I Love Art (Garfunkel)

Summer is in the air in old London town. Away (thank goodness) go those ridiculous furry boots, and out come the halter tops. Thankfully, the ratios of evil golf shirts to male suffers of the dreaded Dunlop's disease seem to be lower here than in other places that Old Ken has lived. But, whether we take one good sniff in the Tube or just count the tube tops on the Strand, the signs of approaching summer are ripe for the picking!

As if to embrace this buoyant, breezy moment, the Barbican Gallery has staged a show called "Colour After Klein." Now, don't get Old Ken wrong here; I think Yves Klein's work is pretty interesting (an example of which can be seen photographed above). Not only was he a Rosicrucian (!), but he patented a color (International Klein Blue or IKB) and did these completely bizarre (and probably deeply objectifying/misogynist) performance pieces in the 1960s where he would have naked women cover themselves with his patented pigment and, ah, smear themselves on massive canvases. All the while, a symphony would be sawing away in the background. Oh, Art!



Nonetheless, the organizing principle of this show at the Barbican seems to be: art comes in different colours. Privileging the sensual over the theoretical is probably a good idea at times; but the curators of this show seem to have gone for this approach whole hog. Consider the sweet, sweet anti-intellectualism of the following statement from the gallery guide: "'Colour After Klein' isn't about colour rules or theories. Instead it takes pleasure in the rapport between the aesthetic and the conceptual, and the emotive responses colour arouses." To which the O.K. says: thank you, Genius-head!

This is not to say that there aren't some lovely, vertiginous moments to be had staring into Klein's bizarre canvases. But, for all of its talk of color, the Old Ken was more struck by the smells involved in this art than anything else. The piece by James Lee Byars, which you see photographed above, had been constructed with real roses, which were beginning to rot. Not only did this give off quite a stench, but it was literally attracting flies. (I did alert a guard to the fact that there was a fly on the art, but he seemed unconcerned. Could I blame him? He was reading about Wayne Rooney in Metro). Further, several of the galleries on the second level of the exhibition space had recently been fitted with new carpet, which emitted a positively revolting smell. So, did this assertiveness of color produce something like a synaesthetic effect, heightening awareness to some kind of sympathetic resonances between the five senses? Computer says no. Rather, as all of this potentially interesting art had been sufficiently decontextualized such that the only salient link between the pieces seemed to be presence of color, I felt like I was desperately looking for other angles to dislodge this tedious triviality.



It was only when I reached the final gallery and saw the amazing work you see above (by an artists whose name I was unfortunately not able to get) that I made some inroads. As you can see, this collage has as much to tell us about the use of color in the later twentieth century as "The Wizard of Oz" might have done in the first half. Indeed, I think the invocation of the Wizard is not entirely inappropriate here. For, clearly, we have a Dorothy-type figure who has magically been transported away from her drab, monotonous Kansas into a kaleidoscopic Munchkinland where dreams really do come true. Could there possibly be any higher dream than this? Thank you, Art.