The Leap

I'm really not crazy about the name of the exhibit, Faking It: The Art of Photo Manipulation Before Photoshop – it seems surprisingly simplistic for the Met. Also, “Faking It” reminds me of faking IT, you know, faking an orgasm, which I really, really don’t want to experience or learn more about. The exhibit, though, is provocative. There’s this one photo, Yves Klein’s “Leap Into the Void,” that stayed with me.

The photo shows the artist soaring over an empty street with a subtle expression of bliss on his face. Down below, a bicyclist rides by, unaware of the miracle overhead, while at the end of the street a train passes by. 

Part of it was a gag. The photo ran in a newspaper called Dimanche, a fake newspaper – sort of an artsy precursor to The Onion – that was designed to mimic the regular Sunday paper and included texts and visual works by Klein. One theory about this photo, taken in 1960, is that it was protesting the space race that was beginning to heat up. If that’s true, I guess the message was, ‘Leaping into nothing, we are bound to hurt ourselves.’ This seems plausible and maybe that was part of it, but I don’t think that it was Klein’s entire intention.

Mr. Klein had to be thinking about all the new possibilities in this medium. At the time, artists were experimenting with photomontage, multiple exposures, composite portraiture, hand coloring and retouching, all kinds of things, and no doubt Yves Klein wanted to tinker and play, too. Clearly, the caption supports that this was not so much about rocket travel, but about art – “The painter of space hurls himself into the void!” So, was he demonstrating the presence of absence? Was he saying that art is immaterial? Or absurd? Was he simply claiming that we’re now entering a new dimension? I think he was saying all those things. I think he was being provocative, forcing us to not only question whether something was real but to not care whether it was real or not – ‘Accept it on its own terms,’ he seems to say. And it's both silly and profound.

It’s also about the act of making art, our inner space, our imagination. The bicyclist rides by, the train passes by with the rest of the world, and meanwhile who knows what leaps the artist is taking inside his or her head.

In other words, Klein’s goal wasn’t to fake something. Poking and prodding us from different angles, he got us to think about some very real things. We forget about the technique. We don't feel deceived. And we feel stimulated.