“We?ll keep silence to listen to our bodies.
We?ll watch ourselves living.
The mind will fall back on itself to read its own history.
We?ll play wonderful games of ability and love.
We?ll talk a lot, to ourselves and to everybody.
Life will be the only environmental art.”45
Minimal design makes the viewer aware of themselves. Minimal design makes its own failure extremely evident. The person within the room of nothing becomes the difference, the failure, the reality within the design.
Architecture which is inhabited has failed because it has been degraded by reality, by function, by action, by time, by impermanence, by change. This is why architecture photographs never include people. Why white sheets are draped over furniture. Why drawings are more compelling than the built object.
“There?s no need for shelters, since the climatic conditions and the body mechanisms of thermo-regulation have been modified to guarantee total comfort.
At the most we can play at making shelter, or rather at the home, at architecture.”
“In Art – Art without problematics – is found the source of inexhaustible LIFE; through this source, if we are true artists, freed from the dreaming and pictorial imagination of the psychological domain (which is the counter-space, the space of the PAST), we may attain to eternal life, to Immortality.”46
“The true painter of the future will be a mute poet who will write nothing but will recount, without speech and in silence, an immense picture without limits.”47
For art to take on its life source, its magic ability to cast us into the void, it must forsake time, memory, prediction. Tzara (nihilistic dadaist), “Dada; every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: Dada; abolition of memory: Dada; abolition of archaeology: Dada; abolition of prophets: Dada; abolition of the future.”48
In order to truly inhabit the void, to truly experience space, flux, flow, the viewer must be cast into the material world with equally material thoughts and actions. “Freespaces are not idealized abstractions, but concrete, existential realizations. To inhabit them, one must be equally concrete in ones thoughts and actions. It is not merely a matter of responding to the material characteristics, of reacting, but of a direct engagement, requiring an initiative, amplified, rendered forceful by a confrontation with “useless” space.”49 It is within this realm, a realm of action and not reduction, of perception and not codification, of existence and not essence, that our soul is felt as it is, part of the continuous flux, flow, energy of an utterly physical, and temporal world. “The soul can only reveal itself through direct action.”50
Art is the ability to look at life as new, fresh, changing every moment as if looking at it for the first time. It is the ability to awaken to the environment and remain naive, relieve all preconceptions.51 It is a state of constant astonishment and awe. “My art would be that of living. Each second, each breath, is a work which is described nowhere, which is neither cerebral, nor visual; it’s a sort of constant euphoria.”52 A state without definitions, a perception of life, an understanding of flow, of void, of now: art must defy its own boundaries, its own definitions, for art is concerned with forcing us into this perception throughout our lives. Within the Dada event, “the violence, the informality, and the strenuous activity of these events were deliberately cultivated in order to bridge the gap between art and life, if not to destroy art altogether.”53 Klein echoes Duchamp in his desire to rid the world of art’s definition and live life as art: “Lets forget art altogether”54
