A Field Guide to Getting Lost (15 page)

His two great influences arrived in his life the year he turned nineteen. One was the
Cosmogonie,
the bible of the Rosicrucian Order, by Max Heindel, which he read again and again over the next decade. For the next three or four years, Klein received weekly lessons by mail from the Rosicrucian Society in Oceanside, California. In the chaos of war and their own itinerant lives, his parents had allowed him to slip out of school at an early age, and his fascination with this one book seems to have in it something of the insularity of the underexposed who can be struck so forcefully by one source, one version. A mystical Christian sect with medieval roots, Rosicrucianism depicted the world in utopian and alchemical terms. Form and matter were, in Heindel’s view, limitations and obstacles to the freedom and the unity of pure spirit, and Klein would make an art that embodied formlessness and the immaterial. That first year of Rosicrucian study, in which he was joined by his friends Claude Pascal and Armand Fernandez (who would become well-known as the artist Arman), the young men attempted to establish an ascetic life for themselves, meditating, fasting, turning vegetarian, though they also listened to jazz, jitterbugged (one picture shows a baby-faced Klein swinging a girl above his shoulders), and occasionally violated their vows of chastity. One day they divided the world between them: in one account, Arman was to have animals, Pascal the realm of plants, and Klein claimed the sky. In imagination he had traveled to the far side of the sky, “the side with no birds, no planes, no clouds, only pure and irreducible Space,” the art critic Thomas McEvilley writes, and signed it. His ambition too was boundless.

The other great influence was judo, in which he began to train in the same year. He had a talent for it, and the way Asian martial arts imparted both mystical discipline and warriors’ powers suited him. Perhaps too something about the way judo teaches its practitioners to fly through the air and land without harm and to transport others thus enchanted him. For some years, he conceived of judo as the arena in which he would become supreme, and he dreamed of riding a horse across Asia to Japan to study the art. As it turned out, though he spent three months in Ireland learning to work with and ride horses, he took a ship—paid for by his aunt—for Japan. Funded by Aunt Rose, he spent fifteen months there, and though he had begun to make small monochrome paintings and exhibited his own work as well as that of his parents, he focused more and more on judo. He wanted to become a fourth
dan
black belt, a level of mastery few in Europe had then achieved, win the European championship, and dominate the French judo federation. He worked intensely, enhancing his energy with the amphetamines that were still legal in Japan and France, and the drug seems to have become part of who he would be for the rest of his life: restless, energetic, insomniac, prolific, unpredictable, and grandiose. Through talent, enormous effort, and a little manipulation, he succeeded in being given the title of fourth
dan
black belt and took a boat back to France, but there his ambitions did not bear the fruit he imagined (and this is the last sense of lost: losing a competition, as in the Giants lost the Series). And thus began his artistic career.

This career, however, he began at a sort of pinnacle. The work he made required little technical skill but a brilliant grasp of ideas and of the art world, and these he had already. The Rosicrucians taught a doctrine of color, and Klein adapted this idea of pure realms of color and color as a spiritual realm to begin his monochromes. Though he initially painted canvases orange as well as blue and eventually settled on a trinity of gold leaf, a rich pink, and intense blue, it was the blue that was to preoccupy and define him, the blue of the great majority of his painterly works. Blue the color that represents the spirit, the sky, and water, the immaterial and the remote, so that however tactile and close-up it is, it is always about distance and disembodiment. By 1957, he was using only this color, a pure ultramarine pigment mixed with a synthetic resin that would not, like most painterly mediums, dilute it’s deep, vibrant intensity.

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.)