ZERO: we live
After the Second World War, many young artists in Europe wanted to restart the world. The scale of devastation and loss of life between 1939 and 1945 was unprecedented in human history. As Heinz Mack remembers, Germany in particular was ‘a kind of poorhouse, comparatively speaking; in the backyard, surrounded by ruins, we were enclosed by a cultural cemetery, an information vacuum that is unimaginable today’.1 Most of the ZERO artists were teenagers in 1945, having grown up under the National Socialist regime when avant-garde art was labelled ‘degenerate’. This new generation felt an obligation to create art anew.
Of the Zero founders, Otto Piene had been drafted into the Hitler Youth, spent 1943–45 as an anti-aircraft spotter and then two years in a British internment camp. Günther Uecker, living on an island in the Baltic Sea, had buried bodies washed up after allied bombing raids. With the hardening of the East-West political divide, he moved from Berlin to Düsseldorf in 1955 (the Berlin Wall was not constructed until 1961). ‘One could not stand in a meadow and paint flowers’, he has said. Düsseldorf had been the target of round-the-clock air attacks and a seven-week bombardment in the spring of 1945. However, as capital of the new federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and with considerable allied investment, the city's reconstruction had proceeded rapidly.
The Polish-born Joseph Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski was a beneficiary of reconstruction programmes funded by America, with a scholarship to the Düsseldorf Academy from 1946 until he left for Australia in 1949. He remembered ‘plenty of information about contemporary art in France, Italy and England, …being on the border of Germany and France’. Although Mack found only ‘three or four old books left’ in the once comprehensive Academy library, and there was no exhibition infrastructure for emerging artists, he received a state scholarship to visit Paris in 1950. He met Yves Klein through Jean Tinguely; discovered Lucio Fontana’s slashed and punctured canvases at the Venice Biennale of 1956; and saw artworks by Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein in the American Embassy in Bonn.
It’s no coincidence that the Zero founders quickly found like-minded connections in Paris, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Milan and Zagreb: key cities in a historical network of trade and culture that is still a backbone in the EU. Having founded their own Azimut gallery in Milan, Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni drove their old Fiat 500 to affiliated exhibitions from Amsterdam to Zagreb (then in Yugoslavia, now Croatia: Yugoslavia saw rapid economic development at this time, having broken with the Soviet Union and opened its borders in 1955). Freedom to travel, to communicate faster and more widely than ever before, was enormously appealing to young artists. The postwar Wirtschaftswunder, the German economic miracle, meant Düsseldorf was now linked to all those forward-looking industrial centres by rail, autobahn and, increasingly, by air. Düsseldorf was eine Welt fur sich offen fur die Welt, as one colourful 1950s tourist guidebook proudly announced—‘a world in itself wide open to the world’.
Those years saw the beginnings of a federal Europe, transformed politically, socially, technologically. West Germany achieved sovereignty and NATO membership in 1955. It was a founding member of the European Economic Community with Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Luxembourg in March 1957. Just two weeks later, Mack and Piene staged their first one-night exhibition event—with readings, music, performance and light displays.
By September that year, they’d thought up the transnationally recognisable name for their consciously permeable collective. And in April 1958, in collaboration with Klein, they announced Zero to the world.
The artists whose work you see here at Mona were united not by style or manifesto—in fact what they’ve said is often quite contradictory—but by mutual inspiration and a sense of what Mack called ‘unexpected possibility’ in the here and right now. Art that is neither painting nor sculpture; non-traditional materials; effect over object; playful invention; performative presentation and new ways of interacting with their audience; a refusal to make rules; and no old-fashioned notions of what art should be. All these were shared. So, too, an optimism tinged with urgency; the sense that, to quote Klein from the first ZERO magazine, ‘One must—and this is not an exaggeration—keep in mind that we’re living in the atomic age, where everything material and physical could disappear from one day to another, to be replaced by nothing but the ultimate abstraction imaginable’. That tension, still—indeed increasingly—relevant today, accounts I think for some of their renewed appeal.
Of course, for all their radical newness, aspects of the wider ZERO were founded in earlier art. The origins of kinetic art, for example, lie partly in mechanised objects created by Marcel Duchamp, Lázló Moholy-Nagy and Alexander Calder (even making an ironic nod to 18th-century and earlier automata). ZERO’s explorations of light and movement build on centuries of artists’ probing of visual perception. The somewhat utopian spirit of the networked Zero, Nul, Azimut, Gruppo T, Nouveau réalisme, New Tendencies and so on, as well as their call for the conceptual and for truth to materials, is reminiscent of Bauhaus teaching in the aftermath of the First World War. Similarly, ZERO’s revolutionary spirit owes something to Dada (although there was a major art historical Dada exhibition in Düsseldorf in 1958 and the Zero founders distanced themselves from what they saw as its ‘nihilism’).
Art as street spectacle had a long tradition in Europe, just more often royal or religious than straight from the studio. The first exhibition event organised by Mack, Piene and Uecker that actually included the word ‘Zero’ in its title was their ZERO: Edition-Demonstration-Exposition in July 1961, inside and outside Alfred Schmela’s gallery in Düsseldorf’s Old Town.2 Streets were blocked off and a circular ‘Zero zone’ was marked out on the cobblestones—an empty space distinct from ‘hardening mechanisms and principles of order’. The third and most ambitious ZERO magazine was launched; fireworks and a spotlit hot-air balloon rose above aluminium flags and young women blowing soap bubbles, wearing black capes emblazoned ‘ZERO’ in white paint. There on the night were Joseph Beuys (another Düsseldorf Academy graduate), Nam June Paik from Korea via Tokyo, Henk Peeters from the Netherlands, Pol Bury and Jésus Raphael Soto (Belgian and Venezuelan respectively but both Paris-based). As were print media and TV.
Jane Clarck
April 2018
Published by the Museum for Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania
1. Quoted by Joseph D. Ketner II, Witness to Phenomenon: Group ZERO and the Development of New Media in Postwar European Art, London, 2017, p. 261.
2. Alfred Schmela trained architect and painter, had opened his Galerie in 1957 with a Klein exhibition; it was soon a centre for Zero activity.
Of the Zero founders, Otto Piene had been drafted into the Hitler Youth, spent 1943–45 as an anti-aircraft spotter and then two years in a British internment camp. Günther Uecker, living on an island in the Baltic Sea, had buried bodies washed up after allied bombing raids. With the hardening of the East-West political divide, he moved from Berlin to Düsseldorf in 1955 (the Berlin Wall was not constructed until 1961). ‘One could not stand in a meadow and paint flowers’, he has said. Düsseldorf had been the target of round-the-clock air attacks and a seven-week bombardment in the spring of 1945. However, as capital of the new federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and with considerable allied investment, the city's reconstruction had proceeded rapidly.
The Polish-born Joseph Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski was a beneficiary of reconstruction programmes funded by America, with a scholarship to the Düsseldorf Academy from 1946 until he left for Australia in 1949. He remembered ‘plenty of information about contemporary art in France, Italy and England, …being on the border of Germany and France’. Although Mack found only ‘three or four old books left’ in the once comprehensive Academy library, and there was no exhibition infrastructure for emerging artists, he received a state scholarship to visit Paris in 1950. He met Yves Klein through Jean Tinguely; discovered Lucio Fontana’s slashed and punctured canvases at the Venice Biennale of 1956; and saw artworks by Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein in the American Embassy in Bonn.
It’s no coincidence that the Zero founders quickly found like-minded connections in Paris, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Milan and Zagreb: key cities in a historical network of trade and culture that is still a backbone in the EU. Having founded their own Azimut gallery in Milan, Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni drove their old Fiat 500 to affiliated exhibitions from Amsterdam to Zagreb (then in Yugoslavia, now Croatia: Yugoslavia saw rapid economic development at this time, having broken with the Soviet Union and opened its borders in 1955). Freedom to travel, to communicate faster and more widely than ever before, was enormously appealing to young artists. The postwar Wirtschaftswunder, the German economic miracle, meant Düsseldorf was now linked to all those forward-looking industrial centres by rail, autobahn and, increasingly, by air. Düsseldorf was eine Welt fur sich offen fur die Welt, as one colourful 1950s tourist guidebook proudly announced—‘a world in itself wide open to the world’.
Those years saw the beginnings of a federal Europe, transformed politically, socially, technologically. West Germany achieved sovereignty and NATO membership in 1955. It was a founding member of the European Economic Community with Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Luxembourg in March 1957. Just two weeks later, Mack and Piene staged their first one-night exhibition event—with readings, music, performance and light displays.
By September that year, they’d thought up the transnationally recognisable name for their consciously permeable collective. And in April 1958, in collaboration with Klein, they announced Zero to the world.
The artists whose work you see here at Mona were united not by style or manifesto—in fact what they’ve said is often quite contradictory—but by mutual inspiration and a sense of what Mack called ‘unexpected possibility’ in the here and right now. Art that is neither painting nor sculpture; non-traditional materials; effect over object; playful invention; performative presentation and new ways of interacting with their audience; a refusal to make rules; and no old-fashioned notions of what art should be. All these were shared. So, too, an optimism tinged with urgency; the sense that, to quote Klein from the first ZERO magazine, ‘One must—and this is not an exaggeration—keep in mind that we’re living in the atomic age, where everything material and physical could disappear from one day to another, to be replaced by nothing but the ultimate abstraction imaginable’. That tension, still—indeed increasingly—relevant today, accounts I think for some of their renewed appeal.
Of course, for all their radical newness, aspects of the wider ZERO were founded in earlier art. The origins of kinetic art, for example, lie partly in mechanised objects created by Marcel Duchamp, Lázló Moholy-Nagy and Alexander Calder (even making an ironic nod to 18th-century and earlier automata). ZERO’s explorations of light and movement build on centuries of artists’ probing of visual perception. The somewhat utopian spirit of the networked Zero, Nul, Azimut, Gruppo T, Nouveau réalisme, New Tendencies and so on, as well as their call for the conceptual and for truth to materials, is reminiscent of Bauhaus teaching in the aftermath of the First World War. Similarly, ZERO’s revolutionary spirit owes something to Dada (although there was a major art historical Dada exhibition in Düsseldorf in 1958 and the Zero founders distanced themselves from what they saw as its ‘nihilism’).
Art as street spectacle had a long tradition in Europe, just more often royal or religious than straight from the studio. The first exhibition event organised by Mack, Piene and Uecker that actually included the word ‘Zero’ in its title was their ZERO: Edition-Demonstration-Exposition in July 1961, inside and outside Alfred Schmela’s gallery in Düsseldorf’s Old Town.2 Streets were blocked off and a circular ‘Zero zone’ was marked out on the cobblestones—an empty space distinct from ‘hardening mechanisms and principles of order’. The third and most ambitious ZERO magazine was launched; fireworks and a spotlit hot-air balloon rose above aluminium flags and young women blowing soap bubbles, wearing black capes emblazoned ‘ZERO’ in white paint. There on the night were Joseph Beuys (another Düsseldorf Academy graduate), Nam June Paik from Korea via Tokyo, Henk Peeters from the Netherlands, Pol Bury and Jésus Raphael Soto (Belgian and Venezuelan respectively but both Paris-based). As were print media and TV.
Jane Clarck
April 2018
Published by the Museum for Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania
1. Quoted by Joseph D. Ketner II, Witness to Phenomenon: Group ZERO and the Development of New Media in Postwar European Art, London, 2017, p. 261.
2. Alfred Schmela trained architect and painter, had opened his Galerie in 1957 with a Klein exhibition; it was soon a centre for Zero activity.