A Field Guide to Getting Lost (16 page)

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 trees 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.

Klein had been obsessed with flying for much of his life. Says Rotraut, his widow, “He was sure he could fly. He used to tell me that at one time monks knew how to levitate, and that he would get there too. It was an obsession. Like a little child he really was convinced that he could do it.” Flying meant literally entering the sky he had claimed, meant vanishing, an obsession of his equal to his preoccupation with levitation, according to one close friend, and it meant entering the void. The leap into the void is sometimes read as a Buddhist phrase about enlightenment, about embracing the emptiness that is not lack as it seems to westerners, but letting go of the finite and material, embracing limitlessness, transcendence, freedom, enlightenment. “Come with me into the void!” wrote Klein, “You who like me, dream / Of that wonderful void / That absolute love. . . .”

A photograph is evidence, but this photograph of Klein’s leap is evidence of something more complicated than a man beginning to fly, and the accounts vary wildly. The photograph is only the trace or souvenir of the work of art, which is the leap itself. Taken on October 19, 1960, it is one of the first of a new kind of photograph to become important in that decade, the photograph as document of an artwork that was too remote, too ephemeral, too personal to be seen otherwise, an artwork that could not be exhibited and would otherwise be lost, so the photograph stands in for it. Artists showed documentation of bodily acts, ephemeral gestures, manipulations of remote landscapes, so that the photograph wasn’t there primarily as a work of art or aesthetic experience but a souvenir of the unseen, the past, the elsewhere, a tool for the imagination.

The photograph is a montage: Klein the judo master did indeed leap, but there was a tarpaulin held by ten judo practitioners below; so the photograph splices together Klein above and the street below without the tarp and colleagues. But McEvilley tells it another way. In his account, taken from those close to Klein, including those who witnessed the multiple leaps, there was a true leap into the void that January, but the principal witnesses were absent and there was no evidence. Bernadette Allain, the woman with whom he lived before Rotraut, witnessed the initial leap and recalls, “For a judoka who knew how to fall, it was not extraordinary. . . . It would be expected of someone at his level of training to know how to recover and fall. He did it as a challenge or act of defiance, to prove that he was capable of leaping into the void—that is not leaping out of a window, but leaping toward the sky. . . . He had nothing underneath him but the pavement—nothing!” The site of that leap was the gallerist Colette Allendy’s house on Rue de l’Assomption, the street of the Asvi sumption, which in Catholic France can mean nothing other than the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven, particularly since this quiet street in the Sixteenth Arrondissement is only a few blocks from the Rue de l’Annonciation, the street of the Annunciation (off which I lived in a maid’s room for several months when I was seventeen, I realize, looking at an old Paris map bemused to think that I must have passed the site of the leap many times without knowing it, that each of our lives traces its own map onto the shared terrain).

After the January leap, he went to visit a pilot friend of his who would indeed disappear for good into the void, in his airplane in the Himalayas; this was the last time Klein was to see him. One trace of the leap was Klein’s limp from “a twisted ankle” for some time afterward. He found that few believed he had made the leap, and so he performed again for the cameras that October at another site. This was the time he leapt with a tarp, twice, for the cameras. Rotraut had persuaded him not to make another leap with nothing beneath him but the pavement. The official photograph shows him traveling upward with composure. Another one shows him blurrily facing downward and thrashing a bit, not like a man falling but perhaps like a cat falling. But in the public photograph, he soars upward forever, truly flying for the moment the camera preserved.

What else is there to tell of Yves Klein? The year after the three leaps he went to the United States where he met with a cold reception in New York and a warm one in Los Angeles, whose art scene was just beginning to burst into bloom. There he was eager to visit Death Valley, and a young artist and curator drove him out deep into the desert, though not all the way there, and somehow this journey to the far west from which his Rosicrucian lessons had come seemed to complete the journey begun with his journey to the far east to study judo. Afterward his mind turned more and more to death, which he had always associated with flying and disappearing. Back in Paris he began his planetary reliefs, the blue-painted relief maps, he married Rotraut, who was pregnant, and his heart, taxed by amphetamines, began to fail. He died in June of 1962, thirty-four years old, a few months before his son, also Yves Klein, was born. Though he was tragically young, his life looks like a meteor, a shooting star, a complete trajectory across the sky, a finished work of art.

Movies are made out of darkness as well as light; it is the surpassingly brief intervals of darkness between each luminous still image that make it possible to assemble the many images into one moving picture. Without that darkness, there would only be a blur. Which is to say that a full-length movie consists of half an hour or an hour of pure darkness that goes unseen. If you could add up all the darkness, you would find the audience in the theater gazing together at a deep imaginative night. It is the terra incognita of film, the dark continent on every map. In a similar way, a runner’s every step is a leap, so that for a moment he or she is entirely off the ground. For those brief instants, shadows no longer spill out from their feet, like leaks, but hover below them like doubles, as they do with birds, whose shadows crawl below them, caressing the surface of the earth, growing and shrinking as their makers move nearer or farther from that surface. For my friends who run long distances, these tiny fragments of levitation add up to something considerable; by their own power they hover above the earth for many minutes, perhaps some significant portion of an hour or perhaps far more for the hundred-mile races. We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.