History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme
Mattijs Visser When I started with the ZERO foundation, I was often asked, not only by museum people and politicians, but also by artists, whether ZERO really had any relevance for today. This was followed by the question of which artists could be seen as ZERO artists, and if ZERO was a German group or an international movement.
Here is an anecdote that I think is interesting. Mark Rothko came to Otto Piene’s opening at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York and told Piene, ‘I could have also been a ZERO artist.’ Piene explained to me that Rothko was trying to paint pure light using paint, and discovered only at the opening that one could also paint with the very essence of light. So is Mark Rothko a ZERO artist?
Daniel, you have been president of the Academic Board of Advisors since the establishment of the ZERO foundation. Maybe you can answer the question of what the relevance of ZERO is today, and not only from a given historical perspective.
Daniel Birnbaum As to the question of an art movement’s relevance today, with emphasis on ‘today,’ we shouldn’t only consider whether its works are found in important collections, or how much they sell for, but we should ask what ZERO means for new generations of artists. Do we find traces of its work in what happened afterwards? Is it influential in that sense?
The whole idea of influence is complex, and many art critics and literary scholars have examined it. Harold Bloom’s book, Anxiety of Influence, tries to come to terms with poetic influence. Not only does ‘A’ lead to ‘B’ – a linear understanding of influence in which something that happened long ago was necessary for something happening today. There is also an inverted mechanism: what happens today is also important for our understanding of what went before. What does this imply? In what way do today’s developments influence our perception of former periods?
For example, I would say that that Marcel Duchamp was one of the most influential artists of this time, leading to conceptual approaches in art and a critique of traditional notions of the artwork. But contemporary artistic production also influences our perception of Duchamp’s work: what happened after Duchamp keeps his legacy alive. After Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, etc., Duchamp appears in a different light. From the emergence of Pop Art on, Duchamp is not quite the same anymore. Our understanding of what it is to put a mass-produced commodity on display has perhaps been normalized through Pop, but this also shifts our perception of Duchamp. The essential question is: Which contemporary figures are of relevance for our understanding of ZERO today? On the other hand, it would be interesting to identify artists from before the emergence of ZERO who were brought back into the conversation through ZERO.
MV The difficulty in talking with younger artists, and with artists that came directly after the ZERO generation is that few of them would acknowledge being influenced by ZERO. Olafur Eliasson says that ZERO’s influence on his work is minimal. James Turrell may not acknowledge having seen an Yves Klein show in New York. But below the level of conscious influence, previous artists certainly exert an unconscious impact on later art practices.
DB Olafur is someone I know well. He is an artist who does a lot of reading and research. Many of the things he has dealt with are present but not always immediately visible in his work. I am not claiming that there are ‘secret sources’ he avoids mentioning, but I think there is always a certain degree of zeitgeist you can’t escape. Certain things happened when ZERO emerged in the late 1950s, early ’60s. One can observe recurring themes. I think it was Mark Twain who said that ‘History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.’ Which is true, considering the 1960s, with all the experimentation in art, the notions of collaboration, and interdisciplinary work between theatre, art, and music, the advances in technology, as well as experimentation with new forms of communication.
These things have happened before; for example, in the 1920s, think of collaborations between Sergei Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky, and Pablo Picasso. It was not the same as in the ’60s, but there was a profusion of new ideas –with Duchamp and the Futurists in the background. You can find moments that seem to be connected. One can never prove that there is an inspirational link between the 1920s and the 1960s, but certain ideas that were formulated, let’s say in Paris, re-emerged in a totally new environment.
To come back to the relationship between ZERO and today’s artists: in the early 1990s, there were ideas of collaboration and collective production, and an interest in the link between art and architecture, as well as other disciplines, in the work of artists that have often been called relational. One can link those practices to the experimental approach ZERO stands for. An example of this is the installation room that Mack, Piene, and Uecker created for documenta III in 1964.
In this legendary Light Room (Homage to Fontana), which is today part of the collection of Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, and is the highlight of the ZERO exhibitions in New York, Berlin, and Amsterdam, there are things that I think Olafur and his generation appreciate. By that, I don’t mean to say that that Light Room ‘led’ in any way to works Olafur Eliasson has made. But they have a lot in common.
To complicate things, let’s turn the tables. The Light Room was legendary, and many scholars knew all about it. Some people saw this work as very interesting and intriguing –but for years, not many people paid attention to it. Then, suddenly, there emerged artists like Carsten Höller or Olafur Eliasson. They stand for a certain approach, which is not the same as that of ZERO, but there is nevertheless a similarity in their art, with a general interest in collaboration that establishes links to other disciplines.
So I think that, through contemporary artists, the Light Room, which could have fallen into oblivion, is suddenly more ‘present’ than it used to be. In my eyes, this idea of retroactive activation of a work can be very inspirational. It’s hard to find a scientific model for this idea of nachträglich (a Freudian term), or retroactive production of meaning. But I think it is something that happens all the time. Looking at the ZERO artists through the lens of some of our contemporary practitioners today is important.
MV I am wondering how it is possible that certain forms or concepts repeat themselves without direct contact with the first instance of their invention, if it can be called ‘invention’. Kazimir Malevich, creator of the Black Square, also conceived a magazine called ZERO to publish articles on nothingness and beyond. Fritz Lang, the filmmaker, invented the countdown for a spaceship launch in his 1929 movie, Woman in the Moon. Kazuo Shiraga founded the Zero-kai artist-group in Japan to assert that art should develop by itself out of nothingness, without any reference to history. Heinz Mack and Otto Piene were completely unaware of this when they ‘invented’ ZERO in 1957.
So how is it possible that a Russian artist, a group in Japan, and the two Germans all came up with similar ideas, almost simultaneously, without being aware of each other? Or is this zeitgeist? Maybe zeitgeist can travel not only in time, but also geographically?
DB I would say that there are certain links that are hard to explain, certain forms of synchronicity, or zeitgeist-related things that maybe relate. Sometimes technological or theoretical innovations create new possibilities, and we find that people in different parts of the world relate to these with seemingly synchronized artistic expressions, although they are not aware of each other.
What I am trying to say has nothing to do with whether influences are conscious or not. Another example is how, when Piene created his first Light Ballet in 1959, some critics were quick to point out that similar things had been done before. Piene himself wrote in his manifesto, ‘Paths to Paradise,’ in ZERO 3: ‘I only heard later that I was the son of a half dozen fathers whom I did not know as such.’ What does he mean by ‘fathers’? He didn’t even know them. It is almost like you give birth to your own parents.
You asked in what sense an influence could exert itself retroactively. The physical objects are there; they don’t change. So, obviously, no one who creates art today can change the physical substrata of an art piece. We are not changing the collections in museums or in the secret archives anywhere. What changes is the understanding of these works. Art is not only a material medium, but is also produced by the audience and by its context, by its continuous reading by generations of artists. Therefore, the significance and ultimately the meaning of artworks do change over time. And not only because we dig deeper and deeper into what they once meant.
MV So we are contemporary archaeologists of a sort. We dig up certain historical elements or happenings, and bring them forth. How do we decide which ones? You work with emerging artists: What inspires you while digging through history? And how do you decide whether it makes sense to reactivate these archaeological finds?
DB What does one look for? When does it feel ‘fresh’ or relevant? It is something that you have to feel, and then you can try to formulate ideas. What is it that makes something relevant today? I think it has to do with intuition. It is not something you can prove. You can spell out relevant themes the ZERO artists shared, but when you try to understand it, you find recurring things. The interests are still there, or they have renewed relevance.
The approach to art that ZERO represents has an interest in the phenomenology of embodiment, in the fact that a viewer is there. The viewer becomes part of the artwork in the sense that the artwork is almost behind your eyes rather than in front of your eyes. That is actually a James Turrell quote: ‘Art itself is not the technological setup, the machinery necessary to produce a certain experience; it is the experience itself.’ This is something that has to be recreated over and over again, because it actually takes place in the here and now with an individual, singular subject. So one can return to the same old artwork, but it is also relevant that new human beings, who are embodied selves, actually encounter things anew. Perhaps the limit that some of these radical artists are looking for is similar: the void or the limit where language can no longer signify, or the kind of objectless space where we have reached beyond all empirical perception. We only perceive perception itself.
We can find words to describe a certain kind of border, but I think it is not surprising that artists return to the same, or almost the same, ambition, only in a different form, because we are in constantly new technological political environments. You asked me about the strong moments where I felt “This is great; this is fifty years old, but it could have been done yesterday.” It doesn’t matter when it was made; it is of relevance for us now.
MV We restaged Otto Piene’s multimedia performance, The Proliferation of the Sun, from the mid-1960s, first in Düsseldorf, then in Stockholm, and recently in Berlin, and I know that we both shared the ‘feeling’ that this ‘archaeological treasure’ is relevant for our time. What does that mean?
DB Let’s imagine contemporary artists as a kind of prism through which we look at things that happened before. They look at the past and they emerge changed somehow. There is a kind of obsession with the sun as a heavenly body, the source of light –at least our cosmic source of light. I found this obsession in many artists: in Spencer Finch, in Olafur Eliasson for example. A kind of heliophilic drive, an almost obsessive, recurring interest in the sun as a source, and the sun as a metamorphic body, as the center of cosmology, and as the strongest lamp around, one that can take many shapes. Gustav Theodor Fechner, an early psychologist who stared into the sun until he turned blind, fascinated Finch. Olafur is the producer and manufacturer of enormous suns. The most famous one was The Weather Project at the Tate Modern in London in 2003. But it is almost like there is a heliophilic drive in everything he has done. Suddenly seeing The Proliferation of the Sun by Otto Piene again, which uses such beautiful old technology that seemed almost obsolete with its slide projectors, but so visually appealing, was one of those moments when I felt: That work could go into any show with contemporary artists who work with similar themes today. It doesn’t feel like some old archival piece; it would fit into a young artists’ show.
MV Is art a machine for producing experiences for the public? Thinking about Otto Piene, it is fantastic to see people coming out of an exhibition or event, and to know they have had a different experience, a different feeling. Does art only produce feelings or experiences?
DB That is not such a small thing. If art actually produces emotions and feelings, I think it’s something to take seriously. I, for one, think it does. Art has to do with shifts in emotions. But I think this also happens through very intellectual means. I would say that one of the things that makes ZERO attractive for many artists today is the interdisciplinary nature of their work, their interest in technology and scientific research, the things they shared early on. Otto Piene stood for this in his entire life. For many years, he was not very visible as an artist. He was a teacher and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he saw his work as a kind of open-ended research project. Of course, there were results; there were artworks being produced, but it was also the beauty of the path –the beauty of the research. That kind of non-commercial, non-art-market-oriented approach which also challenges the structure of the art world with its institutions, gallery system, is something that fascinates many people, myself among them. I think the link to science and research makes the art of the ZERO group special, and keeps coming back as one of the reasons why the group is still attractive to many people working today.
There is also their philosophical approach. It is not really a given what an artwork is. It is something that has to be explored. I think, deep down, the ZERO movement stands for an exploration of perception, experience, and what art can be –even a kind of open exploration of what the role of an artwork can be. That has to do with the limits of perception, the boundaries of what is in our minds and psychological make-up, in our biologically given perceptual apparatus, and what is then added and changes technologically. There are previous moments in advanced aesthetics and writing about art that have tested these limits before, like Walter Benjamin’s 1930s study, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. They have to do with the idea that technology doesn’t merely add something to our perception; it shifts our perception. It can even reorganize our perceptual apparatus.
This can be found in later philosophers as well. For example Gilles Deleuze is interested in what is to become a subject. It is not something that is determined once and for all, but rather is molded through subjectivization, in relationship to language, socialization, and technology. I think that, if one explores the ZERO artists, one can find such ideas in their writings and their projects. They are interested in the boundary between nature and technology being redrawn in new ways; it is not simply a given.
MV You mentioned ZERO as a laboratory in which many groups of artists participated with their own laboratories. Do you see any artists today who are able to include other artists in the same way? Do they include the outside world in their research, in their experiments?
DB It is sometimes more a rhetorical figure than a real fact. But I think that the artists we are talking about, because they are obviously of relevance for today’s exploration of art, space, and technology –people like Olafur Eliasson and Carsten Höller- do indeed do what you describe. Olafur’s studio is a laboratory. These artists produce big machineries for exhibitions, but they also experiment quietly, in an open-ended way with architects and scientists. Olafur was a professor for a while, so he was able to bring into his studio a number of interesting guests: thinkers, writers, philosophers, sociologists, and emerging artists. The studio was part of a big, Berlin-based, laboratory-style exploration of what art can be in society, and what art can be in relationship to audiences and to other disciplines.
There are examples of collaboration today; for example Carsten Höller often refers to his work explicitly as a kind of laboratory. He talks about a ‘laboratory of doubt.’ He has done many works about the extreme limits of perception. For example: How can we shift our perception if we wear glasses that turn things upside down? Our brain tries to process what we see, and in the end it all looks all right. Then you take off the glasses and you are confused. That is just one example. But he has done many things about destabilization.
MV But the whole idea of turning everything upside down has been studied before, so what is so experimental about it? Or is the experiment about sharing the moment of discovery with a wider public?
DB There are some experiments that very few people know about, and he is testing them –maybe pushing their boundaries with a different goal in mind. But he does have a scientific background. He is one of the few contemporary artists who read advanced scientific books, because that’s part of his education and background. You might say that he brings this knowledge into another public sphere –a way to look at his experiments that is not uninteresting. What does it mean to recreate extreme scientific experiments in an opera house, as he did once, or in front of a big audience who normally has little to do with such things? Of course, Gestalt psychology and cognitive science have done similar experiments in a very specialized scientific community. But I think Carsten is trying things in a relatively open-ended and interesting way.
MV Talking about crossing borders, or pushing boundaries, Heinz Mack developed projects for the Sahara in the late ‘50s, and Otto Piene designed sculptures for the sky. Yves Klein designed a space rocket, Piero Manzoni placed our world on a plinth. Several of these ZERO artists tried to challenge spaces outside of museums. To what extent do you think they succeeded in landing there, in this so-called other world? Nowadays, we live in this very commercial world, and everything has to be materialized. Do you think it is still important to carry on with this challenge to find other routes outside the White Cube, the museum, and the market structure?
DB: I think it has become a bit of a predictable expectation, or even something that can almost be reduced to a slogan, to think that art that criticizes institutions like the White Cube as a standard space is automatically of interest. But I do think that there is a big outside world waiting for us. It can take different shapes. I am not sure that the ZERO artists were so successful at this, as not many people realize what they did when they brought the desert and the outer space into their work. We can always find predecessors for their work, but it was brave and new for them at the time. I think they invented it, or at least they had the sense that they were breaking new ground.
MV Do artists perhaps need scientists more than scientists need artists? When you ask scientists, they are not really interested in artists; it’s the other way around. What is it that artists look for in science?
DB: It is something that brings them outside a cliché understanding of the artist as something already formulated fully –something that may open up new possibilities for the role of the artist. There are many versions of this, of art looking for interdisciplinary connections to enrich the idea of what art and an artist can be. Do scientists need artists? Maybe not for science per se, to be successful as scientists. I think that scientists as human beings do need art –but that is a totally different question. On the other hand, some great thinkers with scientific ambitions are interested in innovation as something that is not limited to technology or small adjustments inside scientific theories, but that involves profound shifts in understanding who we are.
A younger artist we have not spoken about yet is Thomás Saraceno, who was educated as an architect but was not very successful in that field. Now he has turned out to be a very thought-provoking installation artist using natural science in his work. I am not even sure I should say science: if you want to know about nature, you usually study what scientists have found out about nature. It might be spider webs, or it might be new materials. It might be things that have changed our perception of what it is to be part of nature, what nature ultimately is, and what form and shape it takes. If you see a tree as architecture, it is a very sophisticated piece of architecture, and you might start thinking about everyday things in a slightly different way. One could say that Thomás turns certain scientific explorations and findings into artistically interesting situations.
We’ve spoken about several different artists, but we have yet to mention any women. At the Venice Biennale in 2009, I opened the show at the Arsenale with a remarkably strong female artist from Brazil, Lygia Pape, who was from the generation of ZERO artists. It seems to me that the ZERO movement was an all male European group of artists.
MV Oh no, not at all. Of course there were female artists in the international ZERO network from the very beginning, in the 1960s, some of them very active. I think, especially after World War II, if they were not married and didn’t have to take care of a family, women really had a chance to start a career as artists. And as Otto has told us, ZERO was not a group with a membership; ZERO had no president. ZERO was a vision, and open to like-minded artists. No one was to be excluded.
We recently discovered that Hal Busse is still alive; she participated in one of the earliest ZERO shows, in Otto Piene’s studio. At the time, she was making red monochrome paintings with thousands of dots, and Uecker-like paintings with nails –not white, in different colors. Her work is very closely related to the obsessive Infinity Nets by the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. A few years later, Busse married the artist Klaus Bendixen and had to take care of the family. In Italy, the architect Nanda Vigo played a very important role for the ZERO network. She invited Lucio Fontana and Enrico Castellani to do installations in the houses she designed. But she also did independent artwork for the ZERO shows. Eduarda Maino (whose artist name was Dadamaino) was from the outset active in the Italian Azimuth group. Yayoi Kusama participated in almost all ZERO show from 1961 onwards. She did her first mirror installations after participating in an early ZERO show in Amsterdam. Lygia Pape could have been a ZERO artist, but decided after a near-fatal accident in Germany not to come back to Europe. Atsuko Tanaka, one of the founders of the Japanese Zero-kai group created (her Electric Dress is an icon) a very female expression that is at the same time highly technical.
Other female artists were around at the time who were pursuing slightly different agendas but were closely connected with ZERO artists: Yves Klein’s wife, Rotraut Uecker, and Niki de Saint Phalle, who was married to Jean Tinguely. And not to forget Hanne Darboven, a student of Almir Mavignier, whose early work displayed a number of parallels with that of the ZERO artists. Mary Baumeister, at the time married to Karlheinz Stockhausen, organized in her studio meetings with and for [ZERO] artists. That some of them did not play a role within the ZERO network does not mean that they are not important for us today. I am sure we will be able to find more female artists with an exciting history in the 1960s. Atsuko Tanaka was one of the completely forgotten until I included her in a ZERO show in 2006. Her husband, a conceptual artist from the Gutai group, stopped working so she could concentrate on her career.
DB Let me come back to the beginning of our conversation, to the question of why I think ZERO is so attractive again today –beyond the kind of theoretical, philosophical attempts of mine here to talk about retroactive animation and things like that. I simply think that their work is really interesting to most people who think about art, look at art, and want to experience art. And I’m not talking only about people involved in producing, selling, and collecting, but also those trying to understand how the history of our life on Earth has developed. There are many alternative histories. ZERO is now becoming a more widely known story, or part of a well-known narrative. It is my attempt and my wish, when involved in conversations like this, not to solidify and canonize a certain group of artists, but to remind ourselves of the fact that there are alternative stories. And the story of art is far richer than that of real life. Plus, it rhymes.
Tijs Visser, ZERO, the international art movement of the 50th and 80th, published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, Köln, 2015
Here is an anecdote that I think is interesting. Mark Rothko came to Otto Piene’s opening at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York and told Piene, ‘I could have also been a ZERO artist.’ Piene explained to me that Rothko was trying to paint pure light using paint, and discovered only at the opening that one could also paint with the very essence of light. So is Mark Rothko a ZERO artist?
Daniel, you have been president of the Academic Board of Advisors since the establishment of the ZERO foundation. Maybe you can answer the question of what the relevance of ZERO is today, and not only from a given historical perspective.
Daniel Birnbaum As to the question of an art movement’s relevance today, with emphasis on ‘today,’ we shouldn’t only consider whether its works are found in important collections, or how much they sell for, but we should ask what ZERO means for new generations of artists. Do we find traces of its work in what happened afterwards? Is it influential in that sense?
The whole idea of influence is complex, and many art critics and literary scholars have examined it. Harold Bloom’s book, Anxiety of Influence, tries to come to terms with poetic influence. Not only does ‘A’ lead to ‘B’ – a linear understanding of influence in which something that happened long ago was necessary for something happening today. There is also an inverted mechanism: what happens today is also important for our understanding of what went before. What does this imply? In what way do today’s developments influence our perception of former periods?
For example, I would say that that Marcel Duchamp was one of the most influential artists of this time, leading to conceptual approaches in art and a critique of traditional notions of the artwork. But contemporary artistic production also influences our perception of Duchamp’s work: what happened after Duchamp keeps his legacy alive. After Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, etc., Duchamp appears in a different light. From the emergence of Pop Art on, Duchamp is not quite the same anymore. Our understanding of what it is to put a mass-produced commodity on display has perhaps been normalized through Pop, but this also shifts our perception of Duchamp. The essential question is: Which contemporary figures are of relevance for our understanding of ZERO today? On the other hand, it would be interesting to identify artists from before the emergence of ZERO who were brought back into the conversation through ZERO.
MV The difficulty in talking with younger artists, and with artists that came directly after the ZERO generation is that few of them would acknowledge being influenced by ZERO. Olafur Eliasson says that ZERO’s influence on his work is minimal. James Turrell may not acknowledge having seen an Yves Klein show in New York. But below the level of conscious influence, previous artists certainly exert an unconscious impact on later art practices.
DB Olafur is someone I know well. He is an artist who does a lot of reading and research. Many of the things he has dealt with are present but not always immediately visible in his work. I am not claiming that there are ‘secret sources’ he avoids mentioning, but I think there is always a certain degree of zeitgeist you can’t escape. Certain things happened when ZERO emerged in the late 1950s, early ’60s. One can observe recurring themes. I think it was Mark Twain who said that ‘History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.’ Which is true, considering the 1960s, with all the experimentation in art, the notions of collaboration, and interdisciplinary work between theatre, art, and music, the advances in technology, as well as experimentation with new forms of communication.
These things have happened before; for example, in the 1920s, think of collaborations between Sergei Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky, and Pablo Picasso. It was not the same as in the ’60s, but there was a profusion of new ideas –with Duchamp and the Futurists in the background. You can find moments that seem to be connected. One can never prove that there is an inspirational link between the 1920s and the 1960s, but certain ideas that were formulated, let’s say in Paris, re-emerged in a totally new environment.
To come back to the relationship between ZERO and today’s artists: in the early 1990s, there were ideas of collaboration and collective production, and an interest in the link between art and architecture, as well as other disciplines, in the work of artists that have often been called relational. One can link those practices to the experimental approach ZERO stands for. An example of this is the installation room that Mack, Piene, and Uecker created for documenta III in 1964.
In this legendary Light Room (Homage to Fontana), which is today part of the collection of Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, and is the highlight of the ZERO exhibitions in New York, Berlin, and Amsterdam, there are things that I think Olafur and his generation appreciate. By that, I don’t mean to say that that Light Room ‘led’ in any way to works Olafur Eliasson has made. But they have a lot in common.
To complicate things, let’s turn the tables. The Light Room was legendary, and many scholars knew all about it. Some people saw this work as very interesting and intriguing –but for years, not many people paid attention to it. Then, suddenly, there emerged artists like Carsten Höller or Olafur Eliasson. They stand for a certain approach, which is not the same as that of ZERO, but there is nevertheless a similarity in their art, with a general interest in collaboration that establishes links to other disciplines.
So I think that, through contemporary artists, the Light Room, which could have fallen into oblivion, is suddenly more ‘present’ than it used to be. In my eyes, this idea of retroactive activation of a work can be very inspirational. It’s hard to find a scientific model for this idea of nachträglich (a Freudian term), or retroactive production of meaning. But I think it is something that happens all the time. Looking at the ZERO artists through the lens of some of our contemporary practitioners today is important.
MV I am wondering how it is possible that certain forms or concepts repeat themselves without direct contact with the first instance of their invention, if it can be called ‘invention’. Kazimir Malevich, creator of the Black Square, also conceived a magazine called ZERO to publish articles on nothingness and beyond. Fritz Lang, the filmmaker, invented the countdown for a spaceship launch in his 1929 movie, Woman in the Moon. Kazuo Shiraga founded the Zero-kai artist-group in Japan to assert that art should develop by itself out of nothingness, without any reference to history. Heinz Mack and Otto Piene were completely unaware of this when they ‘invented’ ZERO in 1957.
So how is it possible that a Russian artist, a group in Japan, and the two Germans all came up with similar ideas, almost simultaneously, without being aware of each other? Or is this zeitgeist? Maybe zeitgeist can travel not only in time, but also geographically?
DB I would say that there are certain links that are hard to explain, certain forms of synchronicity, or zeitgeist-related things that maybe relate. Sometimes technological or theoretical innovations create new possibilities, and we find that people in different parts of the world relate to these with seemingly synchronized artistic expressions, although they are not aware of each other.
What I am trying to say has nothing to do with whether influences are conscious or not. Another example is how, when Piene created his first Light Ballet in 1959, some critics were quick to point out that similar things had been done before. Piene himself wrote in his manifesto, ‘Paths to Paradise,’ in ZERO 3: ‘I only heard later that I was the son of a half dozen fathers whom I did not know as such.’ What does he mean by ‘fathers’? He didn’t even know them. It is almost like you give birth to your own parents.
You asked in what sense an influence could exert itself retroactively. The physical objects are there; they don’t change. So, obviously, no one who creates art today can change the physical substrata of an art piece. We are not changing the collections in museums or in the secret archives anywhere. What changes is the understanding of these works. Art is not only a material medium, but is also produced by the audience and by its context, by its continuous reading by generations of artists. Therefore, the significance and ultimately the meaning of artworks do change over time. And not only because we dig deeper and deeper into what they once meant.
MV So we are contemporary archaeologists of a sort. We dig up certain historical elements or happenings, and bring them forth. How do we decide which ones? You work with emerging artists: What inspires you while digging through history? And how do you decide whether it makes sense to reactivate these archaeological finds?
DB What does one look for? When does it feel ‘fresh’ or relevant? It is something that you have to feel, and then you can try to formulate ideas. What is it that makes something relevant today? I think it has to do with intuition. It is not something you can prove. You can spell out relevant themes the ZERO artists shared, but when you try to understand it, you find recurring things. The interests are still there, or they have renewed relevance.
The approach to art that ZERO represents has an interest in the phenomenology of embodiment, in the fact that a viewer is there. The viewer becomes part of the artwork in the sense that the artwork is almost behind your eyes rather than in front of your eyes. That is actually a James Turrell quote: ‘Art itself is not the technological setup, the machinery necessary to produce a certain experience; it is the experience itself.’ This is something that has to be recreated over and over again, because it actually takes place in the here and now with an individual, singular subject. So one can return to the same old artwork, but it is also relevant that new human beings, who are embodied selves, actually encounter things anew. Perhaps the limit that some of these radical artists are looking for is similar: the void or the limit where language can no longer signify, or the kind of objectless space where we have reached beyond all empirical perception. We only perceive perception itself.
We can find words to describe a certain kind of border, but I think it is not surprising that artists return to the same, or almost the same, ambition, only in a different form, because we are in constantly new technological political environments. You asked me about the strong moments where I felt “This is great; this is fifty years old, but it could have been done yesterday.” It doesn’t matter when it was made; it is of relevance for us now.
MV We restaged Otto Piene’s multimedia performance, The Proliferation of the Sun, from the mid-1960s, first in Düsseldorf, then in Stockholm, and recently in Berlin, and I know that we both shared the ‘feeling’ that this ‘archaeological treasure’ is relevant for our time. What does that mean?
DB Let’s imagine contemporary artists as a kind of prism through which we look at things that happened before. They look at the past and they emerge changed somehow. There is a kind of obsession with the sun as a heavenly body, the source of light –at least our cosmic source of light. I found this obsession in many artists: in Spencer Finch, in Olafur Eliasson for example. A kind of heliophilic drive, an almost obsessive, recurring interest in the sun as a source, and the sun as a metamorphic body, as the center of cosmology, and as the strongest lamp around, one that can take many shapes. Gustav Theodor Fechner, an early psychologist who stared into the sun until he turned blind, fascinated Finch. Olafur is the producer and manufacturer of enormous suns. The most famous one was The Weather Project at the Tate Modern in London in 2003. But it is almost like there is a heliophilic drive in everything he has done. Suddenly seeing The Proliferation of the Sun by Otto Piene again, which uses such beautiful old technology that seemed almost obsolete with its slide projectors, but so visually appealing, was one of those moments when I felt: That work could go into any show with contemporary artists who work with similar themes today. It doesn’t feel like some old archival piece; it would fit into a young artists’ show.
MV Is art a machine for producing experiences for the public? Thinking about Otto Piene, it is fantastic to see people coming out of an exhibition or event, and to know they have had a different experience, a different feeling. Does art only produce feelings or experiences?
DB That is not such a small thing. If art actually produces emotions and feelings, I think it’s something to take seriously. I, for one, think it does. Art has to do with shifts in emotions. But I think this also happens through very intellectual means. I would say that one of the things that makes ZERO attractive for many artists today is the interdisciplinary nature of their work, their interest in technology and scientific research, the things they shared early on. Otto Piene stood for this in his entire life. For many years, he was not very visible as an artist. He was a teacher and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he saw his work as a kind of open-ended research project. Of course, there were results; there were artworks being produced, but it was also the beauty of the path –the beauty of the research. That kind of non-commercial, non-art-market-oriented approach which also challenges the structure of the art world with its institutions, gallery system, is something that fascinates many people, myself among them. I think the link to science and research makes the art of the ZERO group special, and keeps coming back as one of the reasons why the group is still attractive to many people working today.
There is also their philosophical approach. It is not really a given what an artwork is. It is something that has to be explored. I think, deep down, the ZERO movement stands for an exploration of perception, experience, and what art can be –even a kind of open exploration of what the role of an artwork can be. That has to do with the limits of perception, the boundaries of what is in our minds and psychological make-up, in our biologically given perceptual apparatus, and what is then added and changes technologically. There are previous moments in advanced aesthetics and writing about art that have tested these limits before, like Walter Benjamin’s 1930s study, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. They have to do with the idea that technology doesn’t merely add something to our perception; it shifts our perception. It can even reorganize our perceptual apparatus.
This can be found in later philosophers as well. For example Gilles Deleuze is interested in what is to become a subject. It is not something that is determined once and for all, but rather is molded through subjectivization, in relationship to language, socialization, and technology. I think that, if one explores the ZERO artists, one can find such ideas in their writings and their projects. They are interested in the boundary between nature and technology being redrawn in new ways; it is not simply a given.
MV You mentioned ZERO as a laboratory in which many groups of artists participated with their own laboratories. Do you see any artists today who are able to include other artists in the same way? Do they include the outside world in their research, in their experiments?
DB It is sometimes more a rhetorical figure than a real fact. But I think that the artists we are talking about, because they are obviously of relevance for today’s exploration of art, space, and technology –people like Olafur Eliasson and Carsten Höller- do indeed do what you describe. Olafur’s studio is a laboratory. These artists produce big machineries for exhibitions, but they also experiment quietly, in an open-ended way with architects and scientists. Olafur was a professor for a while, so he was able to bring into his studio a number of interesting guests: thinkers, writers, philosophers, sociologists, and emerging artists. The studio was part of a big, Berlin-based, laboratory-style exploration of what art can be in society, and what art can be in relationship to audiences and to other disciplines.
There are examples of collaboration today; for example Carsten Höller often refers to his work explicitly as a kind of laboratory. He talks about a ‘laboratory of doubt.’ He has done many works about the extreme limits of perception. For example: How can we shift our perception if we wear glasses that turn things upside down? Our brain tries to process what we see, and in the end it all looks all right. Then you take off the glasses and you are confused. That is just one example. But he has done many things about destabilization.
MV But the whole idea of turning everything upside down has been studied before, so what is so experimental about it? Or is the experiment about sharing the moment of discovery with a wider public?
DB There are some experiments that very few people know about, and he is testing them –maybe pushing their boundaries with a different goal in mind. But he does have a scientific background. He is one of the few contemporary artists who read advanced scientific books, because that’s part of his education and background. You might say that he brings this knowledge into another public sphere –a way to look at his experiments that is not uninteresting. What does it mean to recreate extreme scientific experiments in an opera house, as he did once, or in front of a big audience who normally has little to do with such things? Of course, Gestalt psychology and cognitive science have done similar experiments in a very specialized scientific community. But I think Carsten is trying things in a relatively open-ended and interesting way.
MV Talking about crossing borders, or pushing boundaries, Heinz Mack developed projects for the Sahara in the late ‘50s, and Otto Piene designed sculptures for the sky. Yves Klein designed a space rocket, Piero Manzoni placed our world on a plinth. Several of these ZERO artists tried to challenge spaces outside of museums. To what extent do you think they succeeded in landing there, in this so-called other world? Nowadays, we live in this very commercial world, and everything has to be materialized. Do you think it is still important to carry on with this challenge to find other routes outside the White Cube, the museum, and the market structure?
DB: I think it has become a bit of a predictable expectation, or even something that can almost be reduced to a slogan, to think that art that criticizes institutions like the White Cube as a standard space is automatically of interest. But I do think that there is a big outside world waiting for us. It can take different shapes. I am not sure that the ZERO artists were so successful at this, as not many people realize what they did when they brought the desert and the outer space into their work. We can always find predecessors for their work, but it was brave and new for them at the time. I think they invented it, or at least they had the sense that they were breaking new ground.
MV Do artists perhaps need scientists more than scientists need artists? When you ask scientists, they are not really interested in artists; it’s the other way around. What is it that artists look for in science?
DB: It is something that brings them outside a cliché understanding of the artist as something already formulated fully –something that may open up new possibilities for the role of the artist. There are many versions of this, of art looking for interdisciplinary connections to enrich the idea of what art and an artist can be. Do scientists need artists? Maybe not for science per se, to be successful as scientists. I think that scientists as human beings do need art –but that is a totally different question. On the other hand, some great thinkers with scientific ambitions are interested in innovation as something that is not limited to technology or small adjustments inside scientific theories, but that involves profound shifts in understanding who we are.
A younger artist we have not spoken about yet is Thomás Saraceno, who was educated as an architect but was not very successful in that field. Now he has turned out to be a very thought-provoking installation artist using natural science in his work. I am not even sure I should say science: if you want to know about nature, you usually study what scientists have found out about nature. It might be spider webs, or it might be new materials. It might be things that have changed our perception of what it is to be part of nature, what nature ultimately is, and what form and shape it takes. If you see a tree as architecture, it is a very sophisticated piece of architecture, and you might start thinking about everyday things in a slightly different way. One could say that Thomás turns certain scientific explorations and findings into artistically interesting situations.
We’ve spoken about several different artists, but we have yet to mention any women. At the Venice Biennale in 2009, I opened the show at the Arsenale with a remarkably strong female artist from Brazil, Lygia Pape, who was from the generation of ZERO artists. It seems to me that the ZERO movement was an all male European group of artists.
MV Oh no, not at all. Of course there were female artists in the international ZERO network from the very beginning, in the 1960s, some of them very active. I think, especially after World War II, if they were not married and didn’t have to take care of a family, women really had a chance to start a career as artists. And as Otto has told us, ZERO was not a group with a membership; ZERO had no president. ZERO was a vision, and open to like-minded artists. No one was to be excluded.
We recently discovered that Hal Busse is still alive; she participated in one of the earliest ZERO shows, in Otto Piene’s studio. At the time, she was making red monochrome paintings with thousands of dots, and Uecker-like paintings with nails –not white, in different colors. Her work is very closely related to the obsessive Infinity Nets by the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. A few years later, Busse married the artist Klaus Bendixen and had to take care of the family. In Italy, the architect Nanda Vigo played a very important role for the ZERO network. She invited Lucio Fontana and Enrico Castellani to do installations in the houses she designed. But she also did independent artwork for the ZERO shows. Eduarda Maino (whose artist name was Dadamaino) was from the outset active in the Italian Azimuth group. Yayoi Kusama participated in almost all ZERO show from 1961 onwards. She did her first mirror installations after participating in an early ZERO show in Amsterdam. Lygia Pape could have been a ZERO artist, but decided after a near-fatal accident in Germany not to come back to Europe. Atsuko Tanaka, one of the founders of the Japanese Zero-kai group created (her Electric Dress is an icon) a very female expression that is at the same time highly technical.
Other female artists were around at the time who were pursuing slightly different agendas but were closely connected with ZERO artists: Yves Klein’s wife, Rotraut Uecker, and Niki de Saint Phalle, who was married to Jean Tinguely. And not to forget Hanne Darboven, a student of Almir Mavignier, whose early work displayed a number of parallels with that of the ZERO artists. Mary Baumeister, at the time married to Karlheinz Stockhausen, organized in her studio meetings with and for [ZERO] artists. That some of them did not play a role within the ZERO network does not mean that they are not important for us today. I am sure we will be able to find more female artists with an exciting history in the 1960s. Atsuko Tanaka was one of the completely forgotten until I included her in a ZERO show in 2006. Her husband, a conceptual artist from the Gutai group, stopped working so she could concentrate on her career.
DB Let me come back to the beginning of our conversation, to the question of why I think ZERO is so attractive again today –beyond the kind of theoretical, philosophical attempts of mine here to talk about retroactive animation and things like that. I simply think that their work is really interesting to most people who think about art, look at art, and want to experience art. And I’m not talking only about people involved in producing, selling, and collecting, but also those trying to understand how the history of our life on Earth has developed. There are many alternative histories. ZERO is now becoming a more widely known story, or part of a well-known narrative. It is my attempt and my wish, when involved in conversations like this, not to solidify and canonize a certain group of artists, but to remind ourselves of the fact that there are alternative stories. And the story of art is far richer than that of real life. Plus, it rhymes.
Tijs Visser, ZERO, the international art movement of the 50th and 80th, published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, Köln, 2015
