Nul
Colin Huizing in conversation with Armando
Yes, Of Course, Provocation
So in 1958 you received a telephone invitation from Henk Peeters to take part in a group show in Delft, along with Bram Bogart,
Kees van Bohemen, Jan Henderikse and Jan Schoonhoven?
I talked it over with Kees van Bohemen and then I thought, ‘as long as they take care of the organizing, I’m in’. My paintings were shown, but I didn’t go in person. I didn’t know any of the other artists. The same exhibition was later put on in Leiden. That time I did drop by, and I thought, ‘these guys are actually pretty good’. And the Nul group eventually came out of that.
What kind of work were you doing at the time?
I was already making black and red monochrome paintings then, and that’s where Nul later came from for me. And this happened to each us at the same time. So you noticed affinities, even international ones. Of course there were differences, often in ways you thought you’d never do yourself. We were working on the same things, but they were individual developments. We discussed it among ourselves a lot;
I went to see Henk Peeters in Arnhem every weekend, for instance.
At the same time you were working as a journalist, involved with the journal Gard Sivik, among others, and later de nieuwe stijl. How did this relate to your work as a visual artist?
Actually I was far too busy with other things, like my journalism work. I had to earn a living, you know. You think I ever made any money from those Nul things? Do you know how much I made from my art between 1960 and 1970? Six hundred guilders. This wasn’t at all appreciated by the tax office. It’s very odd. You have an exhibition in Germany. You don’t sell anything there, and the tax office doesn’t believe you. In the beginning journalism was very inspiring, because you were dealing with ‘reality’. You were consciously relating to rea- lity. It was identical to what you were doing in your paintings. And so journalism led to that New Poetry, for instance, conversations in the train, the Karl May Cycle. You looked at things happening with greater intensity. I went to an agricultural trade show at the RAI in Amsterdam, for example, and I used those farming things to create The Agrarian Cycle. You just ran into these things. And why did I go to an agricultural trade show that I would never go to now? In search of reality, or to put it a better way: in search of a reality.
Were these gestures of provocation?
Not originally, no. They may have become so, but that wasn’t the intention. It was just the product of my journalism work. I worked very hard to recruit other writers to our group and our way of thinking. I saw that in other avant-garde movements in other countries. In the end I didn’t succeed. It’s probable that its true value wasn’t appreci- ated, but I also think that these writers were not necessarily interes- ted in the things we were doing in the visual arts. I did make contact with people like Hans Verhagen and Hans Sleutelaar, who were also working at the Haagse Post then. I was also on the editorial staff of the literary journal Gard Sivik. But a close collaboration between painters and writers never materialized. The remarkable thing is that in that period was Barbarber, with people like K. Schippers, Bernlef and Brands. They were working from more or less the same mind- set, but at the time I had no idea. I did later on.
Surely the 1960 pamphlet Bekendmaking (Proclamation) by the Informal Group (Armando, Kees van Bohemen, Jan Henderikse, Henk Peeters, Jan Schoonhoven) cannot be seen as anything other than a provocation, not least because of its apparent similarity to a German Bekanntmachung of the Second World War. Was it consciously done for effect?
Yes, of course, provocation, because that’s what works; that’s when we get noticed.
In April 1961 you were a co-signer (and writer?) of the Manifesto against Nothing, an adaptation of Carl Laszlo’s Manifest gegen Nichts (1960), and Einde (The End). In these publications, you, Onorio, Carl Laszlo, Bason Brock, Piero Manzoni, Henk Peeters, Jan Henderikse, Jan Schoonhoven, Christan Megert, Arthur Køpcke and Silvano Lora declared an end to all previous art forms and their related institutions. And also announced an exhibition in which (in the end) there would be nothing to see.
Yeah, when I look back on it now, it’s nonsense, but at the time it was a provocation, poking fun at the art world.
And so nothing was exhibited?
No, I don’t even know anymore.
There are conflicting accounts. It was in a gallery on the Willems- parkweg in Amsterdam.
I do remember there was an opening on a Saturday afternoon and everyone went to it, but I wasn’t there. There are people who say they saw me, but I honestly was never there.
The reactions to Nul were mixed. De nieuwe stijl, the successor to the journal Gard Sivik, ran a selection of not exactly positive reviews under the title ‘Parade of the Plebs’.
Yes, we were proud of that. There’d been that sort of negative criticism during the CoBrA period, too. The things they wrote about Appel and all those guys. Now it’s hugely popular, but at the time . . . You have no idea how they were trashed by the press. Our feeling was, the more negative the better. That’s why I never understand the indignation today. I’ve even heard of people who get a tough review, burst into tears and give up painting, but we just laughed our heads off. It only makes sense: when you come up with something new you’re going to face resistance.
You said somewhere: ‘We were very positive; everything was beautiful. One big open eye, and that produced, certainly in the beginning, a pleasant way of looking at things.’ And yet your work from that period has a violent element to it, because of the materials you used: barbed wire, black water, metal plates, bolts . . .
That was the most personal part, the choice of objects. I used bolts and Henk Peeters used cotton balls, for example. They’re materials taken from reality. That’s what I found beautiful: abandoned airfields, as long as it was dull. Another thing I always looked at then: rivets in steel bridges – that’s where those paintings came from. At the time I was living on the Prins Hendrikkade in Amsterdam. And the light glistening in the black water in the evenings, that’s where the work Zwart water (Black Water) came from. They’re all things taken from reality.
The three-dimensional installations: Black Water, Car Tyres, Oil Drums. Can these be called conceptual works, in the sense that they can be produced by others following instructions?
The car tyres I had museum staffers set up. Black tyres on black linen. But it was just a case of, here you go, here are, I don’t know, 20 car tyres, just hang them up. I wasn’t even there. I was present at the opening, but not during the preparations. Zwart water can be produced by other people, too. I made that at the Gemeentemuseum (in The Hague) in 1964. You can still find photos of people looking very thoughtfully into those depths, which the lighting makes seem unfathomable. The funny thing is – maybe it’s a generational issue – maybe 20, 30 years later I saw a similar installation somewhere by a Japanese artist whose name escapes me.
What impact did the work of colleagues in other countries have on you and the development of your work?
We didn’t look that consciously at the work of the artists in other countries, because there were very few periodicals in which we could have kept up with their efforts. You only found out later what was going in other places. Henk Peeters was always well-informed, better than we were. It’s been said that we followed those Germans (Zero) so much, and we never did – with all due respect to the Germans; we never worked with light, for instance, at least not with light as a visual element in itself. And they were much more idealis- tic; we tended maybe more towards the French Nouveau Réalisme. A tiny bit.
But that was primarily the case for you and Jan Henderikse. In the work of Schoonhoven and Peeters, phenomena like light and fire do play a role.
We did go to an exhibition by a certain Yves Klein at Haus Langen in Krefeld. And his work sold very badly; it was really cheap. To us he was already an idol. We had ideas in common, after all. We didn’t meet him in person there; that would come later, at Günther Uecker’s in Düsseldorf. But in the end it was Henk Peeters who had more contacts with artists abroad. He was the secretary, and I was too lazy for that sort of thing. I did meet Piene at the time. We came to Klein’s exhibition because we had an exhibition there as well. It was very rare for us to go somewhere just for an exhibition. All the ZERO and Nul people admired Klein’s work. It was the avant-garde you were interested in. You knew about Arman, too. And Fontana, of course. That was really the very early 1960s. There was one im- portant journal: Das Kunstwerk. It was our ideal to get a photo of our work published in there. And when finally a photo of one of my paintings – with those bolts – was printed in it, the caption read, ‘J.J. Schoonhoven’. We really worked at getting publicity that way. You know what was an important gallery at the time – in which I’ve never been? Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf. That’s where they all showed, but we didn’t – at least not that I know. We were all doing avant-garde stuff, and this took different forms. What I didn’t admire and have never felt any admiration for is that geometric abstraction, by people like Mavignier, Vasarely and so forth. All due admiration and respect, but I’ve never felt any connec- tion with those geometric abstracts, none at all. They bored me. Again, with all due respect – some of them are very great artists. But it was a dangerous point, to end up with geometric abstraction, and I’ve never been for that, even though it may have seemed that way sometimes. I was for repetition, though. The most consistent work is what Jan Schoonhoven did, absolutely. He was the most consistent of all the Nul people, right up to his death.
Looking back it is still rather remarkable that you felt this kinship with a number of artists and that you all emerged simultaneously, as a group.
Yeah, but the credit was mostly due to Henk Peeters. The rest of us were too lazy for all that.
What or when was ‘the end of Nul’ for you?
When I got fed up during the second Nul exhibition (1965) at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. There’s a group photo of the direc- tor, Edy de Wilde, his wife and the participating artists. I’m not in the photo because I’d already gone home by then. After that I didn’t make any more Nul things. There wasn’t anything that led to it while we were setting up the exhibition, but in the end I felt I’d become a shell. I felt a renewed need for manual work, to do something with my own hands again, and this Nul work I could just have other peo- ple make. The way Schoonhoven had it made at the end. And in the beginning I made everything myself – how I did it is still a mystery, because I’m totally hopeless with technical stuff – but then others made it for me. After that I did other things for a few years, writing and so forth, and then I started drawing again and reconnected with the things I’d done in the 1950s. Ultimately, the Nul period was only a very brief period in my career. Afterwards I went back to what I was doing originally.
Interview by Colin Huizing, Amsterdam, 2010
Yes, Of Course, Provocation
So in 1958 you received a telephone invitation from Henk Peeters to take part in a group show in Delft, along with Bram Bogart,
Kees van Bohemen, Jan Henderikse and Jan Schoonhoven?
I talked it over with Kees van Bohemen and then I thought, ‘as long as they take care of the organizing, I’m in’. My paintings were shown, but I didn’t go in person. I didn’t know any of the other artists. The same exhibition was later put on in Leiden. That time I did drop by, and I thought, ‘these guys are actually pretty good’. And the Nul group eventually came out of that.
What kind of work were you doing at the time?
I was already making black and red monochrome paintings then, and that’s where Nul later came from for me. And this happened to each us at the same time. So you noticed affinities, even international ones. Of course there were differences, often in ways you thought you’d never do yourself. We were working on the same things, but they were individual developments. We discussed it among ourselves a lot;
I went to see Henk Peeters in Arnhem every weekend, for instance.
At the same time you were working as a journalist, involved with the journal Gard Sivik, among others, and later de nieuwe stijl. How did this relate to your work as a visual artist?
Actually I was far too busy with other things, like my journalism work. I had to earn a living, you know. You think I ever made any money from those Nul things? Do you know how much I made from my art between 1960 and 1970? Six hundred guilders. This wasn’t at all appreciated by the tax office. It’s very odd. You have an exhibition in Germany. You don’t sell anything there, and the tax office doesn’t believe you. In the beginning journalism was very inspiring, because you were dealing with ‘reality’. You were consciously relating to rea- lity. It was identical to what you were doing in your paintings. And so journalism led to that New Poetry, for instance, conversations in the train, the Karl May Cycle. You looked at things happening with greater intensity. I went to an agricultural trade show at the RAI in Amsterdam, for example, and I used those farming things to create The Agrarian Cycle. You just ran into these things. And why did I go to an agricultural trade show that I would never go to now? In search of reality, or to put it a better way: in search of a reality.
Were these gestures of provocation?
Not originally, no. They may have become so, but that wasn’t the intention. It was just the product of my journalism work. I worked very hard to recruit other writers to our group and our way of thinking. I saw that in other avant-garde movements in other countries. In the end I didn’t succeed. It’s probable that its true value wasn’t appreci- ated, but I also think that these writers were not necessarily interes- ted in the things we were doing in the visual arts. I did make contact with people like Hans Verhagen and Hans Sleutelaar, who were also working at the Haagse Post then. I was also on the editorial staff of the literary journal Gard Sivik. But a close collaboration between painters and writers never materialized. The remarkable thing is that in that period was Barbarber, with people like K. Schippers, Bernlef and Brands. They were working from more or less the same mind- set, but at the time I had no idea. I did later on.
Surely the 1960 pamphlet Bekendmaking (Proclamation) by the Informal Group (Armando, Kees van Bohemen, Jan Henderikse, Henk Peeters, Jan Schoonhoven) cannot be seen as anything other than a provocation, not least because of its apparent similarity to a German Bekanntmachung of the Second World War. Was it consciously done for effect?
Yes, of course, provocation, because that’s what works; that’s when we get noticed.
In April 1961 you were a co-signer (and writer?) of the Manifesto against Nothing, an adaptation of Carl Laszlo’s Manifest gegen Nichts (1960), and Einde (The End). In these publications, you, Onorio, Carl Laszlo, Bason Brock, Piero Manzoni, Henk Peeters, Jan Henderikse, Jan Schoonhoven, Christan Megert, Arthur Køpcke and Silvano Lora declared an end to all previous art forms and their related institutions. And also announced an exhibition in which (in the end) there would be nothing to see.
Yeah, when I look back on it now, it’s nonsense, but at the time it was a provocation, poking fun at the art world.
And so nothing was exhibited?
No, I don’t even know anymore.
There are conflicting accounts. It was in a gallery on the Willems- parkweg in Amsterdam.
I do remember there was an opening on a Saturday afternoon and everyone went to it, but I wasn’t there. There are people who say they saw me, but I honestly was never there.
The reactions to Nul were mixed. De nieuwe stijl, the successor to the journal Gard Sivik, ran a selection of not exactly positive reviews under the title ‘Parade of the Plebs’.
Yes, we were proud of that. There’d been that sort of negative criticism during the CoBrA period, too. The things they wrote about Appel and all those guys. Now it’s hugely popular, but at the time . . . You have no idea how they were trashed by the press. Our feeling was, the more negative the better. That’s why I never understand the indignation today. I’ve even heard of people who get a tough review, burst into tears and give up painting, but we just laughed our heads off. It only makes sense: when you come up with something new you’re going to face resistance.
You said somewhere: ‘We were very positive; everything was beautiful. One big open eye, and that produced, certainly in the beginning, a pleasant way of looking at things.’ And yet your work from that period has a violent element to it, because of the materials you used: barbed wire, black water, metal plates, bolts . . .
That was the most personal part, the choice of objects. I used bolts and Henk Peeters used cotton balls, for example. They’re materials taken from reality. That’s what I found beautiful: abandoned airfields, as long as it was dull. Another thing I always looked at then: rivets in steel bridges – that’s where those paintings came from. At the time I was living on the Prins Hendrikkade in Amsterdam. And the light glistening in the black water in the evenings, that’s where the work Zwart water (Black Water) came from. They’re all things taken from reality.
The three-dimensional installations: Black Water, Car Tyres, Oil Drums. Can these be called conceptual works, in the sense that they can be produced by others following instructions?
The car tyres I had museum staffers set up. Black tyres on black linen. But it was just a case of, here you go, here are, I don’t know, 20 car tyres, just hang them up. I wasn’t even there. I was present at the opening, but not during the preparations. Zwart water can be produced by other people, too. I made that at the Gemeentemuseum (in The Hague) in 1964. You can still find photos of people looking very thoughtfully into those depths, which the lighting makes seem unfathomable. The funny thing is – maybe it’s a generational issue – maybe 20, 30 years later I saw a similar installation somewhere by a Japanese artist whose name escapes me.
What impact did the work of colleagues in other countries have on you and the development of your work?
We didn’t look that consciously at the work of the artists in other countries, because there were very few periodicals in which we could have kept up with their efforts. You only found out later what was going in other places. Henk Peeters was always well-informed, better than we were. It’s been said that we followed those Germans (Zero) so much, and we never did – with all due respect to the Germans; we never worked with light, for instance, at least not with light as a visual element in itself. And they were much more idealis- tic; we tended maybe more towards the French Nouveau Réalisme. A tiny bit.
But that was primarily the case for you and Jan Henderikse. In the work of Schoonhoven and Peeters, phenomena like light and fire do play a role.
We did go to an exhibition by a certain Yves Klein at Haus Langen in Krefeld. And his work sold very badly; it was really cheap. To us he was already an idol. We had ideas in common, after all. We didn’t meet him in person there; that would come later, at Günther Uecker’s in Düsseldorf. But in the end it was Henk Peeters who had more contacts with artists abroad. He was the secretary, and I was too lazy for that sort of thing. I did meet Piene at the time. We came to Klein’s exhibition because we had an exhibition there as well. It was very rare for us to go somewhere just for an exhibition. All the ZERO and Nul people admired Klein’s work. It was the avant-garde you were interested in. You knew about Arman, too. And Fontana, of course. That was really the very early 1960s. There was one im- portant journal: Das Kunstwerk. It was our ideal to get a photo of our work published in there. And when finally a photo of one of my paintings – with those bolts – was printed in it, the caption read, ‘J.J. Schoonhoven’. We really worked at getting publicity that way. You know what was an important gallery at the time – in which I’ve never been? Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf. That’s where they all showed, but we didn’t – at least not that I know. We were all doing avant-garde stuff, and this took different forms. What I didn’t admire and have never felt any admiration for is that geometric abstraction, by people like Mavignier, Vasarely and so forth. All due admiration and respect, but I’ve never felt any connec- tion with those geometric abstracts, none at all. They bored me. Again, with all due respect – some of them are very great artists. But it was a dangerous point, to end up with geometric abstraction, and I’ve never been for that, even though it may have seemed that way sometimes. I was for repetition, though. The most consistent work is what Jan Schoonhoven did, absolutely. He was the most consistent of all the Nul people, right up to his death.
Looking back it is still rather remarkable that you felt this kinship with a number of artists and that you all emerged simultaneously, as a group.
Yeah, but the credit was mostly due to Henk Peeters. The rest of us were too lazy for all that.
What or when was ‘the end of Nul’ for you?
When I got fed up during the second Nul exhibition (1965) at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. There’s a group photo of the direc- tor, Edy de Wilde, his wife and the participating artists. I’m not in the photo because I’d already gone home by then. After that I didn’t make any more Nul things. There wasn’t anything that led to it while we were setting up the exhibition, but in the end I felt I’d become a shell. I felt a renewed need for manual work, to do something with my own hands again, and this Nul work I could just have other peo- ple make. The way Schoonhoven had it made at the end. And in the beginning I made everything myself – how I did it is still a mystery, because I’m totally hopeless with technical stuff – but then others made it for me. After that I did other things for a few years, writing and so forth, and then I started drawing again and reconnected with the things I’d done in the 1950s. Ultimately, the Nul period was only a very brief period in my career. Afterwards I went back to what I was doing originally.
Interview by Colin Huizing, Amsterdam, 2010
