Klein, Jarman, and Bennett’s Angelic Conversation: Thinking About the Place of Art in Crisis

“IKB 3, Monochrome bleu" by Yves Klein (Photo: Kenneth Lu, CC BY-NC 2.0, via Flickr)

In my article, ‘Dreaming Angelic Conversations’, I discussed an imagined ‘angelic conversation’ between queer British filmmaker Derek Jarman and the controversial French painter Yves Klein, two artists who shared a singular motif: the colour blue. This article is a continuation, offering another perspective on Yves Klein and discussing the ethics of art in the face of existential crisis through the work of Gordon Bennett, an Australian artist who appropriated Klein’s artwork in his critiques of colonialism and Aboriginal genocide in his native country.

Gordon Bennett was an artist of intertexts. Art-world giants like Jackson Pollock and Jean-Michel Basquiat encountered pop culture idols like Ice-T in his eclectic works, all of which revolved around burning issues of race and genocide in Bennett’s native Australia. I would insert a quote from the artist here to articulate this mission with his own words, but he rarely did interviews, preferring his paintings, poppy as they were poignant, to speak for themselves. These were his little ‘Culture Bags’ (to borrow the name of one of his painting series), that classic twentieth-century synthesis of high- and low-brow that Bennett weaponised to bring Australia’s dirty secrets and history into blinding light.

Bennett’s intertexts weren’t always in positive appraisal, however. His complex, referential works frequently attacked Western artists whose paintings he considered vapid and overly-ephemeral, such as his 1992 Myth of a Western Man (White Man’s Burden) that parodied Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles (1952) in protest of the National Gallery of Australia’s acquisition of the work. This made Yves Klein, as king of the ephemeral, a natural wellspring of negative inspiration for Bennett, who dragged the French icon into not-so-angelic conversation with his 1992 ‘How to Cross the Void’ sketches. The intertexts with Klein are obvious from the title alone, but in Bennett’s sketches the Kleinian void becomes something shameful rather than the opportunity for shelter and solace away from the realities of the world that Jarman saw, a blue stain more than a blue sanctuary. In the series’s titular ‘How to Cross the Void’ sketch, for example, an Aboriginal body is hung from its neck above a black square labelled ‘The Void’. His message was simple: oppressed populations who must actively fight for their right to live don’t have time for Klein’s wistful fantasies, his ‘Blue Retreat[s]’, as another sketch calls them. This attack on Western signification is reminiscent perhaps of French writer Aimé Césaire’s campaign against the canonical image of the dove in his collaborations with Cuban artist Wilfred Lam, the universal symbol of love and peace being reimagined as a gruesome bird of prey to comment on the violence almost inherent to Western conceptions of peace in the context of ongoing colonialism and conquest. Bennett, like Césaire, re-canonised Western emblems of peace and solace to highlight the privileged, exploitative, and colonial dimensions that exist in the semiotic economies of the White world. We need to always be aware of the politics of art and image, they instruct, and all art, in turn, needs to be consciously political.

Derek Jarman’s angelic conversation with Klein seemed to breed the opposite conclusion. Which isn’t to say that Jarman’s art wasn’t consciously political, see the end-of-life ‘Evil Queen’ painting series to appreciate Jarman’s powerful synthesis of art and politics at its most Jarman-esque. However, he offers a thoughtful riposte to the perspective of Bennett, whose work insisted that all art must constantly demand political change, most powerfully eloquated in Bennett’s sketch rejections of Klein and Malevich’s abstract worlds. For Jarman, there was a certain expediency in allowing the self moments to escape, especially at the end of a lifetime ravaged by the homophobia of the British government and the worst consequences of its HIV apathy. So, he took a certain comfort in the ability to retreat into Klein’s ultramarine, to momentarily escape both the physical and psychological tortures of his illness by dissolving into Klein’s IKB and its “matter in spirit,” as he writes in Modern Nature.

Bennett was never averse to this potential latent in such artwork, but remained hesitant when facing the total abstraction into which the works of Pollock and Klein often teetered: ‘my intention,’ Bennett confessed, ‘was to imbue such commendable spiritual aspiration with a little physical realism.’ And so Bennett’s works were often resplendent with words that insisted on immediate, legible meaning. On Myth of a Western Man he scattered various dates, the majority of which refer to massacres and injustices committed against Aboriginal Australians by White colonisers. Or sometimes his artwork was his words, the 1995 performance art piece Performance With Object of the Aviation of Guilt seeing Bennett hurl racist abuse at a scarified black box, whip in hand. Bennett demanded political expediency in artwork and that art sought change for those who most need it. Please, he begged, just a little physical realism.

And so where does that leave us today? Faced with an existential crisis like no other – that of impending climate catastrophe – it is perhaps worth reflecting on what use art can have for us, where art fits into the Anthropocene era. Because, as activists will remind us, ‘There’s No Art on a Dead Planet.’ Jarman’s desire for fleeting escape against the pains of his day offers a vital, if only small, lesson in self-care and recentring beauty and self-reflection in our lives at a time when everything else feels so immense. But Bennett, in arms with Césaire, reminds us that we cannot let ourselves simply be swallowed into these static voids of the self. I’m here reminded of the ending to Césaire epic poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939), in which the narrator realises that the struggle against colonialism is a collective one and calls on the people of the world to ‘monte / monte / monte.’ Change will require unity, movement, and action, and it is through art that we can be reminded of the unity of this struggle. As Iris Murdoch writes in her greatly underappreciated The Sovereignty of Good, ‘the self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself… to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.’ And, as Maria Popova continues, it is through art that we do this, through art that we are reminded of the beauty of the world and find the unself, realise that we are all joined together in something more.

I think this is the conclusion that Jarman comes to in his angelic conversation with Klein too, even if Klein resisted this philosophy, Jarman’s Blue being a call to action as much as it was a call to escape. ‘I place a delphinium, blue, on your grave,’ the final words of the film. This is Jarman’s harsh return to reality from the void, a return to action and radical transgression in mourning those that society doesn’t want us to mourn. It is an act of unselfing, too, of remembering those who have died before us to move forward and bring them with us. Facing climate crisis, maybe this simple delphinium crystallises as a perfect symbol, one of loss transformed into action, of the self moving toward the other, and of the fruits of the earth becoming our objects of resistance.