dimension in the painting and tries to put on the same plane the decorative motif and the subject, to confuse on the two-dimensional canvas the pattern and the figure. In doing so, Henri Matisse not only opens new ways to contemporary painting (pattern painting and repetition of the motif, all-over and colorfield, minimalism and criticism of the ornamental ...), but he also opens the way to an extension of the painting out of itself, to an opening of painting beyond the limits of painting, which then lets glimpse an infinity which exceeds what it represents.

In these compositions of Writing. Self-portrait, where there is no more hierarchical ordering of form, pattern or figure in the space of the color that constitutes the surface of the painting, Kimiko Yoshida's face tends to disappear directly into the homogeneous space of the drawing, to fade in the plane of the motive, to immaterialize itself in the abstraction of the pattern, to vanish in the flat surface of the photograph. In doing so, the artist not only pursues her reflection on the disappearance of the self and the effacement of the figure, but she also opens her art to a beyond of representation, to an immateriality which is the invisible heart of the image, the infinite and innominate heart of every image, immateriality that is at the beginning of her art and, indeed, at the beginning of all art.

To tame what is discarded in absence and subtraction, to experience the defect that remains beyond emptiness and beyond silence, to express what is lacking in the lack, to make visible in a beyond of the image and of the figure that something always lacks from the image and the figure, to verify the impossible to reach that insists in the aspiration to freedom and joy, in the aspiration to immateriality and to infinity, it is in these meanings of the gap that the art of Kimiko Yoshida finds to orienttame itself.

Afteraving experienced, in the memory of Matisse, with the motives of the arabesque and the henna patterns that drawn by the Morocan women, Kimiko Yoshida's most recent Writings take, with a marked admiration, support on the function of Silence, such as Yves Klein or John Cage promoted it.

After having experimented with the motives of the arabesque and the henna patterns that Moroccan women draw, Kimiko Yoshida takes, with a marked admiration, support on the function of Silence, such as conveyed by Yves Klein or John Cage.

 

Silence by John Cage : the pratical aspect of anarchy
Écriture (Silence de John Cage). Autoportrait, 2010

The work of art 4' 33", often described as "four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence", is the score of the most famous musical piece created by the American composer John Cage.

The score, composed in 1952, is the subject of a publication in 1960 (Edition Peters, New York). The piece, originally written for the piano, is structured in three movements, each represented in Roman numerals (I, II, III) and annotated TACET ("he keeps silence", in Latin), a term traditionally used to indicate to an instrumentalist that he must remain silent throughout the duration of a movement.

A note written by John Cage in 1960 completes the score: "The title of this work represents the total duration of its execution in minutes and seconds. At Woodstock, New York, on August 29, 1952, the title was 4' 33" and the duration of the three movements was respectively 33", 2' 40" and 1' 20". It was performed by pianist David Tudor, who signaled the beginning of each movement by closing the keyboard lid, and the end of the movement by opening the lid. [...] The work can however be performed in any instrumentalist(s) configuration and can last as long as desired." Thus, far from being frozen, the work promises to be resurrected at each execution, depending on the context and the performance hic et nunc.

As arbitrary as it may be, the duration that gives the work its title does not seem, however, pure chance.

On the one hand, four minutes and thirty-three seconds equate to 273 seconds, the standard format of popular songs produced by the record industry.

On the other hand, the number of 273 seconds is to be approximated to the (negative) number defining the absolute zero, which corresponds to zero kelvin (the unit of thermodynamic temperature) equivalent to -273 degrees Celsius: this "temperature", which is the lowest that we can ever imagine to achieve, represents in physics an extreme state of zero thermal agitation, where everything becomes immutable, any chemical reaction impossible, a fateful state where all the particles composing the matter remain inert, where molecules and atoms are motionless, where even the electrons stop gravitating around their nucleus...

Finally, it is not irrelevant to note that John Cage, the year he composes 4' 33", is in France and that, on AZERTY keyboards of the French typewriters, the key of 4 corresponds to the symbol 'and that of 3 to the symbol ".

If absolute zero is certainly a theoretical temperature that is destined to remain unattended, John Cage similarly considers that "silence does not exist", because "until death there will always be noise".

In 1982, John Cage comments in these terms the performance of 1952: "They did not seize. Silence does not exist. What they took for silence, because they do not know how to listen, was filled with random noises. A light wind was heard outside during the first movement [33'']. During the second [2' 40''], raindrops began to dance on the roof, and during the third [1' 20''], it was the people themselves who produced all kinds of sounds interesting when talking or leaving. People started talking in a low voice, and some started to leave. They were not laughing - they got angry when they realized that nothing was going to happen. And they have not forgotten: thirty years later, they are still angry."

Returning to the conditions of creation of this pivotal work, John Cage states: "I think that the best I have written, at least what I prefer, is this silent piece. He has three movements and in all these movements there is no sound. I wanted a work liberated from the I like/I don’t like, because I think music should be independent of the composer’s tastes and ideas. I’ve always felt and I hope I’ve made others feel that the sounds around us make music more interesting than they would hear if they went to the concert." So it is a war of taste that is engaged.

"My most important work is my silent piece. [...] I had already thought about it in 1948. [...] I was then under the influence of my first contacts with Eastern philosophy. That's where my interest in silence naturally came from: it's almost transparent, actually. [...] Tranquility is the center and frées me from the I like/I don’t like. Needless to say that the absence of activity is also typically Buddhist. [...] The wonderful thing is that if the activity stops, you immediately see that the rest of the world hasn’t stopped. Activity is everywhere. [...] So the mind is the only difference between activity and inactivity - the spirit free of desire, Joyce would agree here: the mind free from desire and hate." Where we see that the decision in the act of creating and its reverse, the meditation and non-action of Zen Buddhism, that the subversion of tastes and colors dominating the time, that the war against chatter and social gesticulations, do not go without the search for a symbolic support, a possible alliance to succeed in thinking the impossible to think.

For the composer, inspirer of the Fluxus movement, the recognition of a possible alliance, the moment to conclude, the symbolic trigger will have been, it is not indifferent to emphasize it, the white monochromes that Rauschenberg made in 1951: "I feared that by composing a piece that contains no sound, I would give the impression of making a joke, you see. In fact, I worked longer at my silent piece than at any other. I worked there for four years [1948-1952]. In fact, what pushed me is the example of Robert Rauschenberg. His White Paintings, when I saw them, I said to myself : 'Yes, I have to do it! Otherwise, I'm outdone. Otherwise, the music will be outdone.' "

It must be admitted that, far from responding to an aspiration to casualness or to flippancy, the creation of Silence aims at a crucial significance - it tries among other things to "demonstrate the practical aspect of anarchy" in relying on the "freedom granted to the performer": "With a musician like David Tudor [in 1952, in Woodstock], it gave results that were extraordinarily beautiful. When you give that freedom to people who don’t have discipline and who don’t start at point zero  (by point zero, I mean the absence of the I like/I don’t like) [...] there, naturally, the granting of this freedom does not present the slightest interest. But when you give it to disciplined people, then you see - as we have seen, I believe, in performances with [...] Marcel Duchamp and Teeny Duchamp and I in Toronto - in that case [...] you demonstrate, as I wanted to do, the practical aspect of anarchy."

 

Silence by Yves Klein : the actual presence of the immaterial
Écriture (Silence de Yves Klein). Autoportrait, 2010

Symphonie monoton-Silence : a symphony composed of the tension of a single note (the D, spread over several octaves) or of a single continuous chord (D F-sharp A, spread over several octaves favoring the bass) introducing an "absolute" silence of a duration equal to that of sound. The performance is of variable duration, but originally the symphony conceived by Yves Klein lasts forty minutes (in fact, twenty minutes of sound followed by twenty minutes of silence). The artist has joined the competence of various musicians (Louis Saguer, Pierre Henry) for the writing of the piece, of which there are consequently several partitions (the Kimiko Yoshida’s self-portrait borrows here a detail for voice - soprano, viola, tenor, baritone – from Symphony monoton-Silence 1947-1961). On the sidelines of the 1949-1961 score, Yves Klein notes these indications: "Duration: 5 to 7 minutes plus the absolute 'silence' when the sound stops. No one must move in the orchestra. Very lively interpretation - very tense - continuous. No attack should be perceptible. You must not feel the bows. Divide the chorus into two groups that alternately follow one another. For orchestra - 20 singers, 10 violins, 10 cellos, 3 double basses, 3 flutes, 3 oboes, 3 horns."

Conductor Philippe Arrii-Blachette, who collaborated with Yves Klein, provides the following details: "The Symphonie monoton-Silence by the painter Yves Klein is dated 1947-1961, as there are several versions of different duration. The score accompanied Klein's public pictorial performances in which he used living brushes to compose his Anthropométries with his famous IKB (International Klein Blue). The score is at the same time quite simple to realize on the technical level and at the same time difficult on the musical level, if one wants to obtain from the only sound which this symphony comprises an equality, a tension, an absolute correctness, inseparable from the effect it must produce. In fact, what Klein was interested in was the silence he wanted to be striking after the symphony."

The Symphonie monoton-Silence was conceived in 1947. Yves Klein was then nineteen years old and, in fact, he had not yet begun his work (his artist's life began in 1955, date of the very first exhibition of his monochrome paintings). At that time, in 1947, Yves Klein is far from having yet elaborated the major meanings of his art, which are the following:

- the monochrome (the overcoming of abstraction, the overcoming the painting itself: "My paintings are only the ashes of my art") ;

- the void (as opposed to nothingness, as the overcoming of the negative: "I did not like the nothingness"; "To have rejected the nothingness, I had discovered the void"; "the absolute void which is quite naturally the true pictorial space ");

- the immaterial (the sensibility, the overtaking of the visible, the overtaking of the retinal: "The painting no longer seemed to me to have to be functionally connected to the gaze"; "The authentic quality of the painting, its very being, is beyond the visible, in the pictorial sensibility to the raw material state");

- the overcoming of the problems of art ("Painting is a function of the only thing that does not belong to us: life"; "I want to live constantly in the immense joy of being life itself, life eternal" ; "life, Life itself, which is the absolute art" ; "A painter must paint a unique masterpiece: himself, constantly" ; "The fact that I 'exists' as a painter will be the most formidable pictorial work of this time"...).

In a text entitled precisely Overcoming the problem of art (1959), Yves Klein evokes these years of mental elaboration, "this period of condensation", where is born his project of artist - to be the non-being, to make exist "what does not exist while being there", to make come true the meaning of the life as it is lived: "During this period of condensation, I create around 1947-1948 a Monoton Symphony whose theme is what I wanted to be my life. This 40-minute symphony consists of a single, continuous 'sound', stretched, deprived of its attack and its end, which creates a sensation of vertigo, of aspiration of sensibility out of time. This symphony does not exist while being there, emerging from the phenomenology of time, because it is never born nor dead, after existence, however, in the world of our possibilities of conscious perception: it is audible silence-presence. "

Concerning that overcoming the art, Yves Klein keeps on coming back with a number of variations: "Now, I want to go beyond art, to go beyond sensibility, to go beyond life, to join the void. My life must be like my Symphony of 1949, a continuous sound released from a beginning and an end, limited and eternal at the same time, having neither beginning nor end. A duration appears and lives suddenly, for a certain time, who lives eternally in our senses and in the physical body [...]. I want to die and I want people to say about me: he lived, so he lives" (Paintings and Sculptures od 1961). Resurrection and eternal life ...

During his lecture at the Sorbonne (The Evolution of Art to the Immaterial, 1959), Yves Klein published an excerpt from his Symphonie monoton-Silence, which he presented as "a kind of strange sound phenomenon aspiring to sensibility", emphasizing that the duration of forty minutes shows" the desire to overcome time. [...] having no beginning or end, even imperceptible, this symphony came out of the phenomenology of time, became external to the past, the present, the future, since it was never born or died in short, after existence however in physical sound reality".

Until his brutal death in 1962, the performance of the Symphonie monoton-Silence accompanies the great events of the artist's life: during some vernissages, during the dazzling ceremony of his wedding in full uniform of the very catholic brotherhood of the Knights of San Sebastián, in 1962 (on this occasion, Pierre Henry offers Yves Klein the score of a Symphony monoton No. 2), and of course during the famous public performance of March 9, 1960, at the International Gallery of Contemporary Art directed by the distinguished Count Maurice d'Arquian, where the artist, in white gloves and tuxedo, conducts in front of a hundred guests in evening attire a chamber orchestra and three models naked, the body coated with blue paint, which thus turn into "living brushes" and perform, on the instructions of the painter, a series of Anthropometries, while the single note, tense, continuous, resounds which continues with a brillant, absolute silence, in an atmosphere of enchanted happening. Theatrical ceremonial, sensible emotion, light fevers, unusual grace.

In the Manifesto of the Chelsea Hotel (1961), the artist himself gives a retrospective summary of his own work, arguing the "multiplicity of new possibilities" he opens in the field of art: "Whereas I have painted monochromes [...], Whereas I have created states of immaterial painting, Whereas I have manipulated the forces of emptiness, Whereas I have carved fire and water and that, form fire and water, I have drawn paintings, Whereas I used living brushes to paint [...], Whereas I invented the architecture and urbanism of the air [...], Whereas I proposed a new conception of the music with my Symphonie monoton, Whereas, among other adventures without number, I collected the precipitate of a Theater of the Void ... "

This Theater of the Void is a radical manifesto that the artist publishes in Sunday. Diary of a single day, frontal diversion of the Journal du Dimanche (same format, same typography), where the artist undertakes, in all simplicity, to appropriate as his own work the activity of the planet Earth during the entire duration of this Sunday, November 27, 1960. It is in this "Journal" that is presented a work that has become so emblematic of Yves Klein's aspiration to lévitation : the photograph of the famous Leap into the Void, published on three columns on the front page. With the Theater of the Void, the artist renews the presuppositions and the very meaning of any theatrical representation, abolishes the spectator's function, overcomes the opposition actor/spectator and invents in short a non-spectacle without stage or spectator, a theater without author or director, a non-performance without actor or spectator. A theater identified with life itself: "For me, 'theater' is not at all synonymous with 'Performance' or 'Show'. [...] Thus, very quickly, one arrives at the theater without actor, without scenery, without stage, without spectator... nothing more than the creator alone which is seen by nobody, except the presence of nobody and the theater-non-spectacle begins! The author lives his creation: he is his public, and his triumph or his disaster, and yet everything continues ... To live a constant manifestation, to know the permanence of being: to be there, everywhere, elsewhere, inside as outside [...]. The future of theater: it's an empty room; it's no longer a room at all! "

Sunday includes many texts and manifestos, among which a Project of ballet on fugue aspect and chorale, where "a monoton and tense sound, being heard at the beginning and at the end of the ballet, sustains itself without discontinuity during the fugue and the chorale. We also find in Sunday the publication of a "small personal mythology of monochrome adaptable in film or ballet", entitled The War, where the artist’s aim is summed up in a brief statement, where the silence, again, seizes the infinite and immaterial to signify the future: "In the end, the true painter of the future, it will be a silent poet who will not write anything but who will tell, without articulating, in silence, a immense and limitless picture."

Silence thus arises as that power called at the same time to "conquer the time" and, by opening to an unfinished immensity, to embody in a sensible way the immaterial. It is this same line of force that structures the Manifesto of the Hotel Chelsea (1961): "A sudden inspiration made me write one evening: 'Wouldn’t the future artist be the one who, through silence, but eternally, would express an immense painting that would lack any notion of dimension?'  [...] In the same way that I created a Symphonie monoton in 1947, composed of two parts - a huge continuous sound followed by a silence so huge and extended, provided with an unlimited dimension -, I will try today to scroll before you a written picture of what is the short history of my art, which will be followed naturally, at the end of my talk, of a pure emotional silence. My presentation will end with the creation of an irresistible silence a posteriori, whose existence in our common space [...] is immune to the destructive qualities of physical noise. This  depends a lot on the success of my painting written in its initial technical and audible phase. It is only then that the extraordinary silence a posteriori, in the middle of the noise as well as in the cell of the physical silence, will engender a new and unique zone of pictorial sensibility of the immaterial."

Jean-Michel Ribettes