zero focus

Today I'll try to reply to your blue only with words, without a colour. Yes, Yves Klein's blue is dense, the colour of an object, not a space. It is so densely blue that I'd say it accuses! Everything else except the fact of the blue has been eliminated and somehow (he feels) it's the spectator's fault

[. . .} The blue which is aerial and not dense, is what I call to myself an Aegean Blue. It is the blue of the cross on the Greek flag. The pale Klein blue nags because it has no depth--and it is as brittle as china. The Aegean blue has depth and total indifference.

[. . .} Blue is perhaps jewel. Blue is perhaps adornment. Blue is also modesty--the robe of the Madonna. And perhaps it's this "play" between two things which makes for the erotic. I do not know. (Yes, now I've remembered, the blue of blueberries is sexy).

[. . .} Blue is sad, blue is memory and nostalgia, but blue is also affrontery and impudence. And this is what I love about the colour. The most expensive of colours. Blue is prize. No public one. Intimate prize. Blue says: outrageously and absurdly: I am yours or you are mine! And no other colour can judge us. No simple colour can judge jewel. There's an impromptu by Schubert  which talks of this. And Charlie Parker became Bird because he knew about blue.

For Study for Inner Improvement (1977), a sequence of photographs in which Almeida looks like she is eating blue paint. There is no question that the colour she is consuming is very similar to that of Yves Klein. She had in the past protested at Klein's use of women as objects in his artworks. At the time of making Study for Inner Improvement, the concept of anthropophagy (cultural cannibalism, the idea of consuming other cultures as a way of asserting independence) was a popular ideology. Almeida's chewing up of Klein's blue, a colour he had come to dominate, was a liberating act for women and artists everywhere.