Nul
Tijs Visser in conversation with Henk Peeters
There Must Be a New Art. Or a New Public!
You began as an ‘Informal’ artist. How would you describe the transition from ‘painter’ to ZERO? And where did you first come in contact with the ZERO artists?
Disillusionment about pre-war expressionism was just beginning to spread. At the end of the 1950s, the Netherlands had just started appreciating CoBrA and Tachism. The work of the Dutch Informal Group drew the obvious conclusions from Tachism, with artists like Mark Tobey and Mark Rothko, or material painters like Jean Dubuffet and Tàpies. The group included Armando, Kees van Bohemen, Jan Schoonhoven and myself, and at the beginning Bram van den Boogaard (who worked under the name Bogart) occasionally took part. We were interested in monochromism, and Jan Henderikse, another member of the group, produced plain white or grey surfaces in a thick impasto, Armando went totally black, Schoonhoven produced grey, virtually silted-up droppings and in my case it was grey planes with a white or black border.
We shared our genealogy with Piero Manzoni and Yves Klein, whom I had previously met in Paris. In 1960, via Yves Klein, I made contact with his future brother-in-law Günther Uecker and through the latter we then met Heinz Mack and Otto Piene. That autumn we transformed the ‘Informal’ group into ‘Nul’, signalling an affinity with the German ‘Zero’ group.
I first saw Günther Uecker’s work at Galerie Kasper in Lausanne, where I also exhibited. At the time he was a member of the NEE (Nouvelle École Européenne) group, which was being actively pro- moted by Kasper. Subsequently, I got to know Uecker’s work from the exhibition in Wolfram’s Eschenbach and of course also from the exhibition ‘Monochrome Malerei’ that Udo Kultermann mounted in Leverküsen.
I just missed the exhibition, but saw a large portion of the works in store. I was keen to bring them to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, though without old warhorses like Mark Rothko. I wanted to show new work. Until the last moment, and at the cost of lots of arguments, though with the support of Sandberg, the museum’s director, I tried to persuade artists to participate.
The plans for a first large international Nul exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in 1962 originated in the spring of 1961 in Uecker’s studio in Düsseldorf. Uecker took me to see Mack to discuss things further and Mack in turn advised me to invite Yves Klein. But Klein wasn’t at all interested, since he felt that monochromism was his invention, and actually had an argument about it with Kultermann. Mack also had a different concept and wanted to make the show more of a ZERO exhibition. Because I felt very much at home with them, we drew up a list of artists together. Piene made a plan showing the distribution of rooms.
Shortly afterwards Piero Manzoni visited me at home while he was in Rotterdam for an ZERO exhibition that Hans Sonnenberg organized at the Rotterdamse Kunstkring, and we drew up the final list of participants to which he added Lucio Fontana and Enrico Castellani. Somewhat against his wishes I added Lo Savio, who had made a great impression on me in Leverküsen. Manzoni had a clear picture of trends and he also brought Gruppo T to my attention, especially Gianni Colombo, whom he considered important.
Where did you meet Yves Klein and what influence did he have on your work?
In 1960 I saw his work at Iris Clert’s gallery in Paris, where I also met him for the first time. I’m not sure whether he had a great influence on me. I’m not as religious as Klein, who’s very mystical, and that didn’t interest me at all. I’m much more interested in the superficial, I don’t go beyond the surface, there’s nothing ‘behind’ my work. My ideas were much closer to Manzoni’s; he had much more humour than Klein.
My work is quite similar to Manzoni’s. For the Nul exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in 1962 I asked him to cover a large panel, one of those with feet which paintings usually hung on, with glued cotton wool. He first stretched canvas over it and covered that with cotton wool. At first he wanted to use fibreglass but that irritated the skin, so I sent him some nylon, which I used. It’s a shame the Stedelijk Museum has disposed of the work; it would be worth a lot of money today. You could easily do a copy: the dimensions were just over 2 m high and 3 m wide. He had signed it on the side – it was a genuine Manzoni. But I think that the influence of Alberto Burri or of Fontana is easier to see in my work. I saw Fontana’s work in 1958 at the Venice Biennale and it gave me the first impetus to change my work and to move away from Informal Art.
In 1965 you organized the second Nul exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Why did you invite the Japanese group Gutai to take part? They had never taken part in a ZERO exhibition before.
It was probably around 1961. I was in Düsseldorf staying with Günther Uecker, who regularly organized parties, and Yves Klein was there too. Klein talked about a Japanese group that worked with ideas equivalent to those of ZERO. He had been to Japan in 1952 to learn judo. Klein was going to give me more information but died shortly after, so that on my own initiative I contacted Michel Tapié, who in turn gave me Jiro Yoshihara’s address, he was the spokes- man and founder of the Gutai group. Tapié’s book contained illustrations of Sadamasa Motonaga’s work, long bags filled with water han- ging from tree to tree in a park. That fascinated me, as I also worked with water. We – Ad Peetersen, the curator of the Stedelijk Museum and I – received a letter from Yoshihara saying that he would like to take part with recent paintings. We had now all stopped painting, and so we asked him to reconstruct the installations that they had made in the park. Unfortunately there wasn’t enough money to bring all the Japanese over to Amsterdam, so Yoshihara came with his son Michio. They had also shipped over a crate of paintings, but when we opened it, it turned out to be full of tachist works, still wet. We regarded that period as a closed chapter and so did not show them. Next, with a number of assistants we bought materials based on Yoshihara’s shopping list: sand, paper, lamps, coloured cloth, wood, a clock and with his son he reconstructed the works. I put a big balloon covered in coloured dots in the Yves Klein room, because I thought it fitted in beautifully. Kanayama’s work was just like an atomic mushroom cloud which combined well with the body imprints, an ‘Anthropometry’, by Yves Klein. In the corridor there were long lengths of material covered in footsteps along the walls and on the ceiling. The press found Gutai’s participation very exciting, but Yves Klein’s wife was less happy about my juxtaposition of Klein and the Japanese, since Yves had always been very worried that people would think he had stolen many of his ideas from Gutai. However, it later emerged that Lucio Fontana, Jean Tinguely, Jef Verheyen and Günther Uecker were also interested in Gutai. Fontana and Castellani had in fact had an exhibition in the Gutai museum as early as the early 1960s. Afterwards we included many of the Japanese in the ‘Zero on Sea’ exhibition for Scheveningen.
Why did you include Yayoi Kusama in the Nul exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum that you organized? She wasn’t a member of the Japanese Gutai group.
I first saw Kusama’s work in the ‘Monochrome Malerei’ exhibition that Udo Kultermann had put on. Kultermann regularly visited New York and knew her work well. I wrote to her, and an enthusiastic and frequent correspondence developed, so I included her Net-paintings for the first time in the Nul62 exhibition. But since I had no money to invite her, I did not meet her until shortly before the Nul65 exhibition when she was exhibiting at OREZ. Because of her difficulty in communicating with the museum staff, I came to her aid in setting up her first installation: the boat surrounded by posters. I assigned one of my art school pupils to her, and because she was keen to do something else, I suggested she do another work commissioned by me. She produced a large white plastic canvas, through which she had woven carding twine. Not exactly my style, but I have kept it as an example of group work. Later she exhibited widely in the Nether- lands and in a number of performances she painted the naked bodies of Jan Schoonhoven and others with large dots. That was hugely exciting for us at the time: a little Japanese woman painting dots on people and mannequins, sticking spaghetti on clothes and sewing objects with penises.
How were the Nul exhibitions received by the press and the public? They have now become historic exhibitions, and many works from them are real showpieces in important museum collections.
The Nul62 show was one of the shortest in the history of the Stede- lijk Museum – 13 days – but nevertheless drew over a thousand visitors a day. That wasn’t due to press enthusiasm. Comments included: ‘Infantile handicrafts produced out of boredom,’ said Doelman, who thought Fontana was a pushy old codger. ‘Nihilistic and intolerant,’ was Adri Laan’s verdict. ‘It gives you a bellyache,’ observed Jan Donia. ‘A NULlity, it really doesn’t get any worse,’ declared Gabriël Smit. And one critic said to Sandberg, the director of the Stedelijk: ‘Anyone who shows Cézanne and Van Gogh, and round the corner these charlatans, conmen and airheads, understands nothing about art and nothing about museums.’ I’m giving you a sketch of the atmosphere that today strikes us as almost pathological. To think that those works, which today make a benevolent, serene impression, could make the critics so angry!
After the shows in the Stedelijk Museum was there continued demand for ZERO exhibitions? Did it help you build up international contacts, and how were sales of your own work?
After the Nul65 exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum we really had the feeling we had arrived. Actually, though, that was not at all what we wanted to do: exhibit in a museum, but it was the only option for us. Sandberg couldn’t see any merit in our project but thought it made a change, and so we were able to do what we wanted: we had to pay for it all ourselves anyway. After the show, I realized that it was actually the end of the whole movement; everyone was tired of compromising and having rows, and we didn’t earn a penny. The only galleries that were important to us and sold our work were Iris Clert in Paris and Alfred Schmela in Düsseldorf. Only Fontana had a gallery in New York. I sold my work from the exhibition to the Stedelijk Museum for 400 guilders as it were to settle my mounting debts for transport costs. Kusama too could not afford to ship her boat back to America. She didn’t know what to do with the thing, and so she simply presented it to the Stedelijk. All the work by the Gutai artists was thrown away; Sandberg had no funds to acquire it and his successor De Wilde was unwilling to. Only Kanayama’s ‘Balloon’ has remained in the Stedelijk, since it was to have been exchanged for a work by Hans Haacke. Enrico Castellani was in hiding in Switzerland, because of his involvement with the Red Brigades, and did not want his works back for the time being. So that when the Stedelijk Museum refused to store them I had them transported to my studio, again at my own expense. On top of that many works came back damaged, and so I had to repair them, which also cost me money. So things were not very hopeful and I simply had to do something else. I destroyed part of my work; making art involved so much misery, and I really wanted to call it a day. There had to be a payoff, I felt, if I didn’t earn anything, then at least I wanted to be famous; and I didn’t succeed in doing either. Other things were happening that were much more exciting than making art or organizing exhibitions: the student movement, women’s liberation, the reform of the universities. Fortunately I had been teaching for a while, so I had money coming in and I was able to help my colleagues to plan and mount exhibitions. In that way I was able to build up a large collection of ZERO work. With lots of pieces that were left behind or exchanged.
How did art develop after Nul? You gave up producing art and concentrated on your teaching.
Why did so little of it penetrate more widely? Why is it that one side, the historical side, everything goes so fast, but on the other, the absorption, acceptance, so slowly? I must say that that question has greatly occupied me in recent years. How was it possible that the Nul exhibitions were accepted so quickly and painlessly, but that it should all have stopped dead? Why is it that at present you can no longer visit an exhibition without seeing something of yours or your friends’, even if there are different names underneath and the prices are consequently higher. Why is it that some of us have let ourselves be co-opted into the production system and have to churn out repli- cas of our original discovery ad nauseam, which paralyses any at- tempt to change it. Why is it that we all now feature in the illustrious history of art, but all that is generated is an amount of trade. The fact is that I have drawn my own conclusions from this, and no longer play the game. ‘There must be a new art,’ wrote Armando. I would like to counter that with ‘there must be a new public’. For me Manzoni demonstrated this problem as clearly as can be. His work nowhere shows the continuity of the artist who allows himself to be put into a box. Every moment, every work was a final conclusion, unrepeatable: the end result did not lead to a new style of art, a way in which production could begin. No, each phase was a closure that left only one way out: towards life itself.
Interviews by Tijs Visser, additional texts and corrections by Henk Peeters, Hall, 2009-2010
There Must Be a New Art. Or a New Public!
You began as an ‘Informal’ artist. How would you describe the transition from ‘painter’ to ZERO? And where did you first come in contact with the ZERO artists?
Disillusionment about pre-war expressionism was just beginning to spread. At the end of the 1950s, the Netherlands had just started appreciating CoBrA and Tachism. The work of the Dutch Informal Group drew the obvious conclusions from Tachism, with artists like Mark Tobey and Mark Rothko, or material painters like Jean Dubuffet and Tàpies. The group included Armando, Kees van Bohemen, Jan Schoonhoven and myself, and at the beginning Bram van den Boogaard (who worked under the name Bogart) occasionally took part. We were interested in monochromism, and Jan Henderikse, another member of the group, produced plain white or grey surfaces in a thick impasto, Armando went totally black, Schoonhoven produced grey, virtually silted-up droppings and in my case it was grey planes with a white or black border.
We shared our genealogy with Piero Manzoni and Yves Klein, whom I had previously met in Paris. In 1960, via Yves Klein, I made contact with his future brother-in-law Günther Uecker and through the latter we then met Heinz Mack and Otto Piene. That autumn we transformed the ‘Informal’ group into ‘Nul’, signalling an affinity with the German ‘Zero’ group.
I first saw Günther Uecker’s work at Galerie Kasper in Lausanne, where I also exhibited. At the time he was a member of the NEE (Nouvelle École Européenne) group, which was being actively pro- moted by Kasper. Subsequently, I got to know Uecker’s work from the exhibition in Wolfram’s Eschenbach and of course also from the exhibition ‘Monochrome Malerei’ that Udo Kultermann mounted in Leverküsen.
I just missed the exhibition, but saw a large portion of the works in store. I was keen to bring them to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, though without old warhorses like Mark Rothko. I wanted to show new work. Until the last moment, and at the cost of lots of arguments, though with the support of Sandberg, the museum’s director, I tried to persuade artists to participate.
The plans for a first large international Nul exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in 1962 originated in the spring of 1961 in Uecker’s studio in Düsseldorf. Uecker took me to see Mack to discuss things further and Mack in turn advised me to invite Yves Klein. But Klein wasn’t at all interested, since he felt that monochromism was his invention, and actually had an argument about it with Kultermann. Mack also had a different concept and wanted to make the show more of a ZERO exhibition. Because I felt very much at home with them, we drew up a list of artists together. Piene made a plan showing the distribution of rooms.
Shortly afterwards Piero Manzoni visited me at home while he was in Rotterdam for an ZERO exhibition that Hans Sonnenberg organized at the Rotterdamse Kunstkring, and we drew up the final list of participants to which he added Lucio Fontana and Enrico Castellani. Somewhat against his wishes I added Lo Savio, who had made a great impression on me in Leverküsen. Manzoni had a clear picture of trends and he also brought Gruppo T to my attention, especially Gianni Colombo, whom he considered important.
Where did you meet Yves Klein and what influence did he have on your work?
In 1960 I saw his work at Iris Clert’s gallery in Paris, where I also met him for the first time. I’m not sure whether he had a great influence on me. I’m not as religious as Klein, who’s very mystical, and that didn’t interest me at all. I’m much more interested in the superficial, I don’t go beyond the surface, there’s nothing ‘behind’ my work. My ideas were much closer to Manzoni’s; he had much more humour than Klein.
My work is quite similar to Manzoni’s. For the Nul exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in 1962 I asked him to cover a large panel, one of those with feet which paintings usually hung on, with glued cotton wool. He first stretched canvas over it and covered that with cotton wool. At first he wanted to use fibreglass but that irritated the skin, so I sent him some nylon, which I used. It’s a shame the Stedelijk Museum has disposed of the work; it would be worth a lot of money today. You could easily do a copy: the dimensions were just over 2 m high and 3 m wide. He had signed it on the side – it was a genuine Manzoni. But I think that the influence of Alberto Burri or of Fontana is easier to see in my work. I saw Fontana’s work in 1958 at the Venice Biennale and it gave me the first impetus to change my work and to move away from Informal Art.
In 1965 you organized the second Nul exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Why did you invite the Japanese group Gutai to take part? They had never taken part in a ZERO exhibition before.
It was probably around 1961. I was in Düsseldorf staying with Günther Uecker, who regularly organized parties, and Yves Klein was there too. Klein talked about a Japanese group that worked with ideas equivalent to those of ZERO. He had been to Japan in 1952 to learn judo. Klein was going to give me more information but died shortly after, so that on my own initiative I contacted Michel Tapié, who in turn gave me Jiro Yoshihara’s address, he was the spokes- man and founder of the Gutai group. Tapié’s book contained illustrations of Sadamasa Motonaga’s work, long bags filled with water han- ging from tree to tree in a park. That fascinated me, as I also worked with water. We – Ad Peetersen, the curator of the Stedelijk Museum and I – received a letter from Yoshihara saying that he would like to take part with recent paintings. We had now all stopped painting, and so we asked him to reconstruct the installations that they had made in the park. Unfortunately there wasn’t enough money to bring all the Japanese over to Amsterdam, so Yoshihara came with his son Michio. They had also shipped over a crate of paintings, but when we opened it, it turned out to be full of tachist works, still wet. We regarded that period as a closed chapter and so did not show them. Next, with a number of assistants we bought materials based on Yoshihara’s shopping list: sand, paper, lamps, coloured cloth, wood, a clock and with his son he reconstructed the works. I put a big balloon covered in coloured dots in the Yves Klein room, because I thought it fitted in beautifully. Kanayama’s work was just like an atomic mushroom cloud which combined well with the body imprints, an ‘Anthropometry’, by Yves Klein. In the corridor there were long lengths of material covered in footsteps along the walls and on the ceiling. The press found Gutai’s participation very exciting, but Yves Klein’s wife was less happy about my juxtaposition of Klein and the Japanese, since Yves had always been very worried that people would think he had stolen many of his ideas from Gutai. However, it later emerged that Lucio Fontana, Jean Tinguely, Jef Verheyen and Günther Uecker were also interested in Gutai. Fontana and Castellani had in fact had an exhibition in the Gutai museum as early as the early 1960s. Afterwards we included many of the Japanese in the ‘Zero on Sea’ exhibition for Scheveningen.
Why did you include Yayoi Kusama in the Nul exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum that you organized? She wasn’t a member of the Japanese Gutai group.
I first saw Kusama’s work in the ‘Monochrome Malerei’ exhibition that Udo Kultermann had put on. Kultermann regularly visited New York and knew her work well. I wrote to her, and an enthusiastic and frequent correspondence developed, so I included her Net-paintings for the first time in the Nul62 exhibition. But since I had no money to invite her, I did not meet her until shortly before the Nul65 exhibition when she was exhibiting at OREZ. Because of her difficulty in communicating with the museum staff, I came to her aid in setting up her first installation: the boat surrounded by posters. I assigned one of my art school pupils to her, and because she was keen to do something else, I suggested she do another work commissioned by me. She produced a large white plastic canvas, through which she had woven carding twine. Not exactly my style, but I have kept it as an example of group work. Later she exhibited widely in the Nether- lands and in a number of performances she painted the naked bodies of Jan Schoonhoven and others with large dots. That was hugely exciting for us at the time: a little Japanese woman painting dots on people and mannequins, sticking spaghetti on clothes and sewing objects with penises.
How were the Nul exhibitions received by the press and the public? They have now become historic exhibitions, and many works from them are real showpieces in important museum collections.
The Nul62 show was one of the shortest in the history of the Stede- lijk Museum – 13 days – but nevertheless drew over a thousand visitors a day. That wasn’t due to press enthusiasm. Comments included: ‘Infantile handicrafts produced out of boredom,’ said Doelman, who thought Fontana was a pushy old codger. ‘Nihilistic and intolerant,’ was Adri Laan’s verdict. ‘It gives you a bellyache,’ observed Jan Donia. ‘A NULlity, it really doesn’t get any worse,’ declared Gabriël Smit. And one critic said to Sandberg, the director of the Stedelijk: ‘Anyone who shows Cézanne and Van Gogh, and round the corner these charlatans, conmen and airheads, understands nothing about art and nothing about museums.’ I’m giving you a sketch of the atmosphere that today strikes us as almost pathological. To think that those works, which today make a benevolent, serene impression, could make the critics so angry!
After the shows in the Stedelijk Museum was there continued demand for ZERO exhibitions? Did it help you build up international contacts, and how were sales of your own work?
After the Nul65 exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum we really had the feeling we had arrived. Actually, though, that was not at all what we wanted to do: exhibit in a museum, but it was the only option for us. Sandberg couldn’t see any merit in our project but thought it made a change, and so we were able to do what we wanted: we had to pay for it all ourselves anyway. After the show, I realized that it was actually the end of the whole movement; everyone was tired of compromising and having rows, and we didn’t earn a penny. The only galleries that were important to us and sold our work were Iris Clert in Paris and Alfred Schmela in Düsseldorf. Only Fontana had a gallery in New York. I sold my work from the exhibition to the Stedelijk Museum for 400 guilders as it were to settle my mounting debts for transport costs. Kusama too could not afford to ship her boat back to America. She didn’t know what to do with the thing, and so she simply presented it to the Stedelijk. All the work by the Gutai artists was thrown away; Sandberg had no funds to acquire it and his successor De Wilde was unwilling to. Only Kanayama’s ‘Balloon’ has remained in the Stedelijk, since it was to have been exchanged for a work by Hans Haacke. Enrico Castellani was in hiding in Switzerland, because of his involvement with the Red Brigades, and did not want his works back for the time being. So that when the Stedelijk Museum refused to store them I had them transported to my studio, again at my own expense. On top of that many works came back damaged, and so I had to repair them, which also cost me money. So things were not very hopeful and I simply had to do something else. I destroyed part of my work; making art involved so much misery, and I really wanted to call it a day. There had to be a payoff, I felt, if I didn’t earn anything, then at least I wanted to be famous; and I didn’t succeed in doing either. Other things were happening that were much more exciting than making art or organizing exhibitions: the student movement, women’s liberation, the reform of the universities. Fortunately I had been teaching for a while, so I had money coming in and I was able to help my colleagues to plan and mount exhibitions. In that way I was able to build up a large collection of ZERO work. With lots of pieces that were left behind or exchanged.
How did art develop after Nul? You gave up producing art and concentrated on your teaching.
Why did so little of it penetrate more widely? Why is it that one side, the historical side, everything goes so fast, but on the other, the absorption, acceptance, so slowly? I must say that that question has greatly occupied me in recent years. How was it possible that the Nul exhibitions were accepted so quickly and painlessly, but that it should all have stopped dead? Why is it that at present you can no longer visit an exhibition without seeing something of yours or your friends’, even if there are different names underneath and the prices are consequently higher. Why is it that some of us have let ourselves be co-opted into the production system and have to churn out repli- cas of our original discovery ad nauseam, which paralyses any at- tempt to change it. Why is it that we all now feature in the illustrious history of art, but all that is generated is an amount of trade. The fact is that I have drawn my own conclusions from this, and no longer play the game. ‘There must be a new art,’ wrote Armando. I would like to counter that with ‘there must be a new public’. For me Manzoni demonstrated this problem as clearly as can be. His work nowhere shows the continuity of the artist who allows himself to be put into a box. Every moment, every work was a final conclusion, unrepeatable: the end result did not lead to a new style of art, a way in which production could begin. No, each phase was a closure that left only one way out: towards life itself.
Interviews by Tijs Visser, additional texts and corrections by Henk Peeters, Hall, 2009-2010
