ZERO from Duesseldorf
1945 was indeed ‘Stunde Null’ – the Zero Hour – for Germany, the terrible moment of reckoning after the unspeakable horrors wrought by Adolf Hitler and his multitude of supporters that had led to ruin and defeat, of which it seemed it might take generations to recover. Just over a decade later, on the 11th April 1957, in a small studio on the outskirts of Düsseldorf belonging to the young artist Otto Piene (b.1928), ruins still all around, there occurred the first in a series of nine one night ‘evening exhibitions’. These were largely organized with his friend from the Düsseldorf Academy, Heinz Mack (b.1931). At the time of the first exhibition ZERO as such had not been born, neither as style or cultural attitude. A few other artists were invited to participate, all painters, it would seem, working in a regional informel manner. The informel style of painting and making art emanated largely from Paris – a quasi-abstract expressionist manner that had much to do with personal and existential philosophical ideas that reflected the historical times from which Europe had just emerged. In Paris two of the leading informel artists were of German extraction: the extraordinary painter Wols (Wolfgang Schulze) and Hans Hartung (2 illus.). In Germany Emil Schumacher (illus.) was a leading informel artist. All over Germany, in the years directly after the war, there was an explosion of artistic activity; artists’ groups, galleries, and museums all vied for attention in the media, attempting to recover a sense of modernity that in Germany, prior to 1933 and the Nazi seizure of power, had been largely defined by expressionism. However, one should not forget that there had also been the Bauhaus. It was the Bauhaus that was to define the new style that was to define the New Germany and, indeed, spread all over the world, in new necessary building, design and, ultimately, art.
The art of ZERO that arose out of the new Düsseldorf had a complex birth defined by its two leading protagonists: Piene and Mack, who later were joined by Günther Uecker (b.1930) in 1961. But the fact was that Düsseldorf was the perfect background for a new art movement. It was, indeed, a flagship city of the ‘Economic Miracle’ (Wirtschaftswunder). The United States’ Marshall Plan gave to Western Germany an extraordinary importance in the Cold War stand-off between the Soviet Union and the Western powers defined by NATO and the burgeoning European movement towards economic and political unity. Even Turkey was part of this United States-led drive towards Western prosperity: it is perhaps not totally coincidental that in 1958 there was a cultural treaty between the relatively newly founded Federal Republic of Germany and Turkey itself. Düsseldorf, situated as it was so close to Paris and equally Amsterdam and Antwerp, became the most visible center of an internationalism that characterized much German art of that time. An icon of this new prosperity was the Thyssen Skyscraper which, even today, looms over the city. Known as the ‘Three Plate Building’ (Dreischeibenhaus), it was constructed under the supervision of the architects Hentrich, Petschnigg & Partner (illus.). It is not coincidental that this building was commenced in 1957 and completed in 1960 – the very period that saw the classic years of the emergence and spread of ZERO as a vital art movement.
There is much discussion, even today, as to what ZERO really was; it defined itself never as a style as such, but rather as an attitude. It was nonetheless always concerned with abstract ideas and individual artist’s subjective realizations of the monochrome, light and its absence, movement, connectivity to the four classical elements of Earth, Water, Air and Fire, and, finally, an endless emptiness reaching into outer space. This was an epoch, too, that witnessed the launch of Sputnik in 1957, an event that captivated the imagination of the entire world. It is not irrelevant to mention other moments of political optimism in the public sphere, such as the Festival of Britain in 1951, characterized by Skylon (illus.). Closer to home, in Düsseldorf, the first World Fair after the Second World War took place in Brussels in 1958 and was defined by the Atomium (illus.). Both these public manifestations anticipate images to be created by ZERO, which is not in any way to deny its significance within the world of art and its own sense of Platonic purity.
It was an older Constructivist sculptor, Norbert Kricke (b.1922) (illus.), who suggested to the amazingly enterprising Düsseldorf gallerist Alfred Schmela he brings Yves Klein and his work to the city. As a result, Klein, whose show opened in May 1957, not only connected closely with the ZERO artists, who by this time were beginning to invent their novel style of making art, but also connected them to a far wider network of figures in Paris and in Milan, in particular leading with Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni. Each of these artists, especially Klein and Manzoni, were to make a huge impact in the cultural world in and around Düsseldorf. They were joined in this very much by Jean Tinguely.
Rapidly, by September 1957, ZERO reached a definition of its own style, deciding on the publication of the magazine, ZERO, which had three outstanding issues. The first opens with a statement attributed to Hegel that reads: ‘Red is indeed the concrete color.’ It then proceeds to ask leading established critics, mostly conservative, such as Arnold Gehlin and Hans Sedlmayr, to respond to the question as to what extent does contemporary painting contribute to the formation of the modern world. The answers were predictably negative! Piene was to show in this first magazine exhibition his very first raster paintings (illus.). The title that was to define the movement was arrived at after much discussion. It, Piene has said, was conceived as a zone for silence and new possibilities, and certainly not nihilistically or in a Dadaistic frame of mind. It also celebrated the launching of those new rockets into space:
four,
three,
two,
one,
ZERO – lift off!
Here was a lift off into what can only be described as the beautiful unknown. By the time the seventh evening exhibition took place, once more in the studio of Piene and Mack, no less than 45 artists participated, among them not only Klein but also the French abstract painter Georges Mathieu. Also there, rather surprisingly, perhaps, given his surrealistically figurative style of painting, was the Düsseldorf artist Konrad Klapheck, who also seems to have made a considerable contribution to the editing of the first of the ZERO magazines. All this underlines the wide connectivity of the ZERO enterprise, to other art movements taking place across the Western world, including the United States. Beyond that, there are issues of affinity. For instance, one can easily argue that the by then famous Abstract Expressionism, epitomised by the increasingly dominant New York School, exported globally, divided into those who might be argued were part of an international Tachistic way of painting, for instance, de Kooning and Kline, Gorky and Guston. On the other side, with a greater affinity to ZERO, were Newman, Rothko, and Reinhardt. Others, like Pollock, had tendencies both ways, and even in the next generation Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg can be seen to have ZERO aspects each in their own way – these were occasionally recognized at the time, but not often. When Rothko, always an open-minded and interested artist, saw the first New York exhibition of ZERO at the Howard Wise Gallery in 1962, that included only the three Düsseldorf artists, is said to have declared that he too could be ‘perceived as being part of the movement’. We should not forget that these were the years that witnessed, too, the emergence of Frank Stella and the early manifestations of minimalism and land art. All these American movements increasingly dominated the discourse and it is perhaps only now that analogous European and other manifestations, such as ZERO, are being recognized as having their own legitimate history. In retrospect, it is astonishing to see how much dialogue there was in terms of exhibition participation and other forms of connectivity throughout the international art world. Düsseldorf may not have been the capital of world art but it certainly was a centre alongside other cities in Italy, Switzerland, Britain and, of course, the United States where New York had by then replaced Paris as the centre of the discourse, and the dissemination of painting, sculpture and the by now already burgeoning new media.
A vital exhibition for Mack, Piene, and Uecker, that had the strongest ZERO component, took place in Antwerp between March and May 1959. It was called ‘Vision in Motion – Motion in Vision’ after a publication by the Hungarian Bauhaus artist and teacher Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Moholy-Nagy’s work in the long-term was decisive for the art programme of MIT in Harvard where later Piene was to become the director in succession to another fascinating Hungarian figure, György Kepes. Other participants in the Antwerp exhibition included, as well as Yves Klein, Dieter Roth, Daniel Spoerri, Pol Bury, the American Robert Breer and the Venezuelan Jesús Raphael Soto. The fact is that beyond abstract expressionism the world of ZERO had even affinities with the artistic production of Op Art, Nouveau Realisme, Situationism, Gutai, Land Art and even aspects of Pop art itself, particularly as it was developing in Britain with artists such as Richard Hamilton and his famous exhibition ‘This is Tomorrow’ that he had devised with the Independent Group in 1956. These are a wealth of names and movements to be absorbed, but necessary in order to understand the optimism that pervaded the art and culture of the Western world at the time. The Gutai movement, for example, was a phenomenon that independently arose in a defeated Japan deliberately seeking new forms of making art, reaching within a deeply conservative society towards a radical interaction between spirit and matter and an outreach to the wider world.
Another major cultural moment for the world around Düsseldorf was the opening in 1959 of the music-theatre in the Ruhr town of Gelsenkirchen. The architect was Werner Ruhnau, who commissioned, with the help Norbert Kricke, the largest work ever to be made by Yves Klein, vast murals that covered the foyers of the theatre, that had been conceived in the spirit very much of London’s Royal Festival Hall, built also for The Festival of Britain. Also, many other ZERO artists, not limited to Mack, Piene, and Uecker, were invited to participate in several architectural projects varying from wall decoration, furniture, objects for children to light objects and installations. And at the same time, they exhibited in solo and group exhibitions from Amsterdam, Milan, Bern in Switzerland, to Rome, London, Philadelphia and New York. The tracing of these connections is endlessly fascinating. There are the direct connections, which can be documented, and the affinities, which can be sensed by a more general knowledge of the various art movements and happenings that were taking place simultaneously in different parts of the world.
Ultimately, though, it is necessary to consider each artist as an individual making the contribution within an overall Zeitgeist with his own recognizable identity. The three artists of ZERO, for all the connections that they made that led to friendships, joint exhibitions, participations in publications, each had his own recognizable identity and, indeed, purposeful projects that each set about fulfilling. Piene, who came as much from a philosophical as well as an artistic background, was essentially motivated by the relationship between science and art. This accounts for his playful use of light effects in his famous Light Ballet, which were presented as early as 1959 using grid objects through which he shone a light, and which he continued to stage throughout his long career. These light ballets, in a simple way, gave the viewer/participant a sense of the moving heavens and a connection with an outer space beyond. In many interviews, Piene refers to the strange wonderment that as a child of war he felt watching air raids where the sky was illuminated by falling light effects. For him pitch dark of the black-outs imposed during these air raids were even more threatening and he was to share the relief and even disbelief felt after the war at being able to switch on the light at will. His paintings using smoke and fire, which obviously have affinities to the works of Yves Klein, nonetheless have their own singular feeling for color, not to speak of identifiable touch and form. Red became that essential aspect of his way towards non-objectivity that was forcefully outlined in that first ZERO magazine. Later, Piene went to the United States, which ultimately became his principal arena of activity. Joining MIT clearly enabled him to use art to investigate natural phenomena: the classic four elements once more. Piene’s interest in the participatory led him to stage what essentially were early Happenings alongside his Düsseldorf colleagues. For example, there was a famous ‘ZERO demonstration’ that took place on the banks of the Rhine in May 1962 that consisted of women dressed in ZERO costumes, blowing soap bubbles, and holding grapes made out of balloons within installations improvised out of tinfoil, accompanied, of course, by live music and dancing. It is beautifully documented in an early television film called 0 x 0: Painters Without Paints and Brushes, which reached a wide audience in Western Germany. The ZERO artists, having begun with their private evening's exhibitions, at the beginning attended by relatively few, was achieving a broad public. As a group, these ZERO artists were now constantly invited to show in many of the leading Kunsthalles and museums that had been re-founded in Germany – most aiming consciously to put on the very latest thing in art. At that time ZERO was exactly this. It is interesting that one of the artists very close to Piene and his colleagues was Hans Haacke who, having begun his career around this time as an artist making kinetic abstract sculptures involving living ecosystems, but was, within a few years, after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, to turn his attention as the focus of his art to a critique of current capitalist political and economic realities, even as they were defined and reflected by the art world. Both Piene and Haacke were to make their careers as artists and as teachers in the United States. Ultimately artistically they went separate ways. Piene remained concerned with the representation of natural phenomena that perhaps achieved its most prominent moment with the Rainbow that he made for the Munich Olympic games in 1972 (illus.). By that time the German student revolution and all the cultural developments that went with it were already well underway. If Piene and his colleagues went out of fashion during those years and are coming back now into the discussion, it is perhaps because those moments of disillusionment (which ultimately caused their disbandment in 1966 with a final exhibition in Bonn) that ZERO artists acknowledge came with the assassinations of figures of hope such as JFK in 1963 and Martin Luther King in 1968 have now passed into history.
It is now possible to look back on those optimistic years before disillusionment in European intellectual and student circles with a new objectivity. Mack, as with Piene, was quickly realized that the informel was not for him, particularly after he went first to Paris where he met Yves Klein and Tinguely, as well as Georges Mathieu. However, his realization of the ZERO dream that was after it was established in ’59 was quickly to develop a more concrete and individual aspect, even if transparency and the transmission of light were to remain of the essence. There were to come many extraordinary objects of endless variety proposing the kinetic and ornamental potential of light in perpetual movement. The concept too of ornament remained central to his life’s project, which is why perhaps his obsession with Islamic mathematics and science, design and architecture is so profound. Nonetheless, perhaps the most characteristic objects that form a leitmotif of his work, both in the strictly ZERO periods through to today, are his Stele (illus.). The Stele always has, of course, a sense of commemoration. In the Greek Classical world, it marks aspects of both life and death. In other cultures, it might mark boundaries or military victories and through various forms of decoration convey information to those who pass. Given Mack’s and his colleagues’ concern with emptiness and open space, he as a creative individual with his own sense of purpose and resolve, decided to mark with his sculptures the vast virginal areas of sandy desert and the open seas. These could often only be conveyed to a larger audience by the medium of film and photography (illus.). Already, by 1962, Mack was making experiments with light reflecting Steles in the deserts of Morocco and Algeria. There he was filmed consciously wearing what can only be described as a space suit, anticipating, and also dreaming ahead, as it were, to the famous moonwalk of Buzz Aldrin in 1969 (illus.). The film that was made in 1968, Tele-Mack, that presents an astonishing vision of artificial suns, sand-reliefs, reflective walls and other interventions was perhaps and still is, prophetic of a world that might ultimately harness the energy of the sun for the benefit of all of humankind. The interventions in the empty spaces have their own spectacular aesthetic, which ultimately informs all his work. His work can operate both on a micro and macro level, and there can be no question that he remains one of the most original land artists, anticipating in many ways his now more famous American contemporaries and, dare one say it, followers. Down to the present day, there are many younger artists whose interventions in landscape and installations using light, often in the most arresting ways, must surely find inspiration and equally affinities with Mack’s splendid object based light installations. One might almost imagine Brancusi’s stone and wooden sculptures that reach to the sky as transparent light-emitting objects, using the most up-to-date plastic and shimmering metal-based materials that either emit their own light naturally or have electric light components wired in. The works are changed by moving bodies that perceive them. There is an infinite capacity for invention so that even beyond painting, drawing, and printmaking, which he still continues to do, his work can both delight and continually surprise. A work can be boxed in; it can strive towards the heavens; it can refract; it has its own capacity for luminosity and endless geometry.
The nail is the characteristic vehicle and object in itself that makes possible Günther Uecker’s art, and which clearly distinguishes it from the work of Piene and Mack, and indeed all of those artists who considered themselves part of the ZERO network, particularly in the early years. He, in fact, joined the group a little later, not until 1960, and rapidly found affinity to the other two, and other artists like Klein, Manzoni and, for instance, the Dutch artist Jan Schoonhoven, born as early as 1914 (illus.), but who associated himself closely with the Düsseldorf group. Uecker’s work is characterized by an absence of color, but is often object-based, into which the nails are driven, which have their own way of reflecting light and darkness. But equally, they have a clear metaphorical resonance whether he is knocking nails into a piece of furniture, such as a table, chair, piano or radio, or into a board that as it resembled a painting. In that sense, they have a Fluxus aspect that even relates them to sculptural works made by Joseph Beuys, who of course knew well his Düsseldorf contemporaries. Sometimes the nails are presented methodically and geometrically, other times as chance occurrences on the surface where they can be imagined as moving personage. In one famous group of phallic sculptures known as The New York Dancer (1965) the large nails are electronically connected to give a sinister prickly rippling effect, but on his most famous work The Cosmic Vision (1961–81) the nails that are inserted geometrically on large revolving tondos become sensual light refactors that, though different to the light emitting vitrines of Mack, have a not dissimilar effect.
There is a sense in which ZERO artists, both those of Düsseldorf – the Famous Three, as we might call them – and their counterparts that they chose to involve with their projects were all striving for a world as Uecker himself says ‘where the production of art ceases to be limited to the individual as it has been until now’. That to some degree was, of course, the first ambition of the Bauhaus, which was, even at the outset, to collapse divisions between the architect, the craftsman and the artist, or perhaps between design and art, a return ultimately to a world that had always existed before the European Renaissance. As Walter Gropius declared at the end of the first Bauhaus Manifesto of 1919:
‘Let us strive for, conceive and create the new building of the future that will unite every discipline, architecture and sculpture and painting, and which will one day rise heavenwards from the million hands of craftsmen as a clear symbol of a new belief to come.’
ZERO never attempted to set up a school as such, nor was it, strictly speaking, connected either to architecture or design, as was the Bauhaus very self-consciously, but as in the Bauhaus anonymity of design was not, in spite of best intentions, achievable. And like the famous artists of the Bauhaus the ZERO artists, Otto Piene, Heinz Mack and Günther Uecker, increasingly are of interest to us as seminal figures of their youthful inventions, which endure until today.
Norman Rosenthal, London, 2015
The art of ZERO that arose out of the new Düsseldorf had a complex birth defined by its two leading protagonists: Piene and Mack, who later were joined by Günther Uecker (b.1930) in 1961. But the fact was that Düsseldorf was the perfect background for a new art movement. It was, indeed, a flagship city of the ‘Economic Miracle’ (Wirtschaftswunder). The United States’ Marshall Plan gave to Western Germany an extraordinary importance in the Cold War stand-off between the Soviet Union and the Western powers defined by NATO and the burgeoning European movement towards economic and political unity. Even Turkey was part of this United States-led drive towards Western prosperity: it is perhaps not totally coincidental that in 1958 there was a cultural treaty between the relatively newly founded Federal Republic of Germany and Turkey itself. Düsseldorf, situated as it was so close to Paris and equally Amsterdam and Antwerp, became the most visible center of an internationalism that characterized much German art of that time. An icon of this new prosperity was the Thyssen Skyscraper which, even today, looms over the city. Known as the ‘Three Plate Building’ (Dreischeibenhaus), it was constructed under the supervision of the architects Hentrich, Petschnigg & Partner (illus.). It is not coincidental that this building was commenced in 1957 and completed in 1960 – the very period that saw the classic years of the emergence and spread of ZERO as a vital art movement.
There is much discussion, even today, as to what ZERO really was; it defined itself never as a style as such, but rather as an attitude. It was nonetheless always concerned with abstract ideas and individual artist’s subjective realizations of the monochrome, light and its absence, movement, connectivity to the four classical elements of Earth, Water, Air and Fire, and, finally, an endless emptiness reaching into outer space. This was an epoch, too, that witnessed the launch of Sputnik in 1957, an event that captivated the imagination of the entire world. It is not irrelevant to mention other moments of political optimism in the public sphere, such as the Festival of Britain in 1951, characterized by Skylon (illus.). Closer to home, in Düsseldorf, the first World Fair after the Second World War took place in Brussels in 1958 and was defined by the Atomium (illus.). Both these public manifestations anticipate images to be created by ZERO, which is not in any way to deny its significance within the world of art and its own sense of Platonic purity.
It was an older Constructivist sculptor, Norbert Kricke (b.1922) (illus.), who suggested to the amazingly enterprising Düsseldorf gallerist Alfred Schmela he brings Yves Klein and his work to the city. As a result, Klein, whose show opened in May 1957, not only connected closely with the ZERO artists, who by this time were beginning to invent their novel style of making art, but also connected them to a far wider network of figures in Paris and in Milan, in particular leading with Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni. Each of these artists, especially Klein and Manzoni, were to make a huge impact in the cultural world in and around Düsseldorf. They were joined in this very much by Jean Tinguely.
Rapidly, by September 1957, ZERO reached a definition of its own style, deciding on the publication of the magazine, ZERO, which had three outstanding issues. The first opens with a statement attributed to Hegel that reads: ‘Red is indeed the concrete color.’ It then proceeds to ask leading established critics, mostly conservative, such as Arnold Gehlin and Hans Sedlmayr, to respond to the question as to what extent does contemporary painting contribute to the formation of the modern world. The answers were predictably negative! Piene was to show in this first magazine exhibition his very first raster paintings (illus.). The title that was to define the movement was arrived at after much discussion. It, Piene has said, was conceived as a zone for silence and new possibilities, and certainly not nihilistically or in a Dadaistic frame of mind. It also celebrated the launching of those new rockets into space:
four,
three,
two,
one,
ZERO – lift off!
Here was a lift off into what can only be described as the beautiful unknown. By the time the seventh evening exhibition took place, once more in the studio of Piene and Mack, no less than 45 artists participated, among them not only Klein but also the French abstract painter Georges Mathieu. Also there, rather surprisingly, perhaps, given his surrealistically figurative style of painting, was the Düsseldorf artist Konrad Klapheck, who also seems to have made a considerable contribution to the editing of the first of the ZERO magazines. All this underlines the wide connectivity of the ZERO enterprise, to other art movements taking place across the Western world, including the United States. Beyond that, there are issues of affinity. For instance, one can easily argue that the by then famous Abstract Expressionism, epitomised by the increasingly dominant New York School, exported globally, divided into those who might be argued were part of an international Tachistic way of painting, for instance, de Kooning and Kline, Gorky and Guston. On the other side, with a greater affinity to ZERO, were Newman, Rothko, and Reinhardt. Others, like Pollock, had tendencies both ways, and even in the next generation Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg can be seen to have ZERO aspects each in their own way – these were occasionally recognized at the time, but not often. When Rothko, always an open-minded and interested artist, saw the first New York exhibition of ZERO at the Howard Wise Gallery in 1962, that included only the three Düsseldorf artists, is said to have declared that he too could be ‘perceived as being part of the movement’. We should not forget that these were the years that witnessed, too, the emergence of Frank Stella and the early manifestations of minimalism and land art. All these American movements increasingly dominated the discourse and it is perhaps only now that analogous European and other manifestations, such as ZERO, are being recognized as having their own legitimate history. In retrospect, it is astonishing to see how much dialogue there was in terms of exhibition participation and other forms of connectivity throughout the international art world. Düsseldorf may not have been the capital of world art but it certainly was a centre alongside other cities in Italy, Switzerland, Britain and, of course, the United States where New York had by then replaced Paris as the centre of the discourse, and the dissemination of painting, sculpture and the by now already burgeoning new media.
A vital exhibition for Mack, Piene, and Uecker, that had the strongest ZERO component, took place in Antwerp between March and May 1959. It was called ‘Vision in Motion – Motion in Vision’ after a publication by the Hungarian Bauhaus artist and teacher Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Moholy-Nagy’s work in the long-term was decisive for the art programme of MIT in Harvard where later Piene was to become the director in succession to another fascinating Hungarian figure, György Kepes. Other participants in the Antwerp exhibition included, as well as Yves Klein, Dieter Roth, Daniel Spoerri, Pol Bury, the American Robert Breer and the Venezuelan Jesús Raphael Soto. The fact is that beyond abstract expressionism the world of ZERO had even affinities with the artistic production of Op Art, Nouveau Realisme, Situationism, Gutai, Land Art and even aspects of Pop art itself, particularly as it was developing in Britain with artists such as Richard Hamilton and his famous exhibition ‘This is Tomorrow’ that he had devised with the Independent Group in 1956. These are a wealth of names and movements to be absorbed, but necessary in order to understand the optimism that pervaded the art and culture of the Western world at the time. The Gutai movement, for example, was a phenomenon that independently arose in a defeated Japan deliberately seeking new forms of making art, reaching within a deeply conservative society towards a radical interaction between spirit and matter and an outreach to the wider world.
Another major cultural moment for the world around Düsseldorf was the opening in 1959 of the music-theatre in the Ruhr town of Gelsenkirchen. The architect was Werner Ruhnau, who commissioned, with the help Norbert Kricke, the largest work ever to be made by Yves Klein, vast murals that covered the foyers of the theatre, that had been conceived in the spirit very much of London’s Royal Festival Hall, built also for The Festival of Britain. Also, many other ZERO artists, not limited to Mack, Piene, and Uecker, were invited to participate in several architectural projects varying from wall decoration, furniture, objects for children to light objects and installations. And at the same time, they exhibited in solo and group exhibitions from Amsterdam, Milan, Bern in Switzerland, to Rome, London, Philadelphia and New York. The tracing of these connections is endlessly fascinating. There are the direct connections, which can be documented, and the affinities, which can be sensed by a more general knowledge of the various art movements and happenings that were taking place simultaneously in different parts of the world.
Ultimately, though, it is necessary to consider each artist as an individual making the contribution within an overall Zeitgeist with his own recognizable identity. The three artists of ZERO, for all the connections that they made that led to friendships, joint exhibitions, participations in publications, each had his own recognizable identity and, indeed, purposeful projects that each set about fulfilling. Piene, who came as much from a philosophical as well as an artistic background, was essentially motivated by the relationship between science and art. This accounts for his playful use of light effects in his famous Light Ballet, which were presented as early as 1959 using grid objects through which he shone a light, and which he continued to stage throughout his long career. These light ballets, in a simple way, gave the viewer/participant a sense of the moving heavens and a connection with an outer space beyond. In many interviews, Piene refers to the strange wonderment that as a child of war he felt watching air raids where the sky was illuminated by falling light effects. For him pitch dark of the black-outs imposed during these air raids were even more threatening and he was to share the relief and even disbelief felt after the war at being able to switch on the light at will. His paintings using smoke and fire, which obviously have affinities to the works of Yves Klein, nonetheless have their own singular feeling for color, not to speak of identifiable touch and form. Red became that essential aspect of his way towards non-objectivity that was forcefully outlined in that first ZERO magazine. Later, Piene went to the United States, which ultimately became his principal arena of activity. Joining MIT clearly enabled him to use art to investigate natural phenomena: the classic four elements once more. Piene’s interest in the participatory led him to stage what essentially were early Happenings alongside his Düsseldorf colleagues. For example, there was a famous ‘ZERO demonstration’ that took place on the banks of the Rhine in May 1962 that consisted of women dressed in ZERO costumes, blowing soap bubbles, and holding grapes made out of balloons within installations improvised out of tinfoil, accompanied, of course, by live music and dancing. It is beautifully documented in an early television film called 0 x 0: Painters Without Paints and Brushes, which reached a wide audience in Western Germany. The ZERO artists, having begun with their private evening's exhibitions, at the beginning attended by relatively few, was achieving a broad public. As a group, these ZERO artists were now constantly invited to show in many of the leading Kunsthalles and museums that had been re-founded in Germany – most aiming consciously to put on the very latest thing in art. At that time ZERO was exactly this. It is interesting that one of the artists very close to Piene and his colleagues was Hans Haacke who, having begun his career around this time as an artist making kinetic abstract sculptures involving living ecosystems, but was, within a few years, after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, to turn his attention as the focus of his art to a critique of current capitalist political and economic realities, even as they were defined and reflected by the art world. Both Piene and Haacke were to make their careers as artists and as teachers in the United States. Ultimately artistically they went separate ways. Piene remained concerned with the representation of natural phenomena that perhaps achieved its most prominent moment with the Rainbow that he made for the Munich Olympic games in 1972 (illus.). By that time the German student revolution and all the cultural developments that went with it were already well underway. If Piene and his colleagues went out of fashion during those years and are coming back now into the discussion, it is perhaps because those moments of disillusionment (which ultimately caused their disbandment in 1966 with a final exhibition in Bonn) that ZERO artists acknowledge came with the assassinations of figures of hope such as JFK in 1963 and Martin Luther King in 1968 have now passed into history.
It is now possible to look back on those optimistic years before disillusionment in European intellectual and student circles with a new objectivity. Mack, as with Piene, was quickly realized that the informel was not for him, particularly after he went first to Paris where he met Yves Klein and Tinguely, as well as Georges Mathieu. However, his realization of the ZERO dream that was after it was established in ’59 was quickly to develop a more concrete and individual aspect, even if transparency and the transmission of light were to remain of the essence. There were to come many extraordinary objects of endless variety proposing the kinetic and ornamental potential of light in perpetual movement. The concept too of ornament remained central to his life’s project, which is why perhaps his obsession with Islamic mathematics and science, design and architecture is so profound. Nonetheless, perhaps the most characteristic objects that form a leitmotif of his work, both in the strictly ZERO periods through to today, are his Stele (illus.). The Stele always has, of course, a sense of commemoration. In the Greek Classical world, it marks aspects of both life and death. In other cultures, it might mark boundaries or military victories and through various forms of decoration convey information to those who pass. Given Mack’s and his colleagues’ concern with emptiness and open space, he as a creative individual with his own sense of purpose and resolve, decided to mark with his sculptures the vast virginal areas of sandy desert and the open seas. These could often only be conveyed to a larger audience by the medium of film and photography (illus.). Already, by 1962, Mack was making experiments with light reflecting Steles in the deserts of Morocco and Algeria. There he was filmed consciously wearing what can only be described as a space suit, anticipating, and also dreaming ahead, as it were, to the famous moonwalk of Buzz Aldrin in 1969 (illus.). The film that was made in 1968, Tele-Mack, that presents an astonishing vision of artificial suns, sand-reliefs, reflective walls and other interventions was perhaps and still is, prophetic of a world that might ultimately harness the energy of the sun for the benefit of all of humankind. The interventions in the empty spaces have their own spectacular aesthetic, which ultimately informs all his work. His work can operate both on a micro and macro level, and there can be no question that he remains one of the most original land artists, anticipating in many ways his now more famous American contemporaries and, dare one say it, followers. Down to the present day, there are many younger artists whose interventions in landscape and installations using light, often in the most arresting ways, must surely find inspiration and equally affinities with Mack’s splendid object based light installations. One might almost imagine Brancusi’s stone and wooden sculptures that reach to the sky as transparent light-emitting objects, using the most up-to-date plastic and shimmering metal-based materials that either emit their own light naturally or have electric light components wired in. The works are changed by moving bodies that perceive them. There is an infinite capacity for invention so that even beyond painting, drawing, and printmaking, which he still continues to do, his work can both delight and continually surprise. A work can be boxed in; it can strive towards the heavens; it can refract; it has its own capacity for luminosity and endless geometry.
The nail is the characteristic vehicle and object in itself that makes possible Günther Uecker’s art, and which clearly distinguishes it from the work of Piene and Mack, and indeed all of those artists who considered themselves part of the ZERO network, particularly in the early years. He, in fact, joined the group a little later, not until 1960, and rapidly found affinity to the other two, and other artists like Klein, Manzoni and, for instance, the Dutch artist Jan Schoonhoven, born as early as 1914 (illus.), but who associated himself closely with the Düsseldorf group. Uecker’s work is characterized by an absence of color, but is often object-based, into which the nails are driven, which have their own way of reflecting light and darkness. But equally, they have a clear metaphorical resonance whether he is knocking nails into a piece of furniture, such as a table, chair, piano or radio, or into a board that as it resembled a painting. In that sense, they have a Fluxus aspect that even relates them to sculptural works made by Joseph Beuys, who of course knew well his Düsseldorf contemporaries. Sometimes the nails are presented methodically and geometrically, other times as chance occurrences on the surface where they can be imagined as moving personage. In one famous group of phallic sculptures known as The New York Dancer (1965) the large nails are electronically connected to give a sinister prickly rippling effect, but on his most famous work The Cosmic Vision (1961–81) the nails that are inserted geometrically on large revolving tondos become sensual light refactors that, though different to the light emitting vitrines of Mack, have a not dissimilar effect.
There is a sense in which ZERO artists, both those of Düsseldorf – the Famous Three, as we might call them – and their counterparts that they chose to involve with their projects were all striving for a world as Uecker himself says ‘where the production of art ceases to be limited to the individual as it has been until now’. That to some degree was, of course, the first ambition of the Bauhaus, which was, even at the outset, to collapse divisions between the architect, the craftsman and the artist, or perhaps between design and art, a return ultimately to a world that had always existed before the European Renaissance. As Walter Gropius declared at the end of the first Bauhaus Manifesto of 1919:
‘Let us strive for, conceive and create the new building of the future that will unite every discipline, architecture and sculpture and painting, and which will one day rise heavenwards from the million hands of craftsmen as a clear symbol of a new belief to come.’
ZERO never attempted to set up a school as such, nor was it, strictly speaking, connected either to architecture or design, as was the Bauhaus very self-consciously, but as in the Bauhaus anonymity of design was not, in spite of best intentions, achievable. And like the famous artists of the Bauhaus the ZERO artists, Otto Piene, Heinz Mack and Günther Uecker, increasingly are of interest to us as seminal figures of their youthful inventions, which endure until today.
Norman Rosenthal, London, 2015
