Air Architecture

Yves Klein dreamt of a return to Eden for a decade before working with architects Werner Ruhnau and Claude Parent to give it visual expression in the late 1950's: sketches of a climate controlled desert where liberated, naked people lounge on airbeds. No buildings, no walls, just machines underground to harness air, fire, and other immaterial elements for an unenclosed paradise. The exhibition of Air Architecture, curated by designer François Perrin, is intended more as a reactivation of Klein's ideas than as an archive: an installation of computerized climate-controlling devices inside and outside the 1922 Schindler House attempts a dialogue with original sketches, films, and objects from Klein's collaborations. But another, more interesting dialogue is the one between this and two other recent retrospectives in Los Angeles – Superstudio: Life Without Objects and Ant Farm: 1968-1978 each recalling a hope that art and design can change society.

Although it might seem like a distant memory, particularly for those of us in the United States, there was a lot of talk in the 1990's about the democratic potential (or even promise) of technology. The internet spelled with a capital 'I' back then would bridge distances and cultures to free information, enable communication, and transform the world into a global village. Work became play, some people made a lot of money fast, and lots more became artists taking digital photos, programming animations, and writing nonlinear texts. It's hard not to see Air Architecture in a similar context after all, didn't much of the utopian language of 90's internet culture draw heavily from the 60's ecological principles of John McHale and Buckminster Fuller. For McHale, bodies were interconnected through technological »prosthetics« like radios, televisions, and telephones, such that the world itself was a house for the »whole human family«.

In Klein's project, there were no houses to divide people into families. Underground machinery and immaterial elements produced a flat, open transparency. There was no architecture in the conventional sense. Even the ground is made from glass. Whereas, for Alberti, city walls »were... particularly sacred, because they served both to unite and protect the citizens,« for Klein, an obstructionless Air Architecture would finally destroy »the psychological family environment«. Everybody, under one (air) roof!

No one would disagree that this is some radical architecture: it has manifestos, nudity, and jets of fire. However, if one looks at Claude Parent's wonderful drawings for just long enough, this radical world turns sterile and disturbing, like a New Age shopping mall (or airport, or nature-themed amusement park). Of course it's forty years of space between then and now that gives us the luxury of making such a comparison, a forty years in which the spirit of many of Klein's proposals have been coopted by the comfort industry (ultimately making the drawings seems less utopian than visionary). But those forty years are there; now, it's hard to look at the drawings of people-at-leisure without seeing self-indulgent hippies. Expressing one's individuality is fine but, in Klein's vision, individuality seems to mean kicking back at a bourgeois beach resort.

»Express yourself!« has become a marketing slogan. There are more channels than ever. You can customize just about any mass-produced product. The concept of individuality just doesn't seem to have the same progressive impact it used to. Perhaps this isn't a problem with the concept itself, so much as the infrastructure required to sustain its illusion. Who buffs the airport floors? Who actually builds these shopping malls? Who delivers the products to them? For Klein, all of the machinery is pushed below ground. One assumes, this being Utopia, that the machines run autonomously, without interruption. And if they didn't? Well, the glass floor becomes a glass ceiling.

So why this exhibition, and why now? Technocrats continue to reanimate the »global village« rhetoric of the 1960's. The media (literally, just today) evoke the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests to explain the coming Republican National Convention. The Situationists are more popular than ever. Something is, as they say, in the air.
To be honest, the particulars of Yves Klein's project aren't that interesting. Yes, the drawings look inspiringly strange and the writing is poetic; but, perhaps the most interesting part of it all is the spirit of collaboration which gave form to these ideas. Recently, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was drafted to legislate limits to sharing, speech, and experimentation. Nevertheless, the proliferation of the internet coincided with and enabled a phenomenon of renewed collaboration among artists, architects, and activists. Implicit in each of these fluid networks that cross disciplinary boundaries is the possibility that a project can be more than just art or just architecture, but instead an imaginative leap into a new world.

Ausstellung:
12.5.2004 - 29.8.2004
MAK Center, Los Angeles
Katalog:
Peter Noever und Francois Perrin (Hg.)
Yves Klein - Air Architecture
Mit Beiträgen von Julie Carson, Yves
Klein, Sylvere Lotringer, Mark Wigley und
Nicolas Bourriaud, englisch
Hatje Cantz Verlag: Ostfildern-Ruit, 2004
144 S. EUR 24,80.

Fiona Whitton

Sean Dockray