What took place between 1958 and 1966?
In the interim many answers to that question have been forgotten; new ones are pending, to be found in times to come through the extensive researches of the newly established ZERO foundation. ZERO itself sought new answers to new questions, everything seeming to have already been thought, done and said in the studios and workshops of the painters and sculptors, in the media, by the critics, in the historians’ books.
But were we really aware of everything that had happened by then in art around the world? Modernism, a success story par excellence, the museums and the biennales, displayed the great inventories of world cultures and alongside, the facets of classical Modernism and its recent derivatives. What was there to be questioned?
But, anticipated initially only by Otto Piene and myself, its founders, then soon confirmed in our anticipation by Uecker, ZERO itself seemed to be a question that was looking for an answer. In short, we were goaded on by the question, how could we make a fresh start, having resolved irreversibly that we would abandon the old, secure niches. We were motivated to take on the crisis in order to overcome it by creative means, for all the doubts, all the vexation, all the isolation associated with such a tack, all the wilful criticism, the ill will and derision with which bourgeois society and its institutional transmitters of cultural values ostracised us.
The zero-point that was ZERO’s premise was a piece of fiction by which we hoped to be able to overcome ossified matrices of thinking and seeing, in favour of a more open world. We wanted, and had to, forsake the familiar territories in order to seek out new spaces whose coordinates were unknown. In these wayless spaces only the way was the goal. There were times when ZERO was animated by this spirit.
Heinz Mack, published: XXXXX
But were we really aware of everything that had happened by then in art around the world? Modernism, a success story par excellence, the museums and the biennales, displayed the great inventories of world cultures and alongside, the facets of classical Modernism and its recent derivatives. What was there to be questioned?
But, anticipated initially only by Otto Piene and myself, its founders, then soon confirmed in our anticipation by Uecker, ZERO itself seemed to be a question that was looking for an answer. In short, we were goaded on by the question, how could we make a fresh start, having resolved irreversibly that we would abandon the old, secure niches. We were motivated to take on the crisis in order to overcome it by creative means, for all the doubts, all the vexation, all the isolation associated with such a tack, all the wilful criticism, the ill will and derision with which bourgeois society and its institutional transmitters of cultural values ostracised us.
The zero-point that was ZERO’s premise was a piece of fiction by which we hoped to be able to overcome ossified matrices of thinking and seeing, in favour of a more open world. We wanted, and had to, forsake the familiar territories in order to seek out new spaces whose coordinates were unknown. In these wayless spaces only the way was the goal. There were times when ZERO was animated by this spirit.
Heinz Mack, published: XXXXX
