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

Birds Must Be Eliminated

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.
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

ridiculous, because why would one want to to kill freedom?
The work consists, in its first installation, of a hotel room, windows with blue light filtering material, text excerpts and a rifle.
This creates a situation which could refer to the sky as a dimension of infinity, where one could imagine the possibility to shoot the birds, which could make vivid and palpable a sense where imagination relates to life and at the same time question it.
Also shown at Frac Nord Pas de Calais, Dunkerque, De Paviljoens in Almere, Exposorium/Free University, Amsterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam and Marie Luise Hessel Museum, CCS Bard, NY.