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.
This wish which evolved from his choice of taking the sky as his dimension of infinity, and generates an image which is crazy, exciting and ambiguous at the same time; it is on one hand radical to pursue an idea in its uttermost consequences, and on the other side
