Nul
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If we declare the whole of the world’s development to be art, we’re done; art is finished(1)
Henk Peeters Something Is Almost Nothing (Not Something) – From Informal to Nul 1 April 1961: A stone’s throw from the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Galerie 201 organizes the ‘International Exhibition of NOTHING’. The Manifest tegen niets, or Manifesto Against Nothing, sent as an invitation to the exhibition, hacks away at the pillars of institutions like the Stedelijk Museum, whose director, Willem Sandberg, was still quoting Constant’s 1948 Experimental group manifesto as late as 1959: ‘A painting is not an arrangement of colours, but an animal, a person, a scream, or all of these at once.(2)’tegen niets seems to come from another planet: ‘A painting is worth just as much as no painting, a sculpture is just as good as no sculpture’ and ‘something is almost nothing (not something)’. An alert reader of the manifesto would have figured out that on the day announced for the exhibition the gallery will be closed and empty: ‘Having no art market is just as effective as having an art market.’(3) |
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The Manifest tegen niets and Einde (The End), a pamphlet published at the same time, were among the first activities of the Nul group, which consisted of Armando (b. 1929), Jan Henderikse (b 1937), Henk Peeters (b. 1925) and Jan Schoonhoven (1914-1994), although the name Nul appears nowhere in either text. ‘We need art like we need a hole in the head,’ Einde states. ‘From now on the undersigned pledge to work to disband art circles and close down exhibition facilities, which can then finally be put to worthier use.’(4) The Einde pamphlet imagines a new beginning, as Armando and Henk Peeters had already proclaimed in texts written several years earlier for the Dutch Informals.
The Dutch Informal Group – the later Nul group plus Kees van Bohemen – was founded in 1958.5 Until early 1961 its members showed works in oils or pigments mixed with plaster and sand, usually on panels, linen or jute. The group replaced the expression of emotions in paint with an attempt at an absence of visual signature, resulting in colourless and monochrome works virtually devoid of form or composition. After CoBrA, however, the Netherlands had little patience for yet another revolution-in-paint. Exhibitions by the Informals were panned by critics, virtually without exception: ‘Beneath the greyish crusts lurks the hand of a craftsman who denies his own gifts’ and, worse still, the painters ‘acknowledge no moral, religious or social imperatives’.(6)
The catalogue for the first exhibition of the Dutch Informal Group abroad, at the Galerie Gunar in Düsseldorf in 1959, included Armando’s text ‘Credo I’: There must be an entirely new art, and everything seems to indicate that it is on its way. No more beautiful and ugly, no more good and evil (they still exist), but an art that is no longer art, but a fact (like our paintings).7
The programmatic texts ‘Credo 2’ by Armando and ‘Vuil aan de lucht’ (a play on words alluding to a Dutch expression akin to ‘not a cloud in the sky’, in this case without the ‘not a’) by Henk Peeters, published a few months later, display a similarly sardonic undertone, make digs at people and wrong-foot the critics.(8) Asked for a reaction to a joint text, Jan Schoonhoven wrote: ‘The story, of course, is not quite accurate, but that’s probably irrelevant. Anyway, legends need inaccuracies.’(9)
The texts ‘Vuil aan de lucht’, ‘Credo I’ and ‘Credo 2’ were published during the Informal period, but they carried the seeds of Nul. An aversion to theorizing and institutionalized power – museums, galleries and art dealers – as well as mocking the romantic idea of the artistic genius re-emerged in expanded form during the Nul period. Nul was the fulfilment of the Informal aim to disavow the emotionally charged work of art. Not through a different approach to traditional academic materials like paint and canvas, but by seeking out different resources.
In 1958 Henk Peeters saw the work of Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri for the first time, at the Venice Biennale. Fontana’s escape ‘from the prison of the flat surface’ by piercing or slicing up the canvas and Burri’s material, burnt plastic, made a big impression on him.(10) Burri and Fontana played a vital role in the transition from paint on canvas or panel to the use of indus- trial materials and the abandonment of the flat surface. Barely a year later, in 1959, Henk Peeters burned two rows of holes in a painting, 1959-03, and Armando set nails in the ends of a panel, 10 zwarte spijkers op zwart (10 Black Nails on Black). These works marked a transitional phase from pain- ting to Nul work; they are iconoclastic intermediate steps taken by Peeters and Armando on their new path. Henderikse also turned his back on pain- ting in 1959, with assemblages of everyday objects, and toward 1960 Schoonhoven strived, in frozen, increasingly whiter reliefs, ‘by avoiding in- tentional form . . . for a much greater organic reality of the artificial in and of itself’. These are works that, according to Schoonhoven, offer the possibility ‘to arrive at [an] objectively neutral expression of the generally applicable’.(11)
Nul – Establishing Reality as Art12
The Dutch Nul group manifested itself in form and name in 1961. Armando, Jan Henderikse, Henk Peeters and Jan Schoonhoven first exhibited their new, non-painting work at the ‘Internationale Malerei 1960-61’ exhibition in Wolframs-Eschenbach, Germany, although they took part as individuals rather than as a group.(13) Only with ‘Nederlandse Kunst 1960-’61’ (Dutch Art 1960-’61), the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum’s summer presentation, did the artists make their debut under the name ‘groep nul’.(14) The first issue of the new group’s internationally oriented ‘house organ’, the journal revue nul = 0, edited by Armando, Henk Peeters and Herman de Vries, came out in November 1961. With contributions by artists who a year later would take part in the first Nul exhibition at the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum, the journal presented a good overview of the main themes of the international ZERO movement. The successor to revue nul = 0, the 1965 journal de nieuwe stijl (The New Style) also published texts about and by international ZERO artists.15 The name ‘ZERO’, in capital letters, refers to the international movement that emerged around the journal ZERO, published in 1958 and 1961 by German artists Heinz Mack and Otto Piene.(16) The movement found sympathizers in countries like Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and Venezuela. Since the late 1950s the Dutch had established close ties with the German Zero group led by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene (Günther Uecker joined the group in 1961), as well as with Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani of the Italian group Azimut, the French Nouveau Réaliste Yves Klein and Japan’s Yayoi Kusama.
Nul’s pragmatism, its sober approach to the world, to the product of art, to being an artist and to reality, is expressed in the formal characteristics of its works, but also in its everyday practice, in the way works were created and exhibited, the way artists operated and presented themselves. A 1961 photo shows four clean-shaven gentlemen in suits at the opening of the ‘Avantgarde 61’ exhibition in Trier. The Nul artists aimed to shed the stereo- typed image of the bohemian in a painting smock and had a fresh attitude towards the consumer society, quite at odds with the artistic scene of the early 1960s. Nul was a search for new relationships between art and reality, with at its base the rejection of uniqueness, authenticity and decorative attractiveness in the traditional sense of the word. The group reduced the multicoloured to the monochrome and opted for repetition, seriality and the directness of everyday materials and objects, in use and effect. Even its conceptual aspect, the splitting of thought and action, of conception, production as well as the possibility of repeat production was, in the footsteps of Marcel Duchamp, linked to a different interpretation of ideas like crafts- manship and expertise. At the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1962, for in- stance, Armando and Jan Henderikse left the setting up of their installations to museum staff, and in 1965, at Peeters’ request, Yayoi Kusama produced a work in his material, card sliver, a spun synthetic fibre. ‘The process of creation is . . . completely unimportant and uninteresting; a machine can do it,’ Peeters said. ‘The personal element lies in the idea and no longer in the manufacture.’(17)
Jan Schoonhoven’s ‘objectively neutral expression of the generally applicable’ persisted throughout Nul, and in his work, monochrome – the reduction of all colour to white – was the chosen instrument. Henk Peeters also considered monochrome a levelling effect that could bridge contradictions across the two-dimensional plane, although his work was never as explicitly monochrome as Jan Schoonhoven’s. Armando saw a straight line from his monochrome oil paintings of the late 1950s to his assemblages of bolts and barbed wire during the Nul period. In both instances, to Armando, mono- chrome was a farewell to the psychology of the maker; the monochrome surface is frozen and anonymous – as far as it goes.(18) In Henderikse’s work monochrome played a far more modest role, although in 1959 he was al- ready painting his earliest assemblages black. Mass and multiplication were Henderikse’s major methods of reducing the personal element: ‘I hate little stories but I really love a lot of stuff, of all those things people love, everyday things especially. It’s always been that way.’(19)
Archetypal Nul work seems constructed out of a multiplication of uniform and isolated forms, objects or phenomena: as a linkage of steel bolts, rows of matchboxes, an array of identical white surfaces or the repetition of burn holes and cotton balls. In 1965 Schoonhoven made bold pronouncements on seriality, on the repeated pattern of identical elements. Organization ‘. . . comes out of the need to avoid partiality’ and had nothing to do with geo- metric structure. To Schoonhoven, Nul’s method was driven by its intentions, by the consistent acceptance of isolated reality without accentuating any one thing, with no high points or low points.(20) Armando spoke of ‘intensifying one of the elements out of which a painting used to be constructed’, because ‘. . . combining fragments is an obsolete method’.(21) Seriality was their common way of expressing their refusal to compose, although each found his own material and method: Armando’s seriality is more frozen than Henderikse’s, harder than that of Peeters and more direct in material than Schoonhoven’s.
Machine-made objects and materials also proved ideal for taking the personality aspect out of the work. The choice was not linked to any deeper notion; the material is most of all ‘itself’ in all its ordinary beauty. This acceptance of reality implied that the contribution of the artist, aside from making the choice, was often reduced to a minimum. In 1960 Henderikse signed Düsseldorf’s Oberkassel Bridge in whitewash; three years later he made plans to sign a HEMA shop in Amsterdam, to turn it into the biggest ready-made assemblage ever.(22) These are examples of radical adaptations of reality, like Armando’s 1964 installation of oil drums at the Gemeente- museum in The Hague. According to the Nul artist, there was little you could do to improve on a piece of isolated reality in its unadulterated form. ‘Everything was beautiful,’ Armando said in 1975. ‘Everything was interes- ting. One big eye, that’s how I felt.’(23)
For Peeters, the choice of synthetic products and plastic cut both ways. The material was free of visual signature, but it was also emphatically un- painterly and an expression of resistance against the academic establishment and the rules of the game: ‘You were contributing to the destruction of the commercial aspect of art.’(24) To undermine the retinal aspect of art, the precious and status-based object as a fetish for the eye, Peeters envisaged one more method: to bypass ‘seeing’ altogether and appeal to the sense of touch. Peeters’s ‘tactilist’ works of cotton wool, feathers, hair pieces, nylon thread or fake fur are ‘objects of greater interest to senses other than the eye’.(25)
Jan Schoonhoven is the only one who never ‘annexed’ objects or ready- made materials. Schoonhoven saw his reliefs as ‘spiritual reality’, as a re- presentation of forms out of reality and therefore, in a roundabout way, fit- ting within the Nul idiom.(26) One exception to the rule was his wall of folded and stacked boxes in the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague in 1964. If we take a signatureless use of industrially produced material as a requisite, this is Schoonhoven’s only ‘pure’ Nul work – not to mention directly taken from reality, since Schoonhoven had spotted the stacked boxes in the attic of the Histor paint factory.(27)
The work of Herman de Vries, who worked as an editor at the journal revue nul = 0 until 1963, shows similarities with Nul in terms of form, although he was never part of the movement’s hard core. Using monochrome-white structural reliefs and objects, De Vries sought to convey visual information stripped of personality and partiality. However, his scientific approach as a foundation for the form did not fit in so well with Nul’s more sober outlook.(28) In 1962 De Vries shared a room with Jan Henderikse, Henk Peeters and Jan Schoonhoven in the first Nul exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, but he did not take part in the second exhibition, held in the same museum in 1965.(29) And yet Schoonhoven’s pointed text about ZERO and Nul, about ‘. . . showing the essence of reality, the actual reality of materials, of localized things in isolated clarity’ comes through in De Vries’s work.(30)
The identity of the Dutch Nul group navigated between a cheerful orientation towards the world of the everyday and the cool sobriety of the serial monochrome. Whereas the German Zero artists were still ‘painting’ with the elements, with the effects of fire, light, shadow, movement and reflection, the Nul artist preferred to let reality speak for itself by isolating it, usually in raw form. Among the Dutch, only Henk Peeters worked with the elements water and fire – although Peeters saw his ‘pyrographs’, soot and scorch marks on various surfaces, as a typically Nul solution to the elimination of any excessively personal element: to work with the fickleness of a flame is ‘. . . to let go of the work and to become the spectator of a self-directed performance’.(31) In terms of form, Peeters’s tactile cotton balls, whether on a canvas or on a wall as a three-dimensional installation, are balanced on the cusp between Nul and the German Zero.
‘It is not our job to educate, any more than it is our job to convey messages,’ said Piero Manzoni in 1960.(32) This might as easily have been a state- ment by Henk Peeters, by Jan Henderikse and even by the German Zero group. And yet the sober-minded outlook of the Dutch distinguished itself from the German Zero. ‘Yes, I dream of a better world. Should I dream of a worse?’ wrote Otto Piene in ‘Paths to Paradise’ in 1961.(33) With their clear- eyed view of reality, the members of Nul were not dreaming of the world, neither a better nor a worse, and certainly not of ‘paths to paradise’. During the Nul period, radicalism and a sincerely felt admiration for what was new and contemporary went hand in hand; nimble provocation is what Nul seemed to have a patent on.
ZERO – A New Conception in a European Perspective
The international orientation of the Dutch Nul group is closely related to the way exhibitions were organized in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Exhi- bitions such as ‘Vision in Motion – Motion in Vision’ at the Hessenhuis in Antwerp (1959), Udo Kultermann’s ‘Monochrome Malerei’ (Monochrome Painting) in Leverkusen (1960) and ‘Avantgarde 61’ in Trier (1961) led to an intensifying of contacts, based on a shared distaste of the emotionally charged, painterly gesture. These exhibitions were eye-openers, not least for the participants themselves. ‘Vision in Motion’ brought different Euro- pean avant-garde movements together for the first time, showing current developments across the board, from monochrome to kinetic art, the use of light in three-dimensional installations and the work of the latter Nouveau Réalistes. The exhibition was organized by Jean Tinguely, Paul van Hoeydonck, Pol Bury and Daniel Spoerri at the invitation of the Antwerp artists’ collective G 58.(34)
The exhibition ‘Monochrome Malerei’ played a significant role for the Dutch Nul artists.Henderikse met Lucio Fontana there, and remembers the taglie he exhibited, razor-sharp cuts in canvas; they seemed to him the inevitable conclusion of the Informal trajectory.(35) For Henk Peeters, ‘Mono- chrome Malerei’ was the inspiration for an internationally oriented phase as an artist-curator. At Jan Henderikse’s urging, Peeters went to Leverkusen and saw the works in storage, after the exhibition was over. A few weeks later, Peeters let its organizer, Udo Kultermann, know that he would like to bring the exhibition to Amsterdam.(36) Peeters’ initial idea was to duplicate the exhibition in its entirety, although he indicated in a letter to prospective participants that he also wanted to show ‘experiments in the domain of light and three-dimensional installations’.(37) Several months later, however, he found out that Daniel Spoerri was working on the same theme for the Stedelijk Museum. Peeters worried that the field would be ‘grazed bare’, as he intended to focus, just as Spoerri’s exhibition ‘Bewogen Beweging’ (Moving Movement) would, on ‘non-painterly aspects’. Peeters sought a solution in exhibiting on-going developments in painting, with the emphasis on emptiness and monochrome.38 How quickly the plans evolved was made clear when Peeters submitted his plans to Willem Sandberg in February 1961: by that time there was a provisional list of 28 participating ‘painters’ – note the inverted commas – and Peeters envisaged the exhibition as ‘. . . a week of international demonstrations in which something can happen on a daily basis’.(39) On the spur of the moment the exhibition was initially entitled ‘De laatste schilders’ (The Last Painters), but this proved a mere afterthought.(40) In the spring of 1961 Armando, Jan Henderikse, Yves Klein and Henk Peeters met in Günther Uecker’s Düsseldorf studio to discuss further elaboration of the plans, and correspondence also shows that Peeters consulted intensively with Günther Uecker and Piero Manzoni.(41) Thanks to these ‘conversations with colleagues’, as Peeters called them, a new exhibition concept emerged in the course of barely a year. Peeters’ role as liaison, organizer and promoter of ‘the cause’ was the foundation for the first Nul exhibition in Amsterdam in March 1962.
‘Ultimately, it turns out, it all came out of coincidences,’ said Peeters about the emergence of an international network.(42) In 1957, Yves Klein met Rotraut Uecker, Günther Uecker’s sister, at a party at Arman’s in Nice. Klein did not speak German, and so Rotraut became his link with the Germans: when Klein exhibited work in Germany, Rotraut would accompany him and translate. Jan Henderikse became friends with Uecker in 1959, almost as soon as he moved to Cologne, and the latter told him about a vacant studio in Düsseldorf; Henderikse’s new neighbours were Joseph Beuys and the German Zero artist Gotthard Graubner. At Uecker’s studio Henderikse saw the nail objects that would be shown for the first time at the ‘Vision in Motion’ exhibition in Antwerp later that year.(43)
The Dutch Informal Group had its first presentation abroad in February 1959, at Galerie Gunar in Düsseldorf. Otto Piene came to see the exhibition and was to stay in touch with Henk Peeters from that point on. In February 1960 Peeters met Hans Haacke while setting up an exhibition of the Dutch Informal Group in Kassel.(44) Haacke came to the gallery as the exhibition’s photographer, but he also spoke with Peeters about his own work, white-monochrome embossed prints on paper, already in the spirit of ZERO (unlike the Dutch artists’ Informal paintings). This would lead to Haacke’s participation in the first Nul exhibition at the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum, in 1962. The initial contact with Yves Klein also took place in 1960, through Peeters’ visit to the Iris Clert gallery in Paris. Later that year, when they took part in the exhibition ‘Prix Suisse de Peinture Abstraite’ (Swiss Prize for Abstract Painting) at the Georges Kasper gallery in Lausanne, Peeters and Henderikse met fellow exhibition participant Christian Megert.(45) When he organized two exhibitions in Bern that same year, ‘Internationale Avantgarde 1960’ and ‘Neue Malerei’ (New Painting), Megert included work by the Dutch Informals. The exhibition ‘Avantgarde 61’ was the first significant international presentation in which the Dutch artists exhibited work under the name ‘Nul’.
Between 1957 and 1961, Otto Piene and Heinz Mack organized a series of evening exhibitions at their studios in Düsseldorf and used the occasion to present two issues of the journal ZERO, which was a catalogue for the exhibitions and a platform for European sympathizers all rolled into one. The journal’s third issue, which featured work by Henk Peeters and Jan Schoonhoven, was presented during ‘ZERO – Edition, Exposition, Demonstration’ at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf in July 1961.(46) Peeters attended the ZERO happening at Galerie Schmela; it inspired him to open Galerie A in Arnhem later that year and to bring the Düsseldorf event to the Netherlands. ‘Expositie, demonstratie ZERO’ was the Netherlands’ first broad introduction to the international ZERO movement.(47) In the Netherlands, the official art circuit took very little notice of the Informal Group, the later Nul group and the international ZERO movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Cor de Nobel’s Galerie .31 in Dordrecht – again an artist’s initiative – was the only serious podium for artists working in the informal genre, beginning in 1957. Piero Manzoni exhibited work for the first time in the Netherlands in September 1958. Jan Henderikse and Jan Schoonhoven visited this exhibition, organized by Hans Sonnenberg at the Rotterdam Kunstkring.(48) Henk Peeters saw Manzoni’s work for the first time in April 1959 at Galerie De Posthoorn in The Hague. Henderikse recalls Manzoni’s first solo exhibition in the Netherlands: ‘For us it was really a jolt to see that much work that was that provocative. Jan [Schoonhoven] was hugely impressed by the order in Manzoni’s work. And of course everything was white, pure white!’(49)
On 8 April 1960, Hans Sonnenberg’s Internationale Galerij in The Hague was rechristened Internationale galerij OREZ and opened with a solo exhibition by Piero Manzoni.(50) OREZ, led from 1960 by Leo Verboon, was quick to join forces with the international ZERO movement and in January 1962 organized ‘Nieuwe tendenzen’ (New Tendencies), an ambitious exhibition featuring 40 participants, 23 of which would also take part in the first Nul exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum a few months later. In December 1960, Hans Sonnenberg opened Galerie Delta in Rotterdam. In 1962 the gallery exhibited work by Enrico Castellani, Piero Manzoni and Jan Schoonhoven. The ‘mikro nul zero’ exhibition in 1964 showed work by artists including the German Zero group, the Dutch Nul artists, Piero Manzoni, Enrico Castellani, Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Arman, Jef Verheyen and Yayoi Kusama. The Amstel 47 gallery in Amsterdam also held prominent presentations, though ‘Panorama van de nieuwe tendenzen’ (Panorama of The New Tendencies) and ‘mikro nul zero’ took place somewhat later, in 1963 and 1964, respectively.(51)
Leo Verboon and Albert Vogel of Internationale galerij OREZ made plans to organize a large-scale happening, ‘Zero on Sea’ on the pier at Scheveningen in 1966, with contributions by 36 artists from ten countries. With their open character, the plans for this true ZERO Gesamtkunstwerk (synthesis of the arts), involving sculpture and installation art, music, theatre and even poetry, exuded the spirit of ZERO.(52) But a combination of financial difficulties and the unpredictable Dutch weather proved fatal to the project; ‘Zero on Sea’ remained nothing more than a utopian idea. The prospect of art in the midst of bathers and chip-stands must have undoubtedly appealed to Henderikse and Peeters. A year earlier, in October 1965, Peeters had already made a ‘water ceiling’ for a glove manufacturer’s stand at the Amsterdam garment fair, using plastic bags filled with water; Kusama had produced a hanging assemblage of rubber gloves for the occasion. Like ‘Zero on Sea’, these are the ultimate embodiments of the desire to detach the work of art from a strictly academic and museum setting.
Benchmarks – Museum Presentations in the Netherlands, 1962-1965
There were three major ZERO museum presentations in the Netherlands, two in Amsterdam, ‘Nul’ (1962, hereafter called Nul62) and ‘nul negentien- honderd vijf en zestig’ (1965, hereafter called Nul65), and one in the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, ‘ZERO-0-NUL’ (1964). Nul62 has since taken on mythic proportions, yet a certain adjustment to its perception is required, particularly in regard to the role of director Willem Sandberg. Nul62 only happened because of an unexpected gap in the museum’s schedule, an intensive lobbying effort and the artists agreeing to shoulder the costs themselves – including transport, set-up, insurance and even posters and catalogues.(53) Willem Sandberg’s contribution was limited to making the exhibition space available; he had no serious involvement in the on-going developments around Nul or ZERO.
The entries for the first exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum show the vast differences among the participants, in terms of form and programme – although the common denominator was still the search for a value-free art divorced from the psychology of its maker. This explains the contrast between such displays as the Salle de lumière (a darkened corner room featuring Otto Piene’s light projections and works by Heinz Mack and Günther Uecker), Jan Henderikse’s installation of beer crates, Henk Peeters’s cotton-ball tactile pieces and the monochrome paintings of the Belgian artist Jef Verheyen. The exhibition illustrated how ZERO had succeeded in stretching the traditional concept of art: from the fascination with the ele- ments fire and water, monochrome, movement and vibration, to the ‘annexa- tion’ of consumer goods and the use of industrial materials. In a few instan- ces, however, this led to friction among the participants. The German Zero group, for instance, were uncomfortable with the conceptual and in their view rather crass character of Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista (Artist’s Shit), the artist’s tinned faeces. Henk Peeters recalls Manzoni’s suggestion to re- lease 20 chickens – monochrome white and kinetic, after all – into the Ger- man Salle de lumière during the opening, as an act of sweet revenge.(54)
Afterwards the participants were somewhat disappointed by this first museum presentation in the Netherlands: the plans had been grand and ground-breaking, but some had also been unfeasible or too expensive. On the way to Amsterdam to consult with Sandberg, in 1960, bad weather on the motorway inspired the idea of a museum filled with fog, about isolating this monochrome natural phenomenon in rooms containing Breitners, Mondriaans and Appels – the ultimate levelling of the painterly gesture, it seems. Rooms – environments really – filled with drizzle, foam and mounds of snow and ice never materialized either. Sandberg was willing to listen, but ultimately he was a director of painters: ‘Guys, would you please remember I still have some Van Goghs upstairs for my successor?’(55)
At the end of March Nul62 had to make way for an exhibition of children’s drawings, and the day after the show closed the artists found their works piled up, unprotected and in some cases damaged, in a corner of an exhibition room.(56) A work made on location by Manzoni had been thrown out with the rubbish.(57) Only later that year would the Stedelijk Museum acquire two works by the Nul group, a relief by Jan Schoonhoven, R62-16, and a pyrograph by Peeters, 60-06, although Sandberg’s annotation on the purchase of Schoonhoven’s work speaks volumes: ‘Can be exchanged (has little in stock at the moment)’. Peeters’ pyrograph was obtained as payment of debts after the exhibition.(58) And yet plans were soon made for a second Nul exhibition, which was supposed to take place at director Edy de Wilde’s Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven in October 1963. Peeters started inviting various artists to participate at the beginning of that year, and even designed a stamp for the occasion himself, bearing the words ‘Exposition Nul 2’.(59) However, a second, large-scale Nul exhibition would not take place until 1965, at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. By then, ‘Eindhoven’ director Edy de Wilde had succeeded Willem Sandberg in Amsterdam.(60)
As a few years passed, Dutch museums became somewhat more accommodating, in funding, operational support and a show of involvement in what actually filled the exhibition rooms, although the press still expressed the same disapproval about ‘ZERO-0-NUL’ at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague in 1964.61 Het Parool mostly found Armando’s Zwart water (Black Water) amusing: ‘One visitor tosses a match into it, another some scraps of paper, while some people spit in the water. Fodder for psychologists!’(62) Nul65 opened in April 1965 and featured works by the Nul group, the Ger- man Zero group, the Italian Gruppo T, the Japanese Gutai group and artists such as Yayoi Kusama, George Ricky, Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni. Henk Peeters had wanted to invite the Japanese Gutai group in 1962. ‘Yves Klein will take care of Japan,’ Peeters wrote Sandberg in February 1961 about the line-up of participants.(63) But Klein changed his mind about taking part in the exhibition in Amsterdam and pulled out barely five weeks before the opening.(64) It was only after the exhibition that Peeters was able to make contact with the Gutai group.(65)
The longer duration of Nul65 seems to be an indication of an evolving climate: Sandberg had allowed no more than 16 days in 1962. Peeters was again the exhibition’s organizer in 1965, now with curator Ad Petersen and designer and collector Martin Visser. However, Peeters says director Edy de Wilde made a point of emphatically differentiating himself from his predecessor Sandberg, more as a corrective exercise than out of any genuine interest.(66) Still, in 1965 the Stedelijk Museum organized, paid for and insured the transportation of the works to Amsterdam, took care of setting up the exhibition rooms and published a two-part catalogue. Following the example of Daniel Spoerri’s successful Edition MAT, an idea emerged in June 1964 to generate some extra income by publishing an Editie ZERO of do-it-yourself art works, with a numbered and signed certificate.(67) Henk Peeters made Armando’s and Ricky’s prototypes, and Ad Petersen handled the production of Fontana’s work. De Wilde found the plan too financially risky, however, and pulled out. The artists involved had hoped the publica- tion would help offset the expenses of the exhibition, incurred among other things in shipping back their works. The project never really got off the ground, although Peeters and Petersen were still in touch with artists about the plans as late as 1967.(68)
Aside from Armando’s and Henderikse’s installations of car tyres and beer crates, Nul62 still showed many works on canvas and panel, including in smaller sizes. The installations of 1964 and 1965 provided a glimpse of a growing realization that the world was bigger and more beautiful than could be captured within the four sides of a frame. In 1964 the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague displayed large installations: in addition to Uecker, Piene and Mack’s Salle de lumière, there were also Armando’s oil drums and the unfathomable depths of his Zwart water, Peeters’s walls of cotton balls and shiny paint cans, and Schoonhoven’s wall of stacked cardboard.(69) The Nul instal- lations have a historical context, but their construction is also context-free: they can and may be reconstructed without erasing the ‘signature of the maker’. Ultimately Nul’s installations are also about the ‘authenticity of what is demonstrated, of the information’, as Armando said in 1965, and not about the touch of the artist.(70)
And yet ZERO eventually became ‘established’, as Armando put it; ‘the essential points of Nul’, as K. Schippers called them, were reluctantly accepted and gradually canonized.(71) To be embraced by the establishment was perceived, certainly by Armando and Henk Peeters, as the kiss of death, as though the struggle of resistance had all been for nothing. By then ZERO’s utopian ideology had also faded, due to differences of outlook within the groups, both within Nul and the German Zero, to developments in the work of individual members or to the abandonment of the agreement that only together could anything be achieved. Everyday life seemed to catch up with Nul’s practice: plastic turned out to be not just beautiful, but polluting as well, apparently art was needed more than ‘like a hole in the head’ and even trouble- makers ended up, against their will, tidily spotlighted in the museum gallery.
In April 1966, at the same time as the exhibition ‘Zero on Sea’, which presented the design plans for the cancelled project – the unofficial end to the international ZERO movement – the Internationale galerij OREZ held Peeters’ solo exhibition ‘Nul = 0 II’.(72) Peeters wrote a short text prior to the exhibition: ‘The works exhibited are intended only as examples of mass- produced articles . . . which can be ordered in any size and any colour de- sired.’ A stamp on the back left room to fill in by hand the dates of design and manufacture and the number of the work – even though the edition was unlimited. The announced incineration of the originals once the first ‘mass-produced articles’ had been made did not take place, but a short text that was supposed to be read out afterwards does survive: ‘The age of the unique work of art is over. . . . From now on I will no longer sign any work. . . . Under present conditions only copyright is upheld, even though it’s considered nonsense.’(73) The exhibition was the ultimate consequence of Peeters’ efforts to finish with authenticity, uniqueness and the status-dependent work of art. And, for a good number of years, with the mixed blessings of being an artist as well: for a long time after 1965 Peeters focused exclusively on his teaching at the Academy of Arts in Arnhem. Armando stopped for two years after 1965, and in 1968 Jan Henderikse announced that his switch to film and photography meant the end of his ‘hanging and standing art’.(74) Only Jan Schoonhoven kept working, unruffled, on his oeuvre of crisp- white reliefs and pen drawings, although by about 1980 the expressiveness and dynamism of his signature style from before Nul had resurfaced.
‘We need an entirely new art,’ Armando wrote in 1959.(75) Over ten years later Peeters would make a correction: ‘No, we need an entirely new public.’(76) In 1965, at the Stedelijk Museum, that still seemed a bridge too far: ‘The public is infected by the critics. They walk through the rooms screeching and snorting and wrecking everything.’(77) Nearly half a century later that public finally seems to have arrived. Everything is a question of timing, says Peeters: ‘Art is like camembert, either unripe or already spoiled.’(78)
Antoon Melissen, Berlin, 2010
See for the related images: nul=0, The Dutch Nul Group in an International Context.
Published by the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam and NAi Publishers, Schiedam, 2011
The Dutch Informal Group – the later Nul group plus Kees van Bohemen – was founded in 1958.5 Until early 1961 its members showed works in oils or pigments mixed with plaster and sand, usually on panels, linen or jute. The group replaced the expression of emotions in paint with an attempt at an absence of visual signature, resulting in colourless and monochrome works virtually devoid of form or composition. After CoBrA, however, the Netherlands had little patience for yet another revolution-in-paint. Exhibitions by the Informals were panned by critics, virtually without exception: ‘Beneath the greyish crusts lurks the hand of a craftsman who denies his own gifts’ and, worse still, the painters ‘acknowledge no moral, religious or social imperatives’.(6)
The catalogue for the first exhibition of the Dutch Informal Group abroad, at the Galerie Gunar in Düsseldorf in 1959, included Armando’s text ‘Credo I’: There must be an entirely new art, and everything seems to indicate that it is on its way. No more beautiful and ugly, no more good and evil (they still exist), but an art that is no longer art, but a fact (like our paintings).7
The programmatic texts ‘Credo 2’ by Armando and ‘Vuil aan de lucht’ (a play on words alluding to a Dutch expression akin to ‘not a cloud in the sky’, in this case without the ‘not a’) by Henk Peeters, published a few months later, display a similarly sardonic undertone, make digs at people and wrong-foot the critics.(8) Asked for a reaction to a joint text, Jan Schoonhoven wrote: ‘The story, of course, is not quite accurate, but that’s probably irrelevant. Anyway, legends need inaccuracies.’(9)
The texts ‘Vuil aan de lucht’, ‘Credo I’ and ‘Credo 2’ were published during the Informal period, but they carried the seeds of Nul. An aversion to theorizing and institutionalized power – museums, galleries and art dealers – as well as mocking the romantic idea of the artistic genius re-emerged in expanded form during the Nul period. Nul was the fulfilment of the Informal aim to disavow the emotionally charged work of art. Not through a different approach to traditional academic materials like paint and canvas, but by seeking out different resources.
In 1958 Henk Peeters saw the work of Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri for the first time, at the Venice Biennale. Fontana’s escape ‘from the prison of the flat surface’ by piercing or slicing up the canvas and Burri’s material, burnt plastic, made a big impression on him.(10) Burri and Fontana played a vital role in the transition from paint on canvas or panel to the use of indus- trial materials and the abandonment of the flat surface. Barely a year later, in 1959, Henk Peeters burned two rows of holes in a painting, 1959-03, and Armando set nails in the ends of a panel, 10 zwarte spijkers op zwart (10 Black Nails on Black). These works marked a transitional phase from pain- ting to Nul work; they are iconoclastic intermediate steps taken by Peeters and Armando on their new path. Henderikse also turned his back on pain- ting in 1959, with assemblages of everyday objects, and toward 1960 Schoonhoven strived, in frozen, increasingly whiter reliefs, ‘by avoiding in- tentional form . . . for a much greater organic reality of the artificial in and of itself’. These are works that, according to Schoonhoven, offer the possibility ‘to arrive at [an] objectively neutral expression of the generally applicable’.(11)
Nul – Establishing Reality as Art12
The Dutch Nul group manifested itself in form and name in 1961. Armando, Jan Henderikse, Henk Peeters and Jan Schoonhoven first exhibited their new, non-painting work at the ‘Internationale Malerei 1960-61’ exhibition in Wolframs-Eschenbach, Germany, although they took part as individuals rather than as a group.(13) Only with ‘Nederlandse Kunst 1960-’61’ (Dutch Art 1960-’61), the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum’s summer presentation, did the artists make their debut under the name ‘groep nul’.(14) The first issue of the new group’s internationally oriented ‘house organ’, the journal revue nul = 0, edited by Armando, Henk Peeters and Herman de Vries, came out in November 1961. With contributions by artists who a year later would take part in the first Nul exhibition at the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum, the journal presented a good overview of the main themes of the international ZERO movement. The successor to revue nul = 0, the 1965 journal de nieuwe stijl (The New Style) also published texts about and by international ZERO artists.15 The name ‘ZERO’, in capital letters, refers to the international movement that emerged around the journal ZERO, published in 1958 and 1961 by German artists Heinz Mack and Otto Piene.(16) The movement found sympathizers in countries like Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and Venezuela. Since the late 1950s the Dutch had established close ties with the German Zero group led by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene (Günther Uecker joined the group in 1961), as well as with Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani of the Italian group Azimut, the French Nouveau Réaliste Yves Klein and Japan’s Yayoi Kusama.
Nul’s pragmatism, its sober approach to the world, to the product of art, to being an artist and to reality, is expressed in the formal characteristics of its works, but also in its everyday practice, in the way works were created and exhibited, the way artists operated and presented themselves. A 1961 photo shows four clean-shaven gentlemen in suits at the opening of the ‘Avantgarde 61’ exhibition in Trier. The Nul artists aimed to shed the stereo- typed image of the bohemian in a painting smock and had a fresh attitude towards the consumer society, quite at odds with the artistic scene of the early 1960s. Nul was a search for new relationships between art and reality, with at its base the rejection of uniqueness, authenticity and decorative attractiveness in the traditional sense of the word. The group reduced the multicoloured to the monochrome and opted for repetition, seriality and the directness of everyday materials and objects, in use and effect. Even its conceptual aspect, the splitting of thought and action, of conception, production as well as the possibility of repeat production was, in the footsteps of Marcel Duchamp, linked to a different interpretation of ideas like crafts- manship and expertise. At the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1962, for in- stance, Armando and Jan Henderikse left the setting up of their installations to museum staff, and in 1965, at Peeters’ request, Yayoi Kusama produced a work in his material, card sliver, a spun synthetic fibre. ‘The process of creation is . . . completely unimportant and uninteresting; a machine can do it,’ Peeters said. ‘The personal element lies in the idea and no longer in the manufacture.’(17)
Jan Schoonhoven’s ‘objectively neutral expression of the generally applicable’ persisted throughout Nul, and in his work, monochrome – the reduction of all colour to white – was the chosen instrument. Henk Peeters also considered monochrome a levelling effect that could bridge contradictions across the two-dimensional plane, although his work was never as explicitly monochrome as Jan Schoonhoven’s. Armando saw a straight line from his monochrome oil paintings of the late 1950s to his assemblages of bolts and barbed wire during the Nul period. In both instances, to Armando, mono- chrome was a farewell to the psychology of the maker; the monochrome surface is frozen and anonymous – as far as it goes.(18) In Henderikse’s work monochrome played a far more modest role, although in 1959 he was al- ready painting his earliest assemblages black. Mass and multiplication were Henderikse’s major methods of reducing the personal element: ‘I hate little stories but I really love a lot of stuff, of all those things people love, everyday things especially. It’s always been that way.’(19)
Archetypal Nul work seems constructed out of a multiplication of uniform and isolated forms, objects or phenomena: as a linkage of steel bolts, rows of matchboxes, an array of identical white surfaces or the repetition of burn holes and cotton balls. In 1965 Schoonhoven made bold pronouncements on seriality, on the repeated pattern of identical elements. Organization ‘. . . comes out of the need to avoid partiality’ and had nothing to do with geo- metric structure. To Schoonhoven, Nul’s method was driven by its intentions, by the consistent acceptance of isolated reality without accentuating any one thing, with no high points or low points.(20) Armando spoke of ‘intensifying one of the elements out of which a painting used to be constructed’, because ‘. . . combining fragments is an obsolete method’.(21) Seriality was their common way of expressing their refusal to compose, although each found his own material and method: Armando’s seriality is more frozen than Henderikse’s, harder than that of Peeters and more direct in material than Schoonhoven’s.
Machine-made objects and materials also proved ideal for taking the personality aspect out of the work. The choice was not linked to any deeper notion; the material is most of all ‘itself’ in all its ordinary beauty. This acceptance of reality implied that the contribution of the artist, aside from making the choice, was often reduced to a minimum. In 1960 Henderikse signed Düsseldorf’s Oberkassel Bridge in whitewash; three years later he made plans to sign a HEMA shop in Amsterdam, to turn it into the biggest ready-made assemblage ever.(22) These are examples of radical adaptations of reality, like Armando’s 1964 installation of oil drums at the Gemeente- museum in The Hague. According to the Nul artist, there was little you could do to improve on a piece of isolated reality in its unadulterated form. ‘Everything was beautiful,’ Armando said in 1975. ‘Everything was interes- ting. One big eye, that’s how I felt.’(23)
For Peeters, the choice of synthetic products and plastic cut both ways. The material was free of visual signature, but it was also emphatically un- painterly and an expression of resistance against the academic establishment and the rules of the game: ‘You were contributing to the destruction of the commercial aspect of art.’(24) To undermine the retinal aspect of art, the precious and status-based object as a fetish for the eye, Peeters envisaged one more method: to bypass ‘seeing’ altogether and appeal to the sense of touch. Peeters’s ‘tactilist’ works of cotton wool, feathers, hair pieces, nylon thread or fake fur are ‘objects of greater interest to senses other than the eye’.(25)
Jan Schoonhoven is the only one who never ‘annexed’ objects or ready- made materials. Schoonhoven saw his reliefs as ‘spiritual reality’, as a re- presentation of forms out of reality and therefore, in a roundabout way, fit- ting within the Nul idiom.(26) One exception to the rule was his wall of folded and stacked boxes in the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague in 1964. If we take a signatureless use of industrially produced material as a requisite, this is Schoonhoven’s only ‘pure’ Nul work – not to mention directly taken from reality, since Schoonhoven had spotted the stacked boxes in the attic of the Histor paint factory.(27)
The work of Herman de Vries, who worked as an editor at the journal revue nul = 0 until 1963, shows similarities with Nul in terms of form, although he was never part of the movement’s hard core. Using monochrome-white structural reliefs and objects, De Vries sought to convey visual information stripped of personality and partiality. However, his scientific approach as a foundation for the form did not fit in so well with Nul’s more sober outlook.(28) In 1962 De Vries shared a room with Jan Henderikse, Henk Peeters and Jan Schoonhoven in the first Nul exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, but he did not take part in the second exhibition, held in the same museum in 1965.(29) And yet Schoonhoven’s pointed text about ZERO and Nul, about ‘. . . showing the essence of reality, the actual reality of materials, of localized things in isolated clarity’ comes through in De Vries’s work.(30)
The identity of the Dutch Nul group navigated between a cheerful orientation towards the world of the everyday and the cool sobriety of the serial monochrome. Whereas the German Zero artists were still ‘painting’ with the elements, with the effects of fire, light, shadow, movement and reflection, the Nul artist preferred to let reality speak for itself by isolating it, usually in raw form. Among the Dutch, only Henk Peeters worked with the elements water and fire – although Peeters saw his ‘pyrographs’, soot and scorch marks on various surfaces, as a typically Nul solution to the elimination of any excessively personal element: to work with the fickleness of a flame is ‘. . . to let go of the work and to become the spectator of a self-directed performance’.(31) In terms of form, Peeters’s tactile cotton balls, whether on a canvas or on a wall as a three-dimensional installation, are balanced on the cusp between Nul and the German Zero.
‘It is not our job to educate, any more than it is our job to convey messages,’ said Piero Manzoni in 1960.(32) This might as easily have been a state- ment by Henk Peeters, by Jan Henderikse and even by the German Zero group. And yet the sober-minded outlook of the Dutch distinguished itself from the German Zero. ‘Yes, I dream of a better world. Should I dream of a worse?’ wrote Otto Piene in ‘Paths to Paradise’ in 1961.(33) With their clear- eyed view of reality, the members of Nul were not dreaming of the world, neither a better nor a worse, and certainly not of ‘paths to paradise’. During the Nul period, radicalism and a sincerely felt admiration for what was new and contemporary went hand in hand; nimble provocation is what Nul seemed to have a patent on.
ZERO – A New Conception in a European Perspective
The international orientation of the Dutch Nul group is closely related to the way exhibitions were organized in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Exhi- bitions such as ‘Vision in Motion – Motion in Vision’ at the Hessenhuis in Antwerp (1959), Udo Kultermann’s ‘Monochrome Malerei’ (Monochrome Painting) in Leverkusen (1960) and ‘Avantgarde 61’ in Trier (1961) led to an intensifying of contacts, based on a shared distaste of the emotionally charged, painterly gesture. These exhibitions were eye-openers, not least for the participants themselves. ‘Vision in Motion’ brought different Euro- pean avant-garde movements together for the first time, showing current developments across the board, from monochrome to kinetic art, the use of light in three-dimensional installations and the work of the latter Nouveau Réalistes. The exhibition was organized by Jean Tinguely, Paul van Hoeydonck, Pol Bury and Daniel Spoerri at the invitation of the Antwerp artists’ collective G 58.(34)
The exhibition ‘Monochrome Malerei’ played a significant role for the Dutch Nul artists.Henderikse met Lucio Fontana there, and remembers the taglie he exhibited, razor-sharp cuts in canvas; they seemed to him the inevitable conclusion of the Informal trajectory.(35) For Henk Peeters, ‘Mono- chrome Malerei’ was the inspiration for an internationally oriented phase as an artist-curator. At Jan Henderikse’s urging, Peeters went to Leverkusen and saw the works in storage, after the exhibition was over. A few weeks later, Peeters let its organizer, Udo Kultermann, know that he would like to bring the exhibition to Amsterdam.(36) Peeters’ initial idea was to duplicate the exhibition in its entirety, although he indicated in a letter to prospective participants that he also wanted to show ‘experiments in the domain of light and three-dimensional installations’.(37) Several months later, however, he found out that Daniel Spoerri was working on the same theme for the Stedelijk Museum. Peeters worried that the field would be ‘grazed bare’, as he intended to focus, just as Spoerri’s exhibition ‘Bewogen Beweging’ (Moving Movement) would, on ‘non-painterly aspects’. Peeters sought a solution in exhibiting on-going developments in painting, with the emphasis on emptiness and monochrome.38 How quickly the plans evolved was made clear when Peeters submitted his plans to Willem Sandberg in February 1961: by that time there was a provisional list of 28 participating ‘painters’ – note the inverted commas – and Peeters envisaged the exhibition as ‘. . . a week of international demonstrations in which something can happen on a daily basis’.(39) On the spur of the moment the exhibition was initially entitled ‘De laatste schilders’ (The Last Painters), but this proved a mere afterthought.(40) In the spring of 1961 Armando, Jan Henderikse, Yves Klein and Henk Peeters met in Günther Uecker’s Düsseldorf studio to discuss further elaboration of the plans, and correspondence also shows that Peeters consulted intensively with Günther Uecker and Piero Manzoni.(41) Thanks to these ‘conversations with colleagues’, as Peeters called them, a new exhibition concept emerged in the course of barely a year. Peeters’ role as liaison, organizer and promoter of ‘the cause’ was the foundation for the first Nul exhibition in Amsterdam in March 1962.
‘Ultimately, it turns out, it all came out of coincidences,’ said Peeters about the emergence of an international network.(42) In 1957, Yves Klein met Rotraut Uecker, Günther Uecker’s sister, at a party at Arman’s in Nice. Klein did not speak German, and so Rotraut became his link with the Germans: when Klein exhibited work in Germany, Rotraut would accompany him and translate. Jan Henderikse became friends with Uecker in 1959, almost as soon as he moved to Cologne, and the latter told him about a vacant studio in Düsseldorf; Henderikse’s new neighbours were Joseph Beuys and the German Zero artist Gotthard Graubner. At Uecker’s studio Henderikse saw the nail objects that would be shown for the first time at the ‘Vision in Motion’ exhibition in Antwerp later that year.(43)
The Dutch Informal Group had its first presentation abroad in February 1959, at Galerie Gunar in Düsseldorf. Otto Piene came to see the exhibition and was to stay in touch with Henk Peeters from that point on. In February 1960 Peeters met Hans Haacke while setting up an exhibition of the Dutch Informal Group in Kassel.(44) Haacke came to the gallery as the exhibition’s photographer, but he also spoke with Peeters about his own work, white-monochrome embossed prints on paper, already in the spirit of ZERO (unlike the Dutch artists’ Informal paintings). This would lead to Haacke’s participation in the first Nul exhibition at the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum, in 1962. The initial contact with Yves Klein also took place in 1960, through Peeters’ visit to the Iris Clert gallery in Paris. Later that year, when they took part in the exhibition ‘Prix Suisse de Peinture Abstraite’ (Swiss Prize for Abstract Painting) at the Georges Kasper gallery in Lausanne, Peeters and Henderikse met fellow exhibition participant Christian Megert.(45) When he organized two exhibitions in Bern that same year, ‘Internationale Avantgarde 1960’ and ‘Neue Malerei’ (New Painting), Megert included work by the Dutch Informals. The exhibition ‘Avantgarde 61’ was the first significant international presentation in which the Dutch artists exhibited work under the name ‘Nul’.
Between 1957 and 1961, Otto Piene and Heinz Mack organized a series of evening exhibitions at their studios in Düsseldorf and used the occasion to present two issues of the journal ZERO, which was a catalogue for the exhibitions and a platform for European sympathizers all rolled into one. The journal’s third issue, which featured work by Henk Peeters and Jan Schoonhoven, was presented during ‘ZERO – Edition, Exposition, Demonstration’ at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf in July 1961.(46) Peeters attended the ZERO happening at Galerie Schmela; it inspired him to open Galerie A in Arnhem later that year and to bring the Düsseldorf event to the Netherlands. ‘Expositie, demonstratie ZERO’ was the Netherlands’ first broad introduction to the international ZERO movement.(47) In the Netherlands, the official art circuit took very little notice of the Informal Group, the later Nul group and the international ZERO movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Cor de Nobel’s Galerie .31 in Dordrecht – again an artist’s initiative – was the only serious podium for artists working in the informal genre, beginning in 1957. Piero Manzoni exhibited work for the first time in the Netherlands in September 1958. Jan Henderikse and Jan Schoonhoven visited this exhibition, organized by Hans Sonnenberg at the Rotterdam Kunstkring.(48) Henk Peeters saw Manzoni’s work for the first time in April 1959 at Galerie De Posthoorn in The Hague. Henderikse recalls Manzoni’s first solo exhibition in the Netherlands: ‘For us it was really a jolt to see that much work that was that provocative. Jan [Schoonhoven] was hugely impressed by the order in Manzoni’s work. And of course everything was white, pure white!’(49)
On 8 April 1960, Hans Sonnenberg’s Internationale Galerij in The Hague was rechristened Internationale galerij OREZ and opened with a solo exhibition by Piero Manzoni.(50) OREZ, led from 1960 by Leo Verboon, was quick to join forces with the international ZERO movement and in January 1962 organized ‘Nieuwe tendenzen’ (New Tendencies), an ambitious exhibition featuring 40 participants, 23 of which would also take part in the first Nul exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum a few months later. In December 1960, Hans Sonnenberg opened Galerie Delta in Rotterdam. In 1962 the gallery exhibited work by Enrico Castellani, Piero Manzoni and Jan Schoonhoven. The ‘mikro nul zero’ exhibition in 1964 showed work by artists including the German Zero group, the Dutch Nul artists, Piero Manzoni, Enrico Castellani, Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Arman, Jef Verheyen and Yayoi Kusama. The Amstel 47 gallery in Amsterdam also held prominent presentations, though ‘Panorama van de nieuwe tendenzen’ (Panorama of The New Tendencies) and ‘mikro nul zero’ took place somewhat later, in 1963 and 1964, respectively.(51)
Leo Verboon and Albert Vogel of Internationale galerij OREZ made plans to organize a large-scale happening, ‘Zero on Sea’ on the pier at Scheveningen in 1966, with contributions by 36 artists from ten countries. With their open character, the plans for this true ZERO Gesamtkunstwerk (synthesis of the arts), involving sculpture and installation art, music, theatre and even poetry, exuded the spirit of ZERO.(52) But a combination of financial difficulties and the unpredictable Dutch weather proved fatal to the project; ‘Zero on Sea’ remained nothing more than a utopian idea. The prospect of art in the midst of bathers and chip-stands must have undoubtedly appealed to Henderikse and Peeters. A year earlier, in October 1965, Peeters had already made a ‘water ceiling’ for a glove manufacturer’s stand at the Amsterdam garment fair, using plastic bags filled with water; Kusama had produced a hanging assemblage of rubber gloves for the occasion. Like ‘Zero on Sea’, these are the ultimate embodiments of the desire to detach the work of art from a strictly academic and museum setting.
Benchmarks – Museum Presentations in the Netherlands, 1962-1965
There were three major ZERO museum presentations in the Netherlands, two in Amsterdam, ‘Nul’ (1962, hereafter called Nul62) and ‘nul negentien- honderd vijf en zestig’ (1965, hereafter called Nul65), and one in the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, ‘ZERO-0-NUL’ (1964). Nul62 has since taken on mythic proportions, yet a certain adjustment to its perception is required, particularly in regard to the role of director Willem Sandberg. Nul62 only happened because of an unexpected gap in the museum’s schedule, an intensive lobbying effort and the artists agreeing to shoulder the costs themselves – including transport, set-up, insurance and even posters and catalogues.(53) Willem Sandberg’s contribution was limited to making the exhibition space available; he had no serious involvement in the on-going developments around Nul or ZERO.
The entries for the first exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum show the vast differences among the participants, in terms of form and programme – although the common denominator was still the search for a value-free art divorced from the psychology of its maker. This explains the contrast between such displays as the Salle de lumière (a darkened corner room featuring Otto Piene’s light projections and works by Heinz Mack and Günther Uecker), Jan Henderikse’s installation of beer crates, Henk Peeters’s cotton-ball tactile pieces and the monochrome paintings of the Belgian artist Jef Verheyen. The exhibition illustrated how ZERO had succeeded in stretching the traditional concept of art: from the fascination with the ele- ments fire and water, monochrome, movement and vibration, to the ‘annexa- tion’ of consumer goods and the use of industrial materials. In a few instan- ces, however, this led to friction among the participants. The German Zero group, for instance, were uncomfortable with the conceptual and in their view rather crass character of Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista (Artist’s Shit), the artist’s tinned faeces. Henk Peeters recalls Manzoni’s suggestion to re- lease 20 chickens – monochrome white and kinetic, after all – into the Ger- man Salle de lumière during the opening, as an act of sweet revenge.(54)
Afterwards the participants were somewhat disappointed by this first museum presentation in the Netherlands: the plans had been grand and ground-breaking, but some had also been unfeasible or too expensive. On the way to Amsterdam to consult with Sandberg, in 1960, bad weather on the motorway inspired the idea of a museum filled with fog, about isolating this monochrome natural phenomenon in rooms containing Breitners, Mondriaans and Appels – the ultimate levelling of the painterly gesture, it seems. Rooms – environments really – filled with drizzle, foam and mounds of snow and ice never materialized either. Sandberg was willing to listen, but ultimately he was a director of painters: ‘Guys, would you please remember I still have some Van Goghs upstairs for my successor?’(55)
At the end of March Nul62 had to make way for an exhibition of children’s drawings, and the day after the show closed the artists found their works piled up, unprotected and in some cases damaged, in a corner of an exhibition room.(56) A work made on location by Manzoni had been thrown out with the rubbish.(57) Only later that year would the Stedelijk Museum acquire two works by the Nul group, a relief by Jan Schoonhoven, R62-16, and a pyrograph by Peeters, 60-06, although Sandberg’s annotation on the purchase of Schoonhoven’s work speaks volumes: ‘Can be exchanged (has little in stock at the moment)’. Peeters’ pyrograph was obtained as payment of debts after the exhibition.(58) And yet plans were soon made for a second Nul exhibition, which was supposed to take place at director Edy de Wilde’s Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven in October 1963. Peeters started inviting various artists to participate at the beginning of that year, and even designed a stamp for the occasion himself, bearing the words ‘Exposition Nul 2’.(59) However, a second, large-scale Nul exhibition would not take place until 1965, at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. By then, ‘Eindhoven’ director Edy de Wilde had succeeded Willem Sandberg in Amsterdam.(60)
As a few years passed, Dutch museums became somewhat more accommodating, in funding, operational support and a show of involvement in what actually filled the exhibition rooms, although the press still expressed the same disapproval about ‘ZERO-0-NUL’ at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague in 1964.61 Het Parool mostly found Armando’s Zwart water (Black Water) amusing: ‘One visitor tosses a match into it, another some scraps of paper, while some people spit in the water. Fodder for psychologists!’(62) Nul65 opened in April 1965 and featured works by the Nul group, the Ger- man Zero group, the Italian Gruppo T, the Japanese Gutai group and artists such as Yayoi Kusama, George Ricky, Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni. Henk Peeters had wanted to invite the Japanese Gutai group in 1962. ‘Yves Klein will take care of Japan,’ Peeters wrote Sandberg in February 1961 about the line-up of participants.(63) But Klein changed his mind about taking part in the exhibition in Amsterdam and pulled out barely five weeks before the opening.(64) It was only after the exhibition that Peeters was able to make contact with the Gutai group.(65)
The longer duration of Nul65 seems to be an indication of an evolving climate: Sandberg had allowed no more than 16 days in 1962. Peeters was again the exhibition’s organizer in 1965, now with curator Ad Petersen and designer and collector Martin Visser. However, Peeters says director Edy de Wilde made a point of emphatically differentiating himself from his predecessor Sandberg, more as a corrective exercise than out of any genuine interest.(66) Still, in 1965 the Stedelijk Museum organized, paid for and insured the transportation of the works to Amsterdam, took care of setting up the exhibition rooms and published a two-part catalogue. Following the example of Daniel Spoerri’s successful Edition MAT, an idea emerged in June 1964 to generate some extra income by publishing an Editie ZERO of do-it-yourself art works, with a numbered and signed certificate.(67) Henk Peeters made Armando’s and Ricky’s prototypes, and Ad Petersen handled the production of Fontana’s work. De Wilde found the plan too financially risky, however, and pulled out. The artists involved had hoped the publica- tion would help offset the expenses of the exhibition, incurred among other things in shipping back their works. The project never really got off the ground, although Peeters and Petersen were still in touch with artists about the plans as late as 1967.(68)
Aside from Armando’s and Henderikse’s installations of car tyres and beer crates, Nul62 still showed many works on canvas and panel, including in smaller sizes. The installations of 1964 and 1965 provided a glimpse of a growing realization that the world was bigger and more beautiful than could be captured within the four sides of a frame. In 1964 the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague displayed large installations: in addition to Uecker, Piene and Mack’s Salle de lumière, there were also Armando’s oil drums and the unfathomable depths of his Zwart water, Peeters’s walls of cotton balls and shiny paint cans, and Schoonhoven’s wall of stacked cardboard.(69) The Nul instal- lations have a historical context, but their construction is also context-free: they can and may be reconstructed without erasing the ‘signature of the maker’. Ultimately Nul’s installations are also about the ‘authenticity of what is demonstrated, of the information’, as Armando said in 1965, and not about the touch of the artist.(70)
And yet ZERO eventually became ‘established’, as Armando put it; ‘the essential points of Nul’, as K. Schippers called them, were reluctantly accepted and gradually canonized.(71) To be embraced by the establishment was perceived, certainly by Armando and Henk Peeters, as the kiss of death, as though the struggle of resistance had all been for nothing. By then ZERO’s utopian ideology had also faded, due to differences of outlook within the groups, both within Nul and the German Zero, to developments in the work of individual members or to the abandonment of the agreement that only together could anything be achieved. Everyday life seemed to catch up with Nul’s practice: plastic turned out to be not just beautiful, but polluting as well, apparently art was needed more than ‘like a hole in the head’ and even trouble- makers ended up, against their will, tidily spotlighted in the museum gallery.
In April 1966, at the same time as the exhibition ‘Zero on Sea’, which presented the design plans for the cancelled project – the unofficial end to the international ZERO movement – the Internationale galerij OREZ held Peeters’ solo exhibition ‘Nul = 0 II’.(72) Peeters wrote a short text prior to the exhibition: ‘The works exhibited are intended only as examples of mass- produced articles . . . which can be ordered in any size and any colour de- sired.’ A stamp on the back left room to fill in by hand the dates of design and manufacture and the number of the work – even though the edition was unlimited. The announced incineration of the originals once the first ‘mass-produced articles’ had been made did not take place, but a short text that was supposed to be read out afterwards does survive: ‘The age of the unique work of art is over. . . . From now on I will no longer sign any work. . . . Under present conditions only copyright is upheld, even though it’s considered nonsense.’(73) The exhibition was the ultimate consequence of Peeters’ efforts to finish with authenticity, uniqueness and the status-dependent work of art. And, for a good number of years, with the mixed blessings of being an artist as well: for a long time after 1965 Peeters focused exclusively on his teaching at the Academy of Arts in Arnhem. Armando stopped for two years after 1965, and in 1968 Jan Henderikse announced that his switch to film and photography meant the end of his ‘hanging and standing art’.(74) Only Jan Schoonhoven kept working, unruffled, on his oeuvre of crisp- white reliefs and pen drawings, although by about 1980 the expressiveness and dynamism of his signature style from before Nul had resurfaced.
‘We need an entirely new art,’ Armando wrote in 1959.(75) Over ten years later Peeters would make a correction: ‘No, we need an entirely new public.’(76) In 1965, at the Stedelijk Museum, that still seemed a bridge too far: ‘The public is infected by the critics. They walk through the rooms screeching and snorting and wrecking everything.’(77) Nearly half a century later that public finally seems to have arrived. Everything is a question of timing, says Peeters: ‘Art is like camembert, either unripe or already spoiled.’(78)
Antoon Melissen, Berlin, 2010
See for the related images: nul=0, The Dutch Nul Group in an International Context.
Published by the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam and NAi Publishers, Schiedam, 2011
- Zero onuitgevoerd (Amsterdam, Kunsthistorisch Instituut, 1970), np.
- De vitaliteit in de kunst (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam/Venice: Palazzo Grassi/Recklinghausen: Kunst- halle, 1959), 9.
- Manifest tegen niets, pamphlet (Amsterdam, April 1961).
- Einde, pamphlet (Amsterdam, April 1961).
- Fred Sieger and Rik Jager also exhibited their work with the Dutch Informal Group until May 1959. Bram Bogart occasi- onally joined in. Kees van Bo- hemen left the Informal Group in February 1961, because he was uncomfortable with its new direction. See also Franck Gribling, Informele kunst in België en Nederland 1955–’60. Parallellen in de Nederlands- talige literatuur (The Hague: Gemeentemuseum/Antwerp: Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 1983), 16.
- ‘De Nederlandse Informelen’, Dordrechts Nieuwsblad, 1 October 1958, newspaper clipping in RKD (Netherlands Institute for Art History, The Hague), Henk Peeters archive; Het Vrije Volk, untitled review, 13 October 1958.
- Armando, ‘Credo I’, in: Holländi- sche Informelle Gruppe (Düsseldorf: Galerie Gunar, 1959), np.
- Armando, ‘Credo 2’, in: Infor- mele Groep (Nijmegen: Besiendershuys, 1959), np.
- Fred Wagemans and Mark Peeters, Henk Peeters Tast- baar/Ex plumis cognoscitur avis (Nijmegen: SUN, 1998), 18.
- Interview with Henk Peeters, 23 February 2011. See also Fontana (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam/London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1988), 33. This catalogue includes the last interview with Fontana, from 1968: ‘I make a hole in the canvas as a way of leaving be- hind the old pictorial formula, the painting and the traditional ideas about art, and I escape symbolically, but also in terms of the material, from the prison of the at surface.’
- Nederlandse Informele Groep, self-published exhibition cata- logue, 1959, np.
- Paraphrase of Jan Schoonho- ven’s statement: ‘The aim is to establish reality as art in an im- personal way.’ See J.J. Schoon- hoven, ‘Zero’, in: de nieuwe stijl Vol. 1 (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1965), 123.
- Bram Bogart and Kees van Bohemen also took part in this exhibition. See Het Vaderland, untitled review, 26 April 1961.
- Interview with Henk Peeters, 23 February 2011. See also Caroline Roodenburg-Schadd, Expressie en ordening. Het verzamelbeleid van Willem Sandberg voor het Stedelijk Museum 1945–1962 (Amster- dam: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam/Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2004), 657.
- De nieuwe stijl came out of the Flemish journal Gard Sivik; Armando, Henk Peeters, Hans Sleutelaar, Bastiaan Vaandra- ger and Hans Verhagen joined its editorial staff. De nieuwe stijl also looked at ‘the new poetry’: the ‘depoetization’ of the lofty language of the poet had similarities to the Nul group’s strategy. Two issues of the journal were published, both in 1965.
- The three issues of the ZERO journal came out in April 1958, October 1958 and July 1961.
- Interview Henk Peeters, 1964, typescript, Düsseldorf, ZERO Foundation, Henk Peeters archive.
- K. Schippers and Betty van Garrel, interview Nul group in Galerij OREZ, The Hague, 1975 (DVD).
- Interview with Jan Henderikse, 10 January 2010.
- Schoonhoven, op. cit. (note 12), 123.
- nul negentienhonderd vijf en zestig, exhibition catalogue SM 377, two volumes (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1965), np.
- The plan was never put into action. See undated letter [1963] from Jan Henderikse to Henk Peeters, RKD, Henk Peeters archive.
- Ischa Meijer, ‘De roerloze beweging van zestig’, Haagse Post, 22 November 1975, quo- ted in: Janneke Wesseling, Alles was mooi. Een geschiede- nis van de Nul-beweging (Am- sterdam: Meulenhoff, 1989), 7.
- Interview with Henk Peeters, 23 February 2011.
- nul negentienhonderd vijf en zestig, op. cit. (note 21).
- Schippers and Van Garrel, interview, op. cit. (note 18).
- Janneke Wesseling, Jan Schoonhoven: beeldend kunstenaar (The Hague: SDU/ Amsterdam: Openbaar Kunst- bezit, 1990), 44.
- in the second issue of revue nul = 0, De Vries describes his method of objectivation based on the Statistical Tables for Biological, Agricultural and Me- dical Research (1938) by statis- ticians Ronald Fisher and Frank Yates. See revue nul = 0, series 1, no. 2 (April 1963), 32.
- Later that year De Vries took part in the exhibition ‘Atelier 2’ (24 September 1965) with his random objectivations and a free-standing three-dimensional installation, random spatial structure.
- Schoonhoven, ‘Zero’, op. cit. (note 12), 123.
- nul negentienhonderd vijf en zestig, op. cit. (note 21).
- Germano Celant, Piero Manzoni (Milan: Charta/London: Serpen tine Gallery, 1998), 271.
- Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, ZERO (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 1973), 146.
- The title ‘Vision in Motion – Motion in Vision’ is a reference to Lászlo Moholy-Nagy’s book of the same name (1947). Sometime in 1958, the artists’ collective G 58 obtained pos- session of the attics of the Hessenhuis, a sixteenth-cen- tury warehouse in the port of Antwerp. The artists refurbis- hed the building and organized their own exhibitions. Besides ‘Vision in Motion’, the Hessen- huis held such prominent exhi- bitions as ‘ZERO – groupement international de l’art d’aujourd’hui’ (the group around Hans Sonnenberg, 1959), ‘new european school’ (organized by Georges Kasper, 1960-1961) and ‘Anti-peinture’ (organized by Walter Leblanc, 1962). The Dutch Informal Group exhibited there in 1960.
- Interview with Jan Henderikse, 10 January 2010.
- Letter from Henk Peeters to Udo Kultermann, 1 June 1960, RKD, Henk Peeters archive.
- Letter from Henk Peeters to the intended participants of the Nul62 exhibition, 2 July 1960, RKD, Henk Peeters archive.
- Letter from Henk Peeters to Charles Karstens, 4 January 1961, RKD, Henk Peeters ar- chive. ‘Bewogen Beweging’, at the Stedelijk Museum Amster- dam (10 March-17 April 1961), was organized by Daniel Spoerri, Pontus Hultén and Willem Sandberg and showed the works of artists such as Picabia, Malevich, Duchamp, Calder, Soto, Tinguely, Uecker, Piene, Mack, Colombo and Rickey.
- Letter from Henk Peeters to Willem Sandberg, 4 February 1961, RKD, Henk Peeters archive. ‘Together we want to perform a light ballet by Otto Piene, have Yves Klein play his monochrome music, Uecker do archery, Manzoni hand out eggs, etc.’
- Letter from Henk Peeters to Willem Sandberg, 6 March 1961, RKD, Henk Peeters archive.
- Henk Peeters (Londen: The Mayor Gallery, 2011). See also: undated letter from Piero Man- zoni to Henk Peeters (probably early 1961), and letter from Günther Uecker to Henk Pee- ters, 19 October 1961, Düssel- dorf, ZERO Foundation, Henk Peeters archive.
- Interview with Henk Peeters, 23 February 2011.
- ZERO – Internationale Künstler- Avantgarde der 50er/60er Jahre (Düsseldorf: Museum Kunstpa- last/Ost ldern: Hatje Cantz, 2006), 267.
- This was the exhibition ‘Niederländische Informelle Gruppe’, Galerie Weiss, Kassel (Febru- ary 1960).
- ‘Prix Suisse de Peinture Abstraite’, 5-30 October 1960, Georges Kasper gallery, Lausanne. See also .31, Een geruchtmakende Dordtse galerie voor moderne kunst 1957-1962 (Dordrecht: Dordrechts Museum, 1990), 37.
- Mack and Piene, ZERO, op. cit. (note 33), 271-272.
- ‘Expositie, demonstratie ZERO’, Galerie A, Arnhem, opening on 9 December 1961.
- Manzoni’s introduction to orga- nizer Hans Sonnenberg and artists Gust Romijn and Jan Schoonhoven led to the forma- tion of the artists’ group ZERO on 31 July 1958. See also p. 74.
- Interview with Jan Henderikse, 11 February 2011.
- The name ‘OREZ’, ‘ZERO’ spelled backwards, was Jan Schoonhoven’s idea for the title of a group exhibition at the Internationale gallerij in The Hague (opening on 20 October 1959) in which Kees van Bohe- men, Piero Manzoni, Jan Schoonhoven and Jaap Wage- maker also took part. See also p.74.
- These exhibitions were also or- ganized on a grand scale, with contributions from the German Zero group, members of Italy’s Gruppo T and Azimut, the French Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV) and outsi- ders like Kusama, George Ricky and Jesús Rafael Soto. See also Philip Peters, ‘Van Ou- borg tot Orez – Haagse kunste- naars en kunstbemiddelaars’, in: Onmetelijk Optimisme, Kun- stenaars en hun bemiddelaars in de jaren 1945–1970 (Amster- dam/Zwolle: Waanders, 2006), 67-70.
- A presentation of the plans was still held at OREZ (16 April to 4 May 1966).
- Interview with Henk Peeters, 23 February 2011. See also Renate Wiehager and Antoon Melissen, Jan Henderikse. Acheiropoieta (Ost ldern: Hatje Cantz, 2010), 289.
- Henk Peeters, op. cit. (note 41).
- Marinus Boezem, ‘Boezem- Henk Peeters’, Museumjour- naal, series 16, no. 2 (April 1970), 81-82.
- E-mail from Henk Peeters, 4 July 2010.
- Henk Peeters, op. cit. (note 41).
- Roodenburg-Schadd, Expressie en ordening, op. cit. (note 14), 658.
- Letter from Henk Peeters to Paolo Scheggi, 12 March 1963, Düsseldorf, ZERO Foundation.
- Edy de Wilde was director of the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven from 1946 to 1963.
- Only the German Zero group (Mack, Piene, Uecker) and the Nul group, with the exception of Jan Henderikse, took part in this exhibition.
- Het Parool, untitled review, 3 April 1964.
- Letter from Henk Peeters to Willem Sandberg, 4 February 1961, RKD, Henk Peeters archive.
- Letter from Yves Klein to Henk Peeters, 29 January 1962, Düsseldorf, ZERO Foundation, Henk Peeters archive.
- See interview with Henk Peeters in this publication.
- Telephone conversation with Ad Petersen, 18 May 2011.
- Letter from Edy de Wilde to Henk Peeters, 22 July 1964, RKD, Henk Peeters archive.
- Telephone conversation with Ad Petersen, 18 May 2011. 69 In 1964, unlike in Amsterdam
- In 1962, the walls of the Salle de lumière were covered in aluminium panels.
- nul negentienhonderd vijf en zestig, op. cit. (note 21).
- Schippers and Van Garrel, interview, op. cit. (note 18); and J. Bernlef and K. Schippers (eds.), Een cheque voor de tandarts (Amsterdam: Querido, 1967), 150.
- Invitation to opening on 15 April 1966, RKD, Henk Peeters archive.
- Henk Peeters, undated types- cript, RKD, Henk Peeters archive. See also Bernlef and Schippers, Een cheque, op. cit. (note 71), 157. According to K. Schippers the text was not read out at the conclusion of the exhibition: Schippers, e-mail of 9 May 2011.
- Schippers and Van Garrel, interview, op. cit. (note 18).
- Holländische Informelle Gruppe 1959, np.
- Schippers and Van Garrel, interview, op. cit. (note 18).
- Haagse Post, untitled review, 8 May 1965, newspaper cutting, RKD, Henk Peeters archive.
- 31, op. cit. (note 45), 38.
