Klein's Performance Art

Total art is a type of art that “reaches beyond the studio and the art gallery and into the public domain.”  Artists that use total art attempt to gain inspiration from everything around them, and often use random people as part of their work.  Generally, these artists are more concerned with the process of making the piece of art rather than the finished product.  Performance art is a type of total art that Yves Klein made famous with his work, Anthropometry.  Klein had two naked women covered in paint drag each other across a canvas as “human brushes” to complete the piece.  Obviously, the final product of making that piece wouldn’t matter that much, because the more artistic part was actually how it was made.  I have a hard time accepting something like this as art.  I believe art should take talent, and while there may be talent in coming up with an idea as crazy as that, it took no real talent to create the piece.  And in fact, Klein himself didn’t even make it, he chose two women to carry out his idea for him.  This painting reminded me a lot of the works of Jackson Pollock.  He would randomly splatter paint on his canvases, not caring how the painting would actually turn out.  He was more concerned with enjoyment of the process than the end product.  Since Anthropometry might look somewhat like Pollock’s works when it was finished, I imagine Klein didn’t care much about what it looked like either.  The artistic part to these artists was actually in the creative process, and the outcome didn’t really matter.