Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers:
Four Years Later Still Informing My Art Four Parts in Four Years
By Vicki Milewski
But tonight
I am alone.
How can I describe it?
1 year, 2 year, 20
who is counting?
Who is dreaming me in this sculpture park?
Are the trees, bells or clouds? Maybe the neon blue tinged snow as it struggles to
infiltrate my toes as another substance.
I cross white lines to the angular, ill shaped beauty that holds my breath until I come.
I enter finally inhaling air that is mine.
Men look me up and down and up to smile.
Part One
After tracing stars in the still wild western skies
I stand alone
at the parking pay box
finding my only fee is
to unclench my fists, release the air,
inspect my life’s circumference to find my love hiding there
inside where my manifest destiny crumbles producing
a guilt free life
imbedded in ample resources found stolen.
The Basilica speaks of the crime: 5pm, red dressed, earth booted, fox fur enclosed; I tread on a snow path lightly under a steel blue sky holding tumbling, huge, white clouds catching the Basilica’s dome in their dance.
The West is breathing on me again, pushing on me from the side, suggesting positions to lie in as we both wait wildly to breathe again.
The West is breathing on me again, pushing on me from the side, suggesting positions to lie in as we both wait wildly to breathe again.
But tonight
I am alone.
How can I describe it?
1 year, 2 year, 20
who is counting?
Who is dreaming me in this sculpture park?
Are the trees, bells or clouds? Maybe the neon blue tinged snow as it struggles to
infiltrate my toes as another substance.
I cross white lines to the angular, ill shaped beauty that holds my breath until I come.
I enter finally inhaling air that is mine.
Men look me up and down and up to smile.
No wonder I am alone
since I look at paintings instead; not wanting to remember the past, present or indecent intimacies shared
with the West like
being clothed by clean rivers and kind suns,
a truth too inconvenient for now. But soon our virtually naked doppelgangers will
expose more skin than we.
I hold conversations with blue sponges on wires stuck in rocks or concrete or granite or gone.
The sponges return the piece of my heart they
stole last time I visited; it has blue stains like veins pumping in air and pumping out my life as I open my coat to
reattach this changed piece of heart. They consult with me about my new collection: Where Our Food Comes From—they want thicker blue lines and more time to
think about the man who inspired it all.
But our time is mythological and they are leaving for boxes or stages or worse and I may have a similar fate.
Spiriting through galleries, men’s eyes and minds claim gravity as mine making loneliness grasp at my hands more tightly.
So I hide in the conservatory, inhaling white flower blooms and life until sufficiently high.
The blooms’ fragrance
spins my
face forward, toward my own story, unwritten yet written, a fictional account of my real life since talking with
sponges or trees,
bells or clouds
might be misunderstood
in non-fiction.
The bells disclose the Basilica’s crime: 6pm
meaning I have spent the last hour inside, inside like a thief art steals my time.
A croissant crowds my mouth as I sing along with Copeland and Emily, “Heart, we will forget him.”
But yes I may remember…him.
Part Two
It is a lie that I am here and you are not.
Accessible scales under fingers mean accidentals change our tone. I step outside myself to be honest to be whole to grab hold of you but I am given silence back
I am left here alone and you are not.
If I viewed us through a microscope would the distance between us lessen or grow?
Would it be a lie to say
I watched you from this distance and wondered why I am here and you, you are not?
1/26/2011