Birds Must Be Eliminated (Bird Shot)

Hessel Museum of Art/CCS Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 2008 Project Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2005 Exposorium, Free University, Amsterdam, 2005 DePaviljoens, Almere, 2001 Frere, Independent Art Fair, Chelsea Inn Hotel, New York, 2000

The piece for the first independent art fair, situated in the Chelsea Inn hotel, creates a parallel with the Chelsea Hotel, which is only a few blocks away, and a certain moment of its history. It was in this hotel that Yves Klein wrote his Manifeste de l' Hotel Chelsea (the Chelsea Hotel Manifesto), written during his first one person show in New York at Leo Castelli in 1961, when the response to his show made him feel it was necessary to explain himself. The manifest, a reverse chronology of his artistic life, takes us back to the moment when, as an adolescent, he lay stretched upon the beach of Nice, "feeling hatred for birds which flew back and forth across my blue, cloudless sky because they tried to bore holes in my greatest and most beautiful work." Birds Must Be Eliminated/Bird Shot directly refers to this part of the manifest where Yves Klein wished to eliminate the birds from the sky. Claiming the sky as his own dimension of infinity, created something crazy, exciting and ambiguous at the same time. Radical on the one hand, to pursue an idea in its uttermost consequences. On the other hand

ridiculous, because why would one want to to kill freedom? In its initial configuration, the work consists of a hotel room, windows made of a material that transmits blue light, fragments of text and a rifle. This creates a situation in which one might sit and reflect on the idea of heaven as a dimension of infinity, imagining the possibility of firing the gun, and perhaps wondering whether this would make tangible a feeling in which imagination and life are interconnected, whilst at the same time perhaps also questioning this.

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2005

Abstract Habitats, Sven Lütticken