Nul
Antoon Melissen in conversation with Jan Henderikse
Too Much is Not Enough!
The Dutch Informal Group was founded in 1958. How do you remember those years, in terms of forming a group, but also of
your start as a visual artist?
Actually, the founding of the Informal Group came out of very practical considerations: mostly we were hoping that as a group it would be easier to get exhibited. Earlier that year I’d managed to get us our first group show at the student cafeteria of the Delft Polytechnic. Don’t forget that the official art circuit in the Netherlands didn’t want anything to do with us, with the exception of Cor de Nobel’s Galerie .31 in Dordrecht. De Nobel came to Delft in 1958 to invite Jan Schoonhoven to put on a solo exhibition; I just happened to be visiting Jan at the time. It was so like Jan to say: ‘Sure, I’ll do it, but let this kid do one first.’ And so I had my first solo show in 1958, thanks to Jan. There were really good informal works in it, really thick with paint, too. In those days I was still using house paint, remnants I’d get from a paint shop in Delft. There were drops of paint on the floor tiles under the paintings in the gallery – that’s how brand-new those pieces were! Schoonhoven encouraged me to continue with art – he saw something in my work. And he gave me stacks of paper on more than one occasion, because of course I could hardly afford it. My first visit to Jan and Anita Schoonhoven made a huge impression on me. An artist with a studio – for me it was really a whole other world. And yet Schoonhoven was from a working-class background. Neither of us had any contacts whatsoever in the art world, nobody to pull strings and help us out. We set everything up ourselves. It was the same during the Nul group period, by the way: museums and galleries had no interest at all in our work. It was primarily Henk, of course, who was very active in making contacts – his typewriter was never still. Without him many initiatives would never have got off the ground.
You left the Netherlands fairly soon, in 1959. What was behind your emigration?
To get out of the Netherlands was what I’d always wanted! Gerard Reve, too, wrote about moving abroad, in Op weg naar het einde (On My Way to the End), I think. Reve said there were two options: working in the mines or in a hospital, both in England. Of course I didn’t really want to do that. I couldn’t really find my niche in the Netherlands, and I wasn’t able to do any serious work either. That’s why I wanted to emigrate, to produce real art for a change. And yet around 1958 we barely had any idea of what was going on in other countries. Henk Peeters had a subscription to the journal Das Kunst- werk, so we were able to keep up to date a little bit. I’d hear things sometimes through Bram Bogart, who was also from Delft and had moved to Paris in the early 1950s. And Anita Schoonhoven was a friend of the sculptor Lotti van der Gaag, who’d also been living in Paris since 1950. But it really didn’t amount to much; in the Nether- lands you were really isolated in those days.
You spent several years in Düsseldorf. Did you choose Düsseldorf because of the circle around the German Zero artists?
No, absolutely not. I left in 1959, going first to Cologne and later that year to Düsseldorf. In the past I’d worked as a tour guide on those holiday boats on the German Rhine, so I was a little familiar with the area. I hoped the move would shake things up, and actually it did. Once I left I never painted again – it was really a radical break. In Cologne I met Günther Uecker and through Günther I found a studio in Düsseldorf. Joseph Beuys and Gotthard Graubner were my new neighbours, and Beuys always hated the fact that I had the nicest space. But we had hardly any contact with each other; our worlds were so far apart. He was still drawing at the time and I was already working on my first assemblages. I’d take endless walks with my wife, Idi, along the Rhine in Düsseldorf, and I’d bring back anything I found interesting, even things that had washed up on the banks. My studio was packed to the rafters during that period, and I always had to clear a path in the evening when we wanted to go to bed. Speaking of assemblages, when I was 18 and living in Amsterdam, I was already sticking all the everyday things I used onto panels. That was in 1955. But, yeah, what do you do with that when you’re 18? Threw it all away, of course. What a shame!
Can you talk a little bit about your contacts around 1960, the people you met in Düsseldorf?
Günther Uecker lived around the corner from us in Düsseldorf; we talked with him every day and we were good friends during those years. Uecker would exhibit his work with Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, but actually things clicked a lot better between the two of us. And the Düsseldorf gallery owner Alfred Schmela also dropped by frequently. I usually went to the openings at Schmela’s gallery with Uecker. I also saw a lot of exhibitions outside Düsseldorf, as it hap- pens. ‘Monochrome Malerei’ (Monochrome Painting) in Leverkusen – that’s where I met Lucio Fontana – Yves Klein’s ‘Monochrome und Feuer’ (Monochrome and Fire) exhibition in Krefeld, and Christo’s installation of stacked oil drums in the harbour of Cologne – that was in 1961 as well. And Manzoni, of course. I’d already seen his work in Rotterdam in 1958, with Jan Schoonhoven. For us it was really a jolt to see that much work that was that provocative. Jan was hugely impressed by the order in Manzoni’s work. And of course everything was white, pure white!
Your works from the Nul period differ rather significantly from one another. What was the unifying factor, in your view?
I can illustrate that with a nice story. We picked up Jan Schoonhoven in Delft one day, in a 2CV, and we all drove to Trier, to the opening
of the exhibition ‘Avantgarde 61’. There’s still a photo of that, of us
at the opening in formal suits. All four of us hated affectation – the kind of pretensions and attitudes you’d get from artists, those bohemian types who’d deliberately splatter paint on their hands and then go to an opening. On that score we all agreed. I really clicked with Armando. If you read the manifestos of the time now, it all seems so terribly serious and theoretically worked out, and yet Armando and I would be laughing our heads off making up slogans like ‘creativity goes about dressed in a proper suit’. I wasn’t involved in the writing of the manifestos, by the way. Jan Schoonhoven actually felt the same way about it as I did: ‘Those guys can do what they like; it’s really nothing to do with me’ was more or less the way he looked at it. We weren’t all sitting around all day theorizing; we were much too sober-minded for that. At least I was. But we did share a way of thin- king. However different our works were.
How do you look back on the Nul period?
Yeah, how ‘Nul’ was I, really? Actually, for me Nul was more a vehicle. I was part of it, and yet I wasn’t. And don’t forget that Nul wasn’t a club with by-laws or anything like that: something just evolved out
of the Informal Group that became Nul. People often imagine some- thing very rigid, but actually many things happen quite organically. And that’s the way plans for exhibitions were made: lots of talking and then suddenly you’d get the best ideas. Like for the first Nul exhi- bition in Amsterdam – we discussed that a lot. Including with Günther Uecker and Yves Klein, as it happens. I really wanted to toss 20 crates of beer from the top of that beautiful marble staircase at the Stedelijk Museum. I could see it all, this fantastic layer of foam all over the museum floor. And I was in touch with Braun about a cabin with flash equipment at the museum exit, so you’d have spots in front of your eyes for four days. Real ‘art you take home with you’, in other words! All those plans were rejected. ‘Are you out of your mind?’ Willem Sandberg said. I even had an affidavit from an eye doctor that it wouldn’t do any harm. A chain smoker, that doctor, by the way, be- cause the cigarette packs for the assemblage I exhibited there came from him. But it’s true I didn’t want to have anything more to do with Nul for a long time, and neither did Armando, incidentally. Always the same anecdotes, and always having to explain, over and over, exactly what it was about. A losing battle. It’s incomprehensible, really, that it took so long for the Dutch to pay attention to that period.
In 1968, so after the Nul group had disbanded, you had a solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum entitled ‘Jan Henderikse Uses Common Cents’. ‘Uses common sense’ – is this still the spirit of Nul talking?
I’ve always felt that as an artist you should use your common sense; that’s not specifically ‘Nul’. Marcel Duchamp said it: ‘bête comme un peintre’, dumb as a painter. Artists shouldn’t philosophize too much about their own work; it only leads to problems and nonsense. I’ve always felt an affinity with Duchamp, with the combination of doing serious work but not taking yourself too seriously. Duchamp was a master at self-contradiction, at stirring up tensions time and time again. You can see this in his work: every step is a surprise. Wim Beeren, the director of the Stedelijk Museum in the 1980s, said this about my work too, that I’m so unpredictable. Make what you enjoy, whether it fits in a particular pattern or not. A lot of artists just go on doing things in the same familiar way. Sort of don’t rock the boat, don’t change too much, because it might all go wrong. To me that’s death. I’ve never wanted to conform; I wouldn’t even be able to. What Wim Beeren meant is that people expect an assemblage from me, but instead they get the Dutch national anthem, as my work of art, or an installation of cola bottles. That infuriates people. Because they don’t get it – it runs counter to their expectations.
You’ve mentioned Marcel Duchamp. What are your thoughts on the conceptual element in your own work?
I’ve always believed that art is really more an idea than a thing. I think. I once had an exhibition in mind in which I wouldn’t make any of the pieces myself, and I wouldn’t even go to see it. Maybe that’s going too far; you’d be too consistent. My installations of fruit boxes and beer crates from 1962 are of course the original pieces. But the point is the idea, not that one initial version. Forget the patina, forget the old signature, forget the original work; the value of the later ver- sions of the installations lies somewhere amidst all that, and they are really just as unique as the original version. I was already working with fruit and vegetable boxes and beer crates in 1959, and I also made my first large installations in my studio that year. I didn’t show them until 1962, first at the Stedelijk Museum and later at the Ant- werp exhibition ‘Anti-Peinture’ (Anti-Painting). Yeah, when you look back the idea turns out to be stronger than that one execution in and of itself. It’s why we can still look at it, still make it.
You talked earlier about a shared way of thinking. And yet you didn’t take part in the second Nul exhibition in Amsterdam in 1965.
That’s right. In fact I dropped out in 1964, because I didn’t take part in the ‘ZERO-0-NUL’ exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague in 1964. Jan Schoonhoven and I did exchange letters about that show, but I was already over it by then. It had all got a little too serious, too white, too clean and ‘Zeroist’. In the early years it was different; the Dutch artists had a clear identity of their own, averse to idealism. Very different from the Germans, both feet more on the ground, really. It got a little too rein und hoch for me. I still sent in a proposal for ‘Zero on Sea’ in 1966, because the idea of art in public space has always appealed to me enormously. When I think back on it, you can see a definite difference from the German Zero group, from those light pieces by Otto Piene, for instance. I’d done a design for a room built out of beer crates, with a light bulb inside each beer bottle. And then those light bulbs would flash on and off like mad, preferably at random, of course, not all at the same time. I’ve always loved quantities, masses, preferably of everyday objects. It’s provocative but it’s also beautiful, the way the packed stands of a baseball field are beautiful. It’s decoration in the classical sense of the term, even though it’s to do with things that others might find banal. Unlike many other artists, by the way, I don’t think ‘decoration’ is a dirty word!
Arman also worked with everyday objects and materials. How did your work from the Nul period relate to Arman’s?
I saw Arman’s Poubelles for the first time in Paris; those pieces made a huge impression on me. Stuffing the contents of a rubbish bin inside a Plexiglas box – you couldn’t get any more radical than that, I thought. I was also working with anything I came across, but
I had the feeling that there was more of a ‘choice’ in my work than in Arman’s. Making art without technique, totally devoid of any techni- que at all – I admired that enormously, although Arman’s work was often much more composed than mine. And just recently I heard that he was in fact quite selective before those Plexiglas boxes of rubbish were sealed. I never say anything about my own work; for that you’ll have to go to art historians. Still I think my work is more intuitive, less constructed. Arman, myself, but also Christo, Armando and of course Daniel Spoerri, so many people in those days were looking for ‘it’ in ordinary things, and yet each found it in his own way. Günther Uecker once asked me very politely whether he might make a piece with corks, just as I was doing a lot back then. But of course that piece looked completely different from mine, really composed, laid out in rows – I’d never do it that way. The Korean artist Nam June Paik once said that television had been such a new and dramatic form of entertainment that it allowed artists to go back to making dull and repetitive work. Maybe that’s not such a crazy notion. My favourite things to work with are the most ordinary things, things others find totally uninteresting or fail to notice entirely. Discarded photos, corks, coins, number plates, you name it. When I look back on it, that really is a constant line in my work, right up to the present day, in fact. And then all those ordinary things suddenly turn out to be very interesting indeed.
The artist gets the last word?
Yes please! I’ve said it many times before: I’m interested in every- thing that moves human beings. Everything. Preferably in large quantities. The more the merrier, too much is not enough! To me that really sums it up best.
Interview by Antoon Melissen, New York, Delft, 2010
Too Much is Not Enough!
The Dutch Informal Group was founded in 1958. How do you remember those years, in terms of forming a group, but also of
your start as a visual artist?
Actually, the founding of the Informal Group came out of very practical considerations: mostly we were hoping that as a group it would be easier to get exhibited. Earlier that year I’d managed to get us our first group show at the student cafeteria of the Delft Polytechnic. Don’t forget that the official art circuit in the Netherlands didn’t want anything to do with us, with the exception of Cor de Nobel’s Galerie .31 in Dordrecht. De Nobel came to Delft in 1958 to invite Jan Schoonhoven to put on a solo exhibition; I just happened to be visiting Jan at the time. It was so like Jan to say: ‘Sure, I’ll do it, but let this kid do one first.’ And so I had my first solo show in 1958, thanks to Jan. There were really good informal works in it, really thick with paint, too. In those days I was still using house paint, remnants I’d get from a paint shop in Delft. There were drops of paint on the floor tiles under the paintings in the gallery – that’s how brand-new those pieces were! Schoonhoven encouraged me to continue with art – he saw something in my work. And he gave me stacks of paper on more than one occasion, because of course I could hardly afford it. My first visit to Jan and Anita Schoonhoven made a huge impression on me. An artist with a studio – for me it was really a whole other world. And yet Schoonhoven was from a working-class background. Neither of us had any contacts whatsoever in the art world, nobody to pull strings and help us out. We set everything up ourselves. It was the same during the Nul group period, by the way: museums and galleries had no interest at all in our work. It was primarily Henk, of course, who was very active in making contacts – his typewriter was never still. Without him many initiatives would never have got off the ground.
You left the Netherlands fairly soon, in 1959. What was behind your emigration?
To get out of the Netherlands was what I’d always wanted! Gerard Reve, too, wrote about moving abroad, in Op weg naar het einde (On My Way to the End), I think. Reve said there were two options: working in the mines or in a hospital, both in England. Of course I didn’t really want to do that. I couldn’t really find my niche in the Netherlands, and I wasn’t able to do any serious work either. That’s why I wanted to emigrate, to produce real art for a change. And yet around 1958 we barely had any idea of what was going on in other countries. Henk Peeters had a subscription to the journal Das Kunst- werk, so we were able to keep up to date a little bit. I’d hear things sometimes through Bram Bogart, who was also from Delft and had moved to Paris in the early 1950s. And Anita Schoonhoven was a friend of the sculptor Lotti van der Gaag, who’d also been living in Paris since 1950. But it really didn’t amount to much; in the Nether- lands you were really isolated in those days.
You spent several years in Düsseldorf. Did you choose Düsseldorf because of the circle around the German Zero artists?
No, absolutely not. I left in 1959, going first to Cologne and later that year to Düsseldorf. In the past I’d worked as a tour guide on those holiday boats on the German Rhine, so I was a little familiar with the area. I hoped the move would shake things up, and actually it did. Once I left I never painted again – it was really a radical break. In Cologne I met Günther Uecker and through Günther I found a studio in Düsseldorf. Joseph Beuys and Gotthard Graubner were my new neighbours, and Beuys always hated the fact that I had the nicest space. But we had hardly any contact with each other; our worlds were so far apart. He was still drawing at the time and I was already working on my first assemblages. I’d take endless walks with my wife, Idi, along the Rhine in Düsseldorf, and I’d bring back anything I found interesting, even things that had washed up on the banks. My studio was packed to the rafters during that period, and I always had to clear a path in the evening when we wanted to go to bed. Speaking of assemblages, when I was 18 and living in Amsterdam, I was already sticking all the everyday things I used onto panels. That was in 1955. But, yeah, what do you do with that when you’re 18? Threw it all away, of course. What a shame!
Can you talk a little bit about your contacts around 1960, the people you met in Düsseldorf?
Günther Uecker lived around the corner from us in Düsseldorf; we talked with him every day and we were good friends during those years. Uecker would exhibit his work with Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, but actually things clicked a lot better between the two of us. And the Düsseldorf gallery owner Alfred Schmela also dropped by frequently. I usually went to the openings at Schmela’s gallery with Uecker. I also saw a lot of exhibitions outside Düsseldorf, as it hap- pens. ‘Monochrome Malerei’ (Monochrome Painting) in Leverkusen – that’s where I met Lucio Fontana – Yves Klein’s ‘Monochrome und Feuer’ (Monochrome and Fire) exhibition in Krefeld, and Christo’s installation of stacked oil drums in the harbour of Cologne – that was in 1961 as well. And Manzoni, of course. I’d already seen his work in Rotterdam in 1958, with Jan Schoonhoven. For us it was really a jolt to see that much work that was that provocative. Jan was hugely impressed by the order in Manzoni’s work. And of course everything was white, pure white!
Your works from the Nul period differ rather significantly from one another. What was the unifying factor, in your view?
I can illustrate that with a nice story. We picked up Jan Schoonhoven in Delft one day, in a 2CV, and we all drove to Trier, to the opening
of the exhibition ‘Avantgarde 61’. There’s still a photo of that, of us
at the opening in formal suits. All four of us hated affectation – the kind of pretensions and attitudes you’d get from artists, those bohemian types who’d deliberately splatter paint on their hands and then go to an opening. On that score we all agreed. I really clicked with Armando. If you read the manifestos of the time now, it all seems so terribly serious and theoretically worked out, and yet Armando and I would be laughing our heads off making up slogans like ‘creativity goes about dressed in a proper suit’. I wasn’t involved in the writing of the manifestos, by the way. Jan Schoonhoven actually felt the same way about it as I did: ‘Those guys can do what they like; it’s really nothing to do with me’ was more or less the way he looked at it. We weren’t all sitting around all day theorizing; we were much too sober-minded for that. At least I was. But we did share a way of thin- king. However different our works were.
How do you look back on the Nul period?
Yeah, how ‘Nul’ was I, really? Actually, for me Nul was more a vehicle. I was part of it, and yet I wasn’t. And don’t forget that Nul wasn’t a club with by-laws or anything like that: something just evolved out
of the Informal Group that became Nul. People often imagine some- thing very rigid, but actually many things happen quite organically. And that’s the way plans for exhibitions were made: lots of talking and then suddenly you’d get the best ideas. Like for the first Nul exhi- bition in Amsterdam – we discussed that a lot. Including with Günther Uecker and Yves Klein, as it happens. I really wanted to toss 20 crates of beer from the top of that beautiful marble staircase at the Stedelijk Museum. I could see it all, this fantastic layer of foam all over the museum floor. And I was in touch with Braun about a cabin with flash equipment at the museum exit, so you’d have spots in front of your eyes for four days. Real ‘art you take home with you’, in other words! All those plans were rejected. ‘Are you out of your mind?’ Willem Sandberg said. I even had an affidavit from an eye doctor that it wouldn’t do any harm. A chain smoker, that doctor, by the way, be- cause the cigarette packs for the assemblage I exhibited there came from him. But it’s true I didn’t want to have anything more to do with Nul for a long time, and neither did Armando, incidentally. Always the same anecdotes, and always having to explain, over and over, exactly what it was about. A losing battle. It’s incomprehensible, really, that it took so long for the Dutch to pay attention to that period.
In 1968, so after the Nul group had disbanded, you had a solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum entitled ‘Jan Henderikse Uses Common Cents’. ‘Uses common sense’ – is this still the spirit of Nul talking?
I’ve always felt that as an artist you should use your common sense; that’s not specifically ‘Nul’. Marcel Duchamp said it: ‘bête comme un peintre’, dumb as a painter. Artists shouldn’t philosophize too much about their own work; it only leads to problems and nonsense. I’ve always felt an affinity with Duchamp, with the combination of doing serious work but not taking yourself too seriously. Duchamp was a master at self-contradiction, at stirring up tensions time and time again. You can see this in his work: every step is a surprise. Wim Beeren, the director of the Stedelijk Museum in the 1980s, said this about my work too, that I’m so unpredictable. Make what you enjoy, whether it fits in a particular pattern or not. A lot of artists just go on doing things in the same familiar way. Sort of don’t rock the boat, don’t change too much, because it might all go wrong. To me that’s death. I’ve never wanted to conform; I wouldn’t even be able to. What Wim Beeren meant is that people expect an assemblage from me, but instead they get the Dutch national anthem, as my work of art, or an installation of cola bottles. That infuriates people. Because they don’t get it – it runs counter to their expectations.
You’ve mentioned Marcel Duchamp. What are your thoughts on the conceptual element in your own work?
I’ve always believed that art is really more an idea than a thing. I think. I once had an exhibition in mind in which I wouldn’t make any of the pieces myself, and I wouldn’t even go to see it. Maybe that’s going too far; you’d be too consistent. My installations of fruit boxes and beer crates from 1962 are of course the original pieces. But the point is the idea, not that one initial version. Forget the patina, forget the old signature, forget the original work; the value of the later ver- sions of the installations lies somewhere amidst all that, and they are really just as unique as the original version. I was already working with fruit and vegetable boxes and beer crates in 1959, and I also made my first large installations in my studio that year. I didn’t show them until 1962, first at the Stedelijk Museum and later at the Ant- werp exhibition ‘Anti-Peinture’ (Anti-Painting). Yeah, when you look back the idea turns out to be stronger than that one execution in and of itself. It’s why we can still look at it, still make it.
You talked earlier about a shared way of thinking. And yet you didn’t take part in the second Nul exhibition in Amsterdam in 1965.
That’s right. In fact I dropped out in 1964, because I didn’t take part in the ‘ZERO-0-NUL’ exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague in 1964. Jan Schoonhoven and I did exchange letters about that show, but I was already over it by then. It had all got a little too serious, too white, too clean and ‘Zeroist’. In the early years it was different; the Dutch artists had a clear identity of their own, averse to idealism. Very different from the Germans, both feet more on the ground, really. It got a little too rein und hoch for me. I still sent in a proposal for ‘Zero on Sea’ in 1966, because the idea of art in public space has always appealed to me enormously. When I think back on it, you can see a definite difference from the German Zero group, from those light pieces by Otto Piene, for instance. I’d done a design for a room built out of beer crates, with a light bulb inside each beer bottle. And then those light bulbs would flash on and off like mad, preferably at random, of course, not all at the same time. I’ve always loved quantities, masses, preferably of everyday objects. It’s provocative but it’s also beautiful, the way the packed stands of a baseball field are beautiful. It’s decoration in the classical sense of the term, even though it’s to do with things that others might find banal. Unlike many other artists, by the way, I don’t think ‘decoration’ is a dirty word!
Arman also worked with everyday objects and materials. How did your work from the Nul period relate to Arman’s?
I saw Arman’s Poubelles for the first time in Paris; those pieces made a huge impression on me. Stuffing the contents of a rubbish bin inside a Plexiglas box – you couldn’t get any more radical than that, I thought. I was also working with anything I came across, but
I had the feeling that there was more of a ‘choice’ in my work than in Arman’s. Making art without technique, totally devoid of any techni- que at all – I admired that enormously, although Arman’s work was often much more composed than mine. And just recently I heard that he was in fact quite selective before those Plexiglas boxes of rubbish were sealed. I never say anything about my own work; for that you’ll have to go to art historians. Still I think my work is more intuitive, less constructed. Arman, myself, but also Christo, Armando and of course Daniel Spoerri, so many people in those days were looking for ‘it’ in ordinary things, and yet each found it in his own way. Günther Uecker once asked me very politely whether he might make a piece with corks, just as I was doing a lot back then. But of course that piece looked completely different from mine, really composed, laid out in rows – I’d never do it that way. The Korean artist Nam June Paik once said that television had been such a new and dramatic form of entertainment that it allowed artists to go back to making dull and repetitive work. Maybe that’s not such a crazy notion. My favourite things to work with are the most ordinary things, things others find totally uninteresting or fail to notice entirely. Discarded photos, corks, coins, number plates, you name it. When I look back on it, that really is a constant line in my work, right up to the present day, in fact. And then all those ordinary things suddenly turn out to be very interesting indeed.
The artist gets the last word?
Yes please! I’ve said it many times before: I’m interested in every- thing that moves human beings. Everything. Preferably in large quantities. The more the merrier, too much is not enough! To me that really sums it up best.
Interview by Antoon Melissen, New York, Delft, 2010
