ABSTRACT
A man in a suit leaps from a building into the void. We cannot help but imagine the horrible moment when he will crash onto the pavement of the street below (Figure 11.1). In October of 1960, Yves Klein performed the jump at 5 rue Gentiel Bernard, in Fontenay-aux-Roses, a symbolic site for the artist who was Rosacrucian. Klein called the photomontage Leap into the Void. For me, this image represents the desire to free oneself from convention and imagine a entirely new society. As a visual allegory, it brings together the physical bravery of the jumper with the urban context of a bourgeois home, juxtaposing future and past to create a statement about breaking with tradition while being aware of what that is. Klein, whose extended body here bridges past and future, shows the necessity of risk-taking in order to invent, imagine and create.
