When the distinguished historian Jürgen Osterhammel received the Sigmund Freud Prize in 2014, hisspeech of acceptance bore the title “Decisions and Beginnings.” This was an allusion to how authors from the humanities consciously set the tone and narrative perspective in their writings. “In any case,” said the author ofmajor works on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “the twentieth century demands other forms ofrepresentation: more fractured and fractal, accentuating and making individual voices audible.”

The editors and authors of The ABCs of ZERO do not tell the history/story of ZERO in a linear fashion either. They proceed by following the English alphabet, a method as complex as it is simple. It is complex, because this structure has involved major decisions on the part of all those involved: each letter features but once, yet there is no losing sight of the big picture. And it is simple because, for readers, the outcome and how to use it are easy: they now have the key terms of ZERO laid out clearly before their eyes.

The ABCs of ZERO is a research tool, henceforth, for anyone interested in this art movement—as well as in the historical era that the ZERO generation itself, despite everything, faced with a great deal of optimism. We are very happy to support this undertaking with Foundation funds, and we wish this important book the success it rightfully deserves.

Dr. Angela Kühnen, Member of the Executive Board, Gerda Henkel Foundation

“ZERO is good for you” was the motto with which, in 1966, the three Düsseldorf artists Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker celebrated the dismantling of their collaboration that had begun eight years earlier—Uecker joining in 1961—with a grand “ZERO Midnight Ball” at Rolandseck railway station in Remagen. Even the end of their collaboration seemed imbued with optimism. From their base in the Rhineland, the three artists launched an art movement in the late nineteen-fifties and earlynineteen-sixties that radiated a spirit of optimism and lightness—in stark contrast to the often-gloomy abstractions of Art Informeland Tachisme, in which the psychological and physical devastation wrought by the Second World War lingered. In view of the crisis-ridden times we live in, one could wish that this confidence would spread to us and brighten up our faces a little, upon which war, pandemic, and environmental destruction have left their marks.

But the ZERO movement was not only characterized by playful free-spiritedness and hope for the future. This association of artists, which operated in an international context and, like Surrealism, did not have a style of its own but rather an attitude, had intellectual foundations, and stood for far-reaching visions. Along with the forces of nature, it was not least technological progressthat fed the optimism of the ZERO movement and promised hope for the future.

Although the ZERO artists created networks and made friends throughout Europe, the principal stages of their nine-year collaboration took place in the immediate vicinity of the Rhine: the movement began in the rooms of the studio house rented by the artists in Düsseldorf-Unterbilk, and their last exhibition together took place around seventy kilometers up the Rhine at the Städtische Kunstsammlungen (Municipal Art Museum) in Bonn. To mark the finale of ZERO, they organized the aforementioned Midnight Ball at Rolandseck railway station, south of Bonn, where, among other attractions, there was a theatrical performance in which a wagon full of straw was set on fire and sent running from the station toward the Rhine, where it sank in the river.

The ZERO avantgarde has left its indelible mark on the Rhineland. We not only encounter its productions—the Light Stelae by Heinz Mack, the kinetic installations of Otto Piene, or the Nail Pictures and Objects by Günther Uecker—in museums and galleries, but also in parks, opera houses, or on the façades of department stores. Even decades after it was created, ZERO art does not look one bit outdated and still amazes us with its playful lightness and joy in experimentation. Safeguarding and researching this cultural heritage, whose enduring significance extends far beyond the history of German art, is one of the coretasks of the Landschaftsverband Rheinland (LVR)—the Rhineland Region Communal Association. We are therefore delighted that The ABCs of ZERO, initiated by the ZERO foundation and developed together with international researchers, could be realized with the support of LVR funding for culture. Its interdisciplinary approach, the archival material provided by the ZERO artists Mack, Piene, and Uecker from the ZERO foundation in Düsseldorf and, last but not least, the interdisciplinary key concepts guiding the endeavor, enable us to take a fresh view of this avantgarde movement from new perspectives.

Anne Henk-Hollstein, Chairperson of the Landschaftsverband Rheinland (LVR)

Ulrike Lubek, Director of the Landschaftsverband Rheinland (LVR)

The Friends of the ZERO foundation Düsseldorf Association is committed to keeping alive the ZERO idea—the radical renewal of art after the Second World War—and to promoting and supporting it on a regular basis. It is therefore a great pleasure for us tolend our support to the ABCs of ZERO research project.

Past projects to which our Association has contributed include publication of the volume The Artist as Curator, the major ZEROretrospective exhibition ZERO: The International Art Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, at the Gropius Bau in Berlin in 2015, and, above all, contributions to the restoration and furnishings of the ZERO House.

More recently, the Friends of the ZERO foundation have provided financial support for: the ZERO Art and Fashion project, which was realized to mark the ZERO foundation’s fifteenth anniversary; the exhibitions Otto Piene: Stars, at the National Museum in Wrocław, and Mack, at the ZKM Karlsruhe; and the purchase of two works by Günther Uecker, %%%Sintflut%%% (Die Engel fliegen) and Sintflut Manifest: Überflutung der Welt TRANSGRESSION, both from 1963, as well as an untitled white monochrome work of 1961 by Hermann Bartels.

The publication The ABCs of ZERO not only brings the archive of the ZERO foundation to life and makes it accessible to a widerpublic, but the contributions to this book also make it clear just how topical and relevant the ZERO themes—such as light, fire,nature, and kinetics—still are today, and how beneficial the artists’ consistently positive and optimistic attitude to the future is for usas well. It is therefore most gratifying that this publication is complemented by a website of the same name in German and English.We wish the publication and the website a wide readership and outreach and look forward to the ensuing discussions.

Dr. Detlef Hunsdiek, Chairperson of the Friends of the ZERO foundation

Besides numerous exhibition catalogs, with the two books ZERO 4321 and The Artist as Curator, the ZERO foundation has already published two important academic publications that resulted from the research activities and studies carried out by the foundation since 2008.

With the third volume in this academic series, The ABCs of ZERO, the foundation moves away from a chronological account and looks at interdisciplinary aspects. As with the previous publications, the ZERO foundation is supported by renowned international scholars; this time not only by art historians, but also by experts from the fields of music, theater and performance, literature, cultural policy, the art trade, and, of course, art studies.

Opening the Archive is the subtitle of The ABCs of ZERO, which suggests, but does not predetermine, the direction that the investigation might take. The archival materials from the period 1957/58 to 1966, which Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker donated to the foundation, enable a historically sound analysis to be developed. In addition, there are conversations, thoughts, and documents sourced from other archives that make the ABC a storehouse of authentic knowledge. From the book’s contributions, a vivid picture of ZERO artin the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties emerges, following such key terms as A for Atelier, B for Books, K for Kinetics, and L for Light.

In 1957, posters for the West German federal election to the Bundestag advised “No experiments.” We are very glad indeed that the ZERO artists ignored this advice, and instead set out to create art on the basis of Europe-wide friendships, the reverberations of which continue to this day and keep our curiosity undiminished. The ZERO foundation, too, likes to experiment and to facilitate new encounters in unusual formats. Many thanks to the ZERO team, first and foremost Barbara Könches, who have given us this experience with their commitment to, and in the name of, ZERO!

We would also like to thank the authors of the publication, as well as those who made this challenging project possible with their financial and nonmaterial support: the Kunststiftung NRW (Art Foundation of North Rhine-Westphalia) (Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas Sternberg, Dr. Andrea Firmenich); the Gerda Henkel Foundation (Dr. Angela Kühnen); the Landschaftsverband Rheinland (Rhineland Regional Association) (Anne Henk-Hollstein, Ulrike Lubek); the Friends of the ZERO foundation (Dr. Detlef Hunsdiek); and the Vervoordt Gallery (Boris Vervoordt).

Dr. Friderike Bagel, Chairperson of the ZERO foundation, 2008–23

(Excerpt from the welcome address for the workshop held on September 1, 2023, at ZERO House)

None other than Michel Foucault (1926–1984) paved the way for this publication that is fed by the archive—an archive which in this case holds the bequests and estates of visual artists. On ninety meters of shelving, neatly packed in acid-free cardboard boxes marked “Loreley” or “Scala,” letters, invoices, assemblages, lists, as well as photographs, sketches, and drafts slumber in the dark in a biotope with a constant, pleasantly warm, but never too warm temperature. Several times a day, the lights are switched on briefly and someone pulls out this or that box to take out a specific item or hopefully find a document that may provide answers. Yet, often enough, the (re)searcher finds answers to questions that have not yet even been asked.

If Michel Foucault’s thinking should prepose the work that is done in an archive, then it should be from the point of view that Paul Veyne (1930–2022), his long-time friend and biographer, made clear:

The painting as a manifestation of art had been abandoned “after Duchamp rejected it in favor of the real object, and Rodchenko reduced it to a surface of pure color with the statement ‘it’s all over,’” as Christian Kravagna says aptly in his review of the exhibition Bildlicht: Malerei zwischen Materialität und Immaterialität(Picture-Light: Painting between Materiality and Immateriality).[i] Both Bildlicht and the parallel exhibition Das Bild nach dem letzten Bild (The Picture after the Last Picture), both shown in Vienna in 1991,[ii] were about nothing less than “the end of art.”[iii] “What happened in the 19th century that made artists feel for the first time that they had read and seen everything, written and done everything?” asked Peter Weibel (1944–2023) in the exhibition catalog for The Picture after the Last Picture.[iv] His answer is as complex as it is rigorous: taking “Mallarmé’s ideal poem, which would just be silence”[v] as his starting point, Weibel develops his argument that the “crisis of verse” is the “crisis of representation.”[vi] Like Foucault, Weibel reads the dissolution of the image as the revolutionary victory of signs over things.[vii] But how can art stop this self-destruction that is inherent in the modern age? The solution is: through the archive.

[i] Christian Kravagna, “Bildlicht: Malerei zwischen Materialität und Immaterialität,” KUNSTFORUM International, no. 114 (July–August 1991), p. 378.

[ii] Bildlicht: Malerei zwischen Materialität und Immaterialität, Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts, Vienna, May 3–July 7, 1991, curated by Wolfgang Drechsler and Peter Weibel; Das Bild nach dem letzten Bild, Galerie Metropol, Vienna, April–June 1991, curated by Peter Weibel and Kasper König.

[iii] Peter Weibel, “Das Bild nach dem letzten Bild,” in Peter Weibel and Christian Meyer, Das Bild nach dem letzten Bild (Cologne, 1991), p. 198.

[iv] Ibid., p. 189.

[v] Ibid., p. 184.

[vi] Ibid., p. 188, italics in the original.

[vii] Ibid., pp. 186, 207.

“The Ende der Kunstgeschichte [end of art history] can’t impress anyone anymore who has already become accustomed to the Ende der Kunst [end of art],” is how Hans Belting (1935–2023) begins his publication of 1995.[i] He freely admits that he himself has ventured far ahead[ii] by bidding farewell to his own discipline and, in order to formulate his concern more clearly, adds that what he is speaking of is the “end of a certain artifact, called art history, in the sense of rules of the game, but assumes that the game” will be continued in another way.

Belting also recognizes the crisis of representation, which went hand in hand with the crisis of art history, and because of this art history lost one of its fundamental elements: the work of art. Using the example of Yves Klein’s Anthropometries, Belting makes it clear that “the original has lost its tried and tested meaning,” because the tasks once strictly divided between “the commentary and the work” have evaporated “ever since art declared itself to be a text.”[iii] This is accompanied by the loss of the “binding narrative schema,” which has been replaced by context, because “artistic creativity has been released on all sides at the interface between ‘art and life.’”[iv] Art is gaining in importance for visual and cultural history, Belting thinks, which is no longer Eurocentric and channeled by the Western gaze.[v] “The ‘end of art history,’ as a necessary fermata, and the insight of the fictional character of the written art history of the modern age liberate the view for a greater task: The inspection of one’s own culture with the gaze of an ethnologist.”[vi]

Belting does not find it easy to bid farewell to linear art history, for he discerns a “rattling of sabers … when new isms are proclaimed yet again. Simultaneous theater alone, where one plays every piece and satisfies every taste,” leads to a kind of arbitrariness in which work forms appear or disappear at random without disturbing the flow.[vii] “It’s like a hall of mirrors,” the art historian says about his profession, “where you can’t find a way out. The information is theses, and the theses in turn subsequently become information that ends up in the archive once it has been exchanged for other theses.”[viii]

What can be done, how can art history be continued? How can the now expanded discipline shape its future? A lexical record could offer a way out, “because it relieves the author of the obligation to retell a sequence of events,”[ix] says Belting. Panoramas could also be an option, as they enable a “simultaneous view” of all kinds of things “that do not have to be presented side by side or one after the other.”[x]

[i] Hans Belting, Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte: Eine Revision nach zehn Jahren (Munich, 1995), p. 7, italics in the original.

[ii] Hans Belting, Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte (Berlin, 1983).

[iii] Ibid., pp. 164, 183, italics in the original.

[iv] Ibid., p. 165.

[v] Ibid., p. 171.

[vi] Ibid., p. 178.

[vii] Ibid., p. 185.

[viii] Ibid., p. 185.

[ix] Ibid., p. 189.

[x] Ibid., p. 189.

Heinz Mack’s (b. 1931) response to the request to describe the location and premises he shared with Otto Piene (1928–2014) in the rear building at Gladbacher Strasse 69, in Düsseldorf, depoeticizes. His words dispense with the notion of the atelier as a mysterious, mythical place of artistic creation that is anchored in the collective consciousness, as evoked by numerous pictorial representations à la Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), and instead create the image of an “other” space. This otherness certainly refers first and foremost to the contrast with the outlined topos. In Mack’s statement, there is also an echo of a differentiated understanding of space that, on the one hand, distinguishes between the built, physical, and as such visible space—the space in the old factory—and, on the other, the space that is projected onto this actual space: the atelier.

The idea of double or multiple spatiality in one and the same geographical location can be found in a text by Michel Foucault (1926–1984) that was published posthumously.[i] In Of Other Spaces, he develops the concept of “heterotopia” in contrast to utopia:

[i] Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” (1967), trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986), pp. 22–27.

According to Foucault, these “other spaces” arise when society assigns one or more specific functions to a place that cannot be directly explained by or derived from its topography. If this particular task disappears, the heterotopia vanishes or adapts to the new circumstances. A central characteristic, therefore, is that these spaces can be reevaluated at will by the members of a society at any time. Heterotopias are not static entities; they turn places into mutable spaces, the understanding of which, and thus their respective meaning, only emerges from analyzing all of the contexts within which these spaces are constituted.

According to the definition, the term “atelier,” which is borrowed from the French, was used in German from the middle of the nineteenth century to refer to the workshop of an artist. Regardless of whether it was built specifically for this purpose or had once had a different function, the declaration of a space as an atelier is linked solely to artists and their intentions. Foucault’s discursive approach helps to shift this rigid focus and to consider Mack’s and Piene’s atelier at Gladbacher Strasse 69 in Düsseldorf, where the history of ZERO began, over and above the term’s definition, as a potentially multidimensional space that could equally be shaped by others, by the circle of visitors. In addition to the various use-specific aspects of the location, Mack and Piene, as active designers of the space, also show a differentiated approach to its staging, whereby, depending on the occasion, they consciously attempt to negate the topos of the atelier or use it specifically as an instrument.[i]

[i] The idea of applying Foucault‘s theory of heterotopias to the atelier comes from Eva Mongi-Vollmer, who has explored the various forms of the studio in German-speaking countries during the latter half of the nineteenth century. See Eva Mongi-Vollmer, “Das Atelier als anderer Raum: Über die diskursive Identität und Komplexität des Ateliers im 19. Jahrhundert,” KUNSTFORUM International, no. 208 (May–June 2011), pp. 92–107.

Candles, an upturned glass, open cans of paint, various bottles, cardboard boxes, a small table clock, and a multitude of other utensils lie in a jumble, piled up on top of a grand piano, which is barely recognizable as such underneath. Traces of artistic creation are found everywhere—the body of the musical instrument, which appears to have been repurposed as a workbench; the floor; the easel in the background; and all of the furniture are covered with residues of brightly colored paint. There are scraps of paper lying around, along with canisters of various sizes. And in the midst of this creative chaos, its creator, with one of his famous Grid Paintings in his hands.

A photograph from 1958 shows Piene in his studio, and is obviously arranged. Dressed in a suit and bow tie, but above all with a black grid template in front of his chest—the tool with which he began to distance himself from the habitus of gestural painting and to strive for a standardization of the surface—the cofounder of ZERO is staged at the keyboard by photographer Paul Brandenburg, literally setting the tone as the protagonist of a new conception of art. The clear, regular structure of the grid template stands in marked contrast to the disorder of the collection of articles in front of him, which he does not look at, instead gazing strictly ahead as if into the future. “ZERO is the (new) beginning” appears to be the programmatic motto of this depiction, which clearly places the studio in the service of the artist’s self-fashioning. The impression of the space conveyed, however, appears to be authentic. A comparison with a photograph of a more documentary nature by Charles Wilp (1932–2005), which shows Piene in the process of priming a canvas, draws a similar picture, and identifies the space as a modest workshop oriented toward artistic activity—an atelier, by way of definition. This is the place where the fleeting idea materializes, slowly takes shape, and finally manifests itself in a finished work of art. It is governed by its own rules, which do not demand any strict order, but are solely up to the creative process.

The atelier was located on the upper floor of a building in the rear courtyard at Gladbacher Strasse 69, in the Düsseldorf district of Bilk. The building had been partially destroyed during the Second World War, and the lower floor was occupied by a turning shop.[i] The upper floor, which was reached by a narrow and extremely steep staircase directly behind the wooden door with the white letterbox, consisted of three rooms: two to the left and one to the right of the staircase. Mack was already using the latter as a workshop, and at times also as a place to live, when the opportunity arose to take over the larger of the two rooms opposite—a ballet school that rented the premises moved out around 1955/56.[ii] Mack, Piene, and Hans Salentin (1925–2009), who had become friends during their time together at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, joined forces with the artist Hans-Joachim Bleckert (1927–1998) and the advertising photographer Charles Wilp, and rented it collectively.[iii] The room was around fifty-six square meters and had several windows on the south and west walls.[iv] The roof was of corrugated iron, which replaced the original war-damaged roof.[v]Visible steel lattice girders supported the construction and, together with the unclad brickwork, ensured that the room always had an industrial feel to it, as Mack emphasized in the statement quoted at the beginning of this contribution to underline the basic conditions at the premises.[vi] In this connection, Piene also referred to it in a similarly terse way as a “building shell.”[vii] There were no skylights, nor were there any sanitary facilities. he artists shared an outside toilet in the small garden next to the turning shop with the staff there. If the water pipes running across the courtyard froze in winter, they went to the Hafenquelle restaurant on the opposite side of the street.[viii] In 1957, Piene became sole tenant of the room, and he kept it until 1966, when ZERO ended.[ix] The adjacent smaller studio had been rented by the sculptor Kurt Link (1926–1996) before Mack officially took it over later. It also served partly to provide additional space for the Evening Exhibitions[x]—the legendary events organized by Mack and Piene that ultimately led to the founding of ZERO and to the opening up of the atelier in terms of concept and function, beyond the familiar meaning of the term as an artist’s workspace.

[i] See Otto Piene, “Wo sich nichts spiegelte als der Himmel,” in Meister 2006 (see note 1), p. 15.

[ii] See Thekla Zell, Exposition Zero: Vom Atelier in die Avantgardegalerie. Zur Konstituierung und Etablierung der Zero-Bewegung in Deutschland am Beispiel der Abendausstellungen, der Galerie Schmela, des Studio F, der Galerie Nota und der D(ato) Galerie(Vienna, 2019), p. 81.

[iii] The information about who rented which room and when is not always consistent. Piene, in Meister 2006 (see note 1), p. 15, mentions Kurt Link as well as Bleckert in connection with the rent for the large room. Zell 2019 (see note 6), p. 81, who bases her statements on the information given by Piene, does not mention Bleckert. Mack confines himself to the general statement that the “larger room had been rented by five people … and the smaller one later by Kurt Link, and then by me.” Mack, in Meister 2006 (see note 1), p. 55.

[iv] See Zell 2019 (see note 6), p. 83.

[v] See Piene, in Meister 2006 (see note 1), p. 15.

[vi] Mack, in Meister 2006 (see note 1), p. 57, even compares his small apartment “almost” to a “penal institution,” but says at the end of his reply that they “didn‘t actually see it as hardship at all.”

[vii] Piene, in Meister 2006 (see note 1), p. 17.

[viii] See ibid., p. 17.

[ix] See Otto Piene and Heinz-Norbert Jocks, “Otto Piene: Das Gold namens Licht,” in Ulrike Bleicker-Honisch and Anna Lenz, eds., Das Ohr am Tatort (Ostfildern, 2009), p. 101.

[x] See ibid, p. 101; also Mack, in Meister 2006 (see note 1), p. 55.

The same place, photographed from almost the same angle, and yet a completely different space. Nothing here is reminiscent of the mysterious atmosphere that Brandenburg’s photograph exudes, on the trail of the artist’s creative process. At the time when this photograph was taken, artistic production had come to an end for these outcomes, as the hanging paintings of different formats and content make clear. The walls look whiter. Some tidying up has been done; nothing is lying around anymore. The heap of props has given way to neatly lined-up glasses. They are as yet unused; the crate of beer bottles under the grand piano is full—obviously the vernissage has not yet begun.

This photo by Hans Salentin documents September 26, 1957, when Mack and Piene organized their 4th Evening Exhibition. Born out of a general need—there was virtually no platform for young, progressive artists to present their work to the public in the conservative Düsseldorf of the nineteen-fifties—the two artists had decided around six months earlier to take matters into their own hands and had organized their famous Evening Exhibitions.[i] At regular intervals of one to three months from April 1957 to October 1958, they opened the doors to their atelier in Gladbacher Strasse for one evening, to show the latest developments in contemporary painting to an interested audience.[ii]

The idea of converting their workshop into an exhibition space was by no means new. Asmus Carstens (1754–1798) and Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), for example, used their studios in Rome toward the end of the eighteenth century to present their works in shows organized especially for the general public.[iii]However, what had not been done before and that represented a decisive difference was artists exhibiting not only their own works but also, or even primarily, those of their colleagues. Far from commercial considerations, such as attracting an audience of potential buyers[iv] or expressing independence from established authorities like the Paris Salon in the case of Courbet or Édouard Manet (1832–1882),[v] Mack’s and Piene’s primary intention in opening up their atelier was to exhibit and to give the discourse on art a space in the truest sense of the word. Mack declared that exchanges are an existential need: “As an artist, you run the risk of becoming depressed if you paint all alone and without any echo at all. You want to know whether what you are doing will endure.”[vi] Piene formulated the same thoughts in a letter to Adolf Zillmann, from the perspective of the audience:

[i] See Dirk Pörschmann, “‘M.P.Ue.’ Dynamo for ZERO: The Artist-Curators Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker,” in Tiziana Caianiello and Mattijs Visser, eds., The Artist as Curator: Collaborative Initiatives in the International ZERO Movement 1957–1967(Ghent, 2015), p. 20.

[ii] The pragmatic reason for limiting the duration of the exhibitions was that Mack and Piene worked as teachers during the day and only had time for their own projects in the evenings. See Heinz Mack, “Am Anfang war Bach,” in Bleicker-Honisch and Lenz 2009 (see note 13), p. 52. However, a certain exclusivity that went hand in hand with the limited running time of the shows quickly became apparent, which is why the events continued to be advertised strategically as “one-evening exhibitions,” although it was soon possible to visit the exhibitions beyond the opening evening. See Zell 2019 (see note 6), p. 80; also Otto Piene to Oskar Holweck (carbon copy), July 21, 1958, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.I.884.

[iii] See Michael Diers, “atelier/réalité: Von der Atelierausstellung zum ausgestellten Atelier,” in Michael Diers and Monika Wagner, eds., Topos Atelier: Werkstatt und Wissensform, Hamburger Forschungen zur Kunstgeschichte, vol. 7 (Berlin, 2010), p. 3.

[iv] See Oskar Bätschmann, Ausstellungskünstler: Kult und Karriere im modernen Kunstsystem (Cologne, 1997), p. 138. Bätschmann explains this development of the open studio at the end of the nineteenth century by way of the increasing necessity of “advertising for an audience,” on which the “exhibition artists” depended.

[v] See Diers 2010 (see note 17), p. 3.

[vi] Mack, in Bleicker-Honisch and Lenz 2009 (see note 13), p. 52.

And Klaus Jürgen Fischer (1930–2017), who gave the opening speech at the 7th Evening Exhibition, also emphasized the key role of the audience, without whose response “art easily withers away in recipes, in what is risk-free, celebrity, or even in mastery.”[i] In the open atelier, all three entities—artists, artworks, and visitors—were able to come into direct contact with each other and engage in dialogue in direct confrontation with their counterparts. Another of Salentin’s photographs from the 4th Evening Exhibition shows Mack and Piene as the two organizers of the evening: dressed in suits, sitting in a half circle of chairs in front of the exhibits, they literally invite us to enter into conversation with them and illustrate the communication-oriented approach of the event in person.

[i] Klaus Jürgen Fischer, opening speech at the 7th Evening Exhibition, April 24, 1958, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.VI.27.

This was both the explicit intention of the two artists and also something that appeared to fulfill a lack on the part of the audience, as demonstrated by the considerable popularity of the Evening Exhibitions, right from the very first shows. The concept obviously captured the mood of the times, as was emphasized several times in the press, who began to report on the events after the 2nd Evening Exhibition.[i] Karl Ruhrberg (1924–2006) highlighted in the Düsseldorfer Nachrichten of May 17, 1957, the “lively discussion about the nature of young art and what it wants,”[ii] and compared these events favorably to other exhibitions, which often neglected this aspect. He also referred explicitly to a “whole lot of interested laypeople”[iii] who were present in addition to the connoisseurs and who helped to shape the discourse. In an article that appeared in the Rheinische Post newspaper, the “lively and ongoing debates” were explicitly linked to the “studio atmosphere”[iv] and even placed in direct contrast with the institution of the gallery. In the context of the Evening Exhibitions, the atelier took an intermediate position at the interface between artist, work, and public, along with the gallery and the museum, and became a kind of forum that promoted and sometimes catalyzed exchange.[v] Within just a few months, Mack and Piene had turned the lack of exhibition platforms for young art into a general place for social encounters, as a snapshot of the first event shows, in which the exhibits are barely seen due to the number of visitors.[vi] The pronounced social aspect, which, in contrast to the aforementioned predecessors in the nineteenth century, was already part of the endeavor’s intention, ran like a red thread right through to the realization of the concept. In retrospect, Mack was correct when he made the following assessment: “The whole thing was also a social occasion, an event. That’s what you would call it today. Suddenly, our atelier was more than just a space for paintings. It was a social meeting place where people came together who had never met before, which made it unique.”[vii] For the artists themselves, this opened up an ideal form of informal networking that brought them into contact with like-minded artists such as Yves Klein, as well as with gallery owners, critics, media representatives, potential collectors, and people from the museum landscape.[viii]

[i] See Zell 2019 (see note 6), p. 87.

[ii] Karl Ruhrberg, “Junge Bilder im alten Bilk: Ein Maler verleiht sein Atelier an die Kollegen,” Düsseldorfer Nachrichten, May 17, 1957.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] “Neuer Treffpunkt ‘Abendausstellungen’: Max Bense als Gast,” Rheinische Post, December 18, 1957, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.II.32.

[v] See Zell 2019 (see note 6), p. 60; also Diers 2010 (see note 17), p. 4. Both refer here to the classification of the atelier in the nineteenth century, which can indubitably be applied to the situation of Mack‘s and Piene‘s studio.

[vi] The photograph is reproduced in Anette Kuhn, ZERO: Eine Avantgarde der sechziger Jahre (Frankfurt am Main and Berlin, 1991), p. 14, fig. 4.

[vii] Mack, in Bleicker-Honisch and Lenz 2009 (see note 13), p. 52. Piene, in Meister 2006 (see note 1), p. 18: “The Gladbacher Strasse became a meeting place.”

[viii] Already during the first Evening Exhibitions, Mack and Piene got to know the later collectors Ilse Dwinger and the married couple Troost, for example. See Mack, in Bleicker-Honisch and Lenz 2009 (see note 13), p. 53. See also Piene, in Meister 2006 (see note 1), p. 18, who lists other well-known visitors to the Evening Exhibitions, including Rolf Wiesselmann from WDR and Clement Greenberg, the US art critic.

In addition to the implicit obligation to put in an appearance at the evening of the vernissage, it was also the state of the building that exerted a great attraction on the public. Newspaper reports repeatedly focused on the architecture of the location and its partially derelict condition, although Mack and Piene had not intended this—quite the opposite. As Piene emphasized, they tried to make their studio “as clean as possible, so that no romanticism or sentimentality about ruins could be read into it.”[i] That which, in the eyes of the visitors, primarily evoked the typical idea of the studio as a “phantasmal” site of creative acts, a visit to which promised to bring one closer to this enigma, for the artists primarily conjured up associations with the war and, with regard to art, with Tachisme, a style of abstract painting from which they gradually sought to detach themselves in their works.[ii] In order to liberate the space from the dirt and the burden of the past and produce a presentation area that was as neutral as possible both intellectually and visually, they completely cleared out the studio in the run-up to the events and whitewashed the walls, “which was necessary anyway after that Tachiste era,”[iii] said Mack, thus highlighting the unwanted connection. The interior design, reminiscent of the principle of the “white cube,” thus not only emphasized the external transformation from atelier as workshop to atelier as exhibition space, but also pursued ideological purposes—a plan that, despite the differences described, would work out in the reception of the location. In an article in the Düsseldorfer Nachrichten newspaper on October 7, 1958, a critic described the walk to the atelier as though it were a path from the dark Tachiste painting processing war experiences, as ZERO then interpreted it, to a singular pictorial language led by structure and light:[iv]

[i] Otto Piene, “Untitled,” in Wulf Herzogenrath, ed., Selbstdarstellung: Künstler über sich (Düsseldorf, 1973), p. 132.

[ii] See Heinz Mack, “Gespräch mit Heinz Mack,” in Susanne Rennert, ed., Dieter Hülsmanns und Friedolin Reske: Ateliergespräche, Düsseldorf 1966 (Cologne, 2018), p. 109: “Like most of my friends, I allowed myself to be seduced by Tachisme for a short while. Without inner conviction, I went along with what was then the newest of all art phenomena, but it led to inner tensions. The results, which depended more on chance, did not satisfy me; I suffered and was desperate.”

[iii] The whole sentence reads: “And since in the mid 1950s there was virtually no chance of exhibiting, this situation led to the decision to tidy up our ateliers, which was necessary after that Tachiste era, to whitewash the walls and hang up our new works.”Heinz Mack, “Untitled,” in Herzogenrath 1973 (see note 31), p. 106.

[iv] See Kuhn 1991 (see note 28), p. 14.

In the course of the Evening Exhibitions, the studio in Gladbacher Strasse expanded into a multiple space whose dimensions stretched beyond the conceptual definition. Yet in a certain sense the series of events was intended to hark back to the original etymological meaning of the studio as a place of artistic creation. The first Evening Exhibitions were conceived as general demonstrations of current trends in art without any specific focus of content. “It was simply about showing what we 20 to 25-year-olds were working on,”[i] as Piene summarized the idea in retrospect. The only prerequisite for collaboration with other artists was that they “were not represented by a gallery. They had to experiment and look for new things, with regard to what was available at the time.”[ii] The invitation cards, always produced with the same plain layout design, list the names of the exhibiting artists. With the exception of Johannes Geccelli (1925–2011), to whom the 5th Evening Exhibition was later dedicated as a solo show, they were in fact all working abstract artists.[iii] They mainly belonged to Gruppe 53 and based their works on the gestural style of French Art Informel, as did Mack and Piene at the time.[iv] The first turning point came with the 4th Evening Exhibition, in September 1957, in which Piene presented for the first time his new Grid Paintings, created during the summer holidays, with which he gradually began to turn away from the prevailing visual language and develop his own style.[v] The same trend can be observed with regard to the conception of this exhibition, which in the selection of artists documents a dissociation from Gruppe 53.[vi] The final paradigm shift took place with the 7th Evening Exhibition, in April 1958, which for the first time had a concrete theme: its title was Das rote Bild(The Red Painting). In the “Invitation to Participate,” Mack and Piene requested the submission of a painting of “medium size,” “whose dominant color is red.”[vii] This is the wording of the circular letter, which they sent specifically to colleagues known to them, in whose works they discerned a relationship to their own, including Günther Uecker (b. 1930) for the first time.[viii] Thus the project, which initially had just begun as an experiment, was increasingly taking on apparent characteristics of a program. These would manifest themselves in the articles on art theory in the first issue of their self-published magazine ZERO 1, which appeared parallel to the 7th Evening Exhibition, and which gave their endeavor both its name and its identity.[ix] Under the title Vibration, the 8th Evening Exhibition followed in October 1958. This further sharpened the profile because the goal of a common artistic tendency was obviously crystallizing and the event was accompanied by the publication of ZERO 2.[x] ZERO was officially born.

Retrospectively, Dirk Pörschmann aptly described the series of Evening Exhibitions as the “mythical, legendary humus of ZERO’s history.”[xi] The nucleus was the atelier, Mack’s and Piene’s workshop, which contributed decisively to the early success of the series of events and thus to the formation and establishment of ZERO, both due to its special features and orientation as a physical space and also due to the “other” spaces sketched over the real premises. The fact that “Atelier” stands at the beginning of thisABC of ZERO is obvious, for “A” comes first in an alphabetized organization of chapters, but it also makes sense in terms of content and chronology, because: in the beginning was the atelier (at Gladbacher Strasse 69).

[i] Piene, in Bleicker-Honisch and Lenz 2009 (see note 13), p. 100.

[ii] Ibid., p. 101.

[iii] See Zell 2019 (see note 6), p. 85.

[iv] See ibid, p. 85.

[v] See ibid, p. 91.

[vi] See ibid, p. 91.

[vii] Otto Piene, invitation to the 7th Evening Exhibition (concept), March 5, 1958, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.I.963.

[viii] See Pörschmann 2015 (see note 15), p. 29.

[ix] See Zell 2019 (see note 6), p. 85.

[x] See Zell 2019 (see note 6), p. 117. ZERO 3 was presented at the event ZERO: Edition, Exposition, Demonstration, at the Galerie Schmela in 1961. The third and final issue of the magazine contains contributions by over thirty artists from various countries, and provides an overview of the ZERO approach and mindset, which developed into an international art movement.

[xi] Pörschmann 2015 (see note 15), p. 20.

As soon as galleries included Mack’s and Piene’s works in their portfolios, the two artists ceased organizing their own Evening Exhibitions.[i] The heterotopia of an exhibition platform for progressive art in the atelier on Gladbacher Strasse had fulfilled its purpose; it became increasingly superfluous, and disappeared once more. Two years after the eighth and final event in the series, Piene organized a show titled 9th Evening Exhibition, which, despite the title suggesting a continuation of the series, has to be classified as a completely independent format, as it deviated fundamentally from the original concept. It took place in collaboration with Galerie Schmela as part of Piene’s second solo exhibition there, which was titled Piene: Ein Fest für das Licht (Piene: A Festival for the Light), and which opened on October 7, 1960, in the gallery’s premises on Hunsrückenstrasse in Düsseldorf’s old town. On three evenings, parallel to the exhibition in the gallery, Piene staged in his atelier various versions of the Lichtballett (Light Ballet) that he had been developing for about a year.[ii] The exhibition poster lists both venues, highlighting their symbiotic character, which is also reflected in the structure of the poster. The names of the venues are set at the same line height—here shown on one of Piene’s drawings of the design with the underlined exhortation “achsial!” (“axial!”) as a central and meaningful design element. They appear as equal venues at eye level, as it were, whereby the artworks on display in each case determined the meaning of the respective locations or, in the case of the atelier, even changed it decisively. While Alfred Schmela showed new Rauchbilder (Smoke Paintings) and light graphics by Piene, which are tangible and permanent works that were suitable for marketing and which confirmed the function of the gallery, the artist presented a purely ephemeral work with the various choreographies of his Light Ballet in his atelier, which could not be captured for a permanent presentation nor was eligible for sale.[iii] In particular, the first performance, of Light Ballet “mit Folien nach Jazz” (“with foils to jazz”),[iv] in which several people made the light dance in the room—and not machines, as in the third, Vollelektronisches Lichtballett (Fully Electronic Light Ballet)—was created purely for the moment and it only existed in that moment, instantly transforming the atelier into an “experimental action space.”[v]Whereas in the eight preceding Evening Exhibitions it had served the basic function of surfaces on which exhibits were displayed, here the atelier was now ennobled to the status of a kind of stage, and thus itself became part of the artwork being presented.[vi]

[i] See Zell 2019 (see note 6), p. 63.

[ii] See ibid., p. 125.

[iii] See ibid., p. 127.

[iv] Otto Piene, typescript, Düsseldorf, January 3, 1965, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.IV.58.

[v] Zell 2019 (see note 6), p. 127.

[vi] However, this only applies to the moment of the performance. It should also be borne in mind that, as a rule, Piene conceived and designed his Light Ballets to be independent of space. They could be projected anywhere—the location itself always played a subordinate role, although it is of course an inherent criterion of the work, without which the installation cannot function.

In 1966, Piene organized a Zweites Fest für das Licht (Second Festival for the Light) in collaboration with Schmela. From November 11 to December 9, the artist staged several actions, which, like the first event of the same name six years earlier, were spread across several venues. In addition to the two locations used before, Piene’s new atelier rooms at Hüttenstrasse 104—the present headquarters of the ZERO foundation—became a third location, where he presented Blackout 1 and Blackout 2 on two evenings, two interactive happenings that involved the visitors as participants in the action, which consisted of slide projections and multimedia elements.[i] On December 2, 1966, Piene staged the demonstration Die rotglühende Venus (The Red Hot Venus) in his old studio on Gladbacher Strasse, at which the location was incorporated in a performance one last time and became an event space. In the darkened studio, Piene heated with a Bunsen burner a metal sculpture of a small angel, hanging freely in the room, until the bronze began to glow red, before it slowly lost its color again after a few minutes, as it cooled.[ii] On the poster, the action is announced as the “Last Evening Exhibition,”[iii] which makes it clear that this term was used solely in the context of the atelier on Gladbacher Strasse, and that the format was specifically linked to the premises there.[iv] The extinguishing of The Red Hot Venus not only brought the series of Evening Exhibitions to a close, but the history of the studio on Gladbacher Strasse had come to an end—Piene subsequently moved to Hüttenstrasse. A week earlier, during the opening of the exhibition Zero in Bonn at the Städtische Kunstsammlungen (Municipal Art Museum) in Bonn on November 25, 1966, Mack, Piene, and Uecker had officially declared the end of their artistic collaboration, and ZERO was also over.[v]

[i] See Zell 2019 (see note 6), p. 130.

[ii] See Piene, in Meister 2006 (see note 1), pp. 30–31.

[iii] Piene: Zweites Fest für das Licht (poster), Galerie Schmela, Düsseldorf, Atelier Piene, Gladbacher Strasse 69, Düsseldorf, Atelier Piene, Hüttenstrasse 104, Düsseldorf, 1966, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Heinz Mack, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.0.VII.4.

[iv] See Zell 2019 (see note 6), p. 129. Interestingly, the term “atelier” only appears on the two posters for the Fest für das Licht, that is, when it was used solely for events exhibiting works by Piene. The invitation cards for the first eight Evening Exhibitions give the address of Gladbacher Strasse 69 as the location, without any reference that this was Mack‘s and Piene‘s atelier, which again underlines the social aspect of the endeavor—that the focus should not be on them, but on the community of all the exhibiting artists.

[v] See Zell 2019 (see note 6), p. 131.

One of the elements that unites all these publications and magazines is the fact that they are precisely produced by artists, who, in a conscious and organized manner, become authors, designers, and editors. They go far beyond the mere production of works of art or images for reproduction. As the volume The Artist as Curator: Collaborative Initiatives in the International ZERO Movement 1957–1967 argues, the artists concerned actively extended their fields of action to specialized areas, among which we find the publication of magazines and books, and this offers an essential differentiation.[i] For the artist, the book or magazine is a space of creativity that is equivalent to the space of the studio as well as an extension of the gallery space. It is a space of reproduction and dissemination. It concerns the occupation of a space proper to modern identity (in the Habermasian sense of the term) that is equated with the space of the institutions that define the culture of an open society. The space of art is no longer the chambers of the prince, nor is it managed by the government (as was and is the case with totalitarian governments). Nor is its presence reduced to museums, open for a very short time to contemporary art, or to fairs or salons where aesthetic innovations can be appreciated. Art occupies, with a certain normality, with a certain exceptionality, a new public space whose origin lies in the dissemination of information and opinions. The extensive monograph Artists’ Magazines[ii] offers a dense analysis through a selection of mainly North American publications, among which the German Interfunktionen (1968–75) stands out. The publication is, therefore, a space of communication, like that of the gallery or the exhibition space. For the institution, for the museum, the book is an extension of the institutional space of representation. For the art critic, curator, or author, the publication is (or was) the natural space in which to convey ideas and arguments. This is why the interests of multiple actors in the system converge in the pages of books and magazines. The printed page, the book, the periodical, or the pamphlet, is a hybrid space of great power and significance. “Exhibitions go, books stay,” Harald Szeemann told me many years ago. Today, we understand exhibitions as a category of historiographical importance, mainly thanks to what remains of them—catalogues and magazines—which make them “stay” beyond their ephemeral nature. In this sense, it is interesting to consider that the history of exhibitions has emerged only very recently as a subcategory in the historicization of contemporary art.

[i] Tiziana Caianiello and Mattijs Visser, eds., The Artist as Curator: Collaborative Initiatives in the International ZERO Movement 1957–1967 (Ghent, 2015).

[ii] Gwen Allen, Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2011). Beyond the specificity of the magazines as “alternative” spaces for art, I also recommend Brian O’Doherty, Studio and Cube: On the Relationship between Where Art Is Made and Where Art Is Displayed (New York, 2007).

The publishing activities of the second half of the twentieth century have a clear counterpart in those before World War II. The so-called historical avant-gardes were equally prolific in their literary and critical activities and were involved in numerous publishing projects. Let us recall, among others, publications central to the development of art movements and groups at the time, such as De Stijl (1917–20 and 1921–32), Mecano(1922–23), Ma (1916–25), 391 (1917–24), L’Esprit Nouveau (1920–25), Bauhaus (1926–32), Der Sturm(1910–32), Die Aktion (1911–32), Die Freie Strasse (1915–18), Dada (1919–20), Merz (1923–32), LEF (1923–25), and so on, many of which were published in Germany. From a comparison of both groups of publications, a first consideration emerges: the graphic creativity of most interwar publications is enormous; those published after World War II offer a great visual and graphic sobriety that contrasts with the earlier ones. In the interwar period, visual experimentation was expressed in new territories such as typography, with great compositional freedom. The written word became a very powerful image, in a radically different way than it had been in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. Experimental and phonetic poetry contributed to placing writing and image at equal levels. The combination of visual innovations linked to experimental and phonetic poetry, typographic revolutions, and the breakthrough of graphic possibilities brought by photography was a perfect intersection that consolidated the modern aesthetic that would later be transformed into advertising.

How can we explain the graphic sobriety of the postwar artists’ publications? I don’t have a definitive answer, but I imagine that their authors were clearly aware that these periodicals were fundamental instruments for obtaining a primary objective: to gain the public visibility, impact, and relevance that would allow them to gain respect and recognition. I am not talking about this in terms of what we would now call “marketing”: this generation of artists had to rebuild their own public sphere. It was not a question of occupying a preexisting scene, nor of reconstructing a scene that had been cracked. The enthusiasm breathed by their texts and proclamations has more to do with the will to invent something that did not yet exist than to change something that existed before. In contrast, the artists around Futurism or Dada had devoted as much energy to destroying the prevailing bourgeois culture of the past as to generating a new aesthetic program; that is why Dada was identified for a long time (and wrongly, in my opinion) as anti-art. Besides its apparent nihilism, ZERO was about a new start, the building of a new condition, a rebirth.

The books and publications in the milieu of ZERO and adjacent groups seem to contrast with the atmosphere of fun, bustle, constant movement, and the unpredictable and surprising character of the performances in public spaces, at certain openings, the appearances of Piero Manzoni (1933–1963) on television at the time, or the meetings of the artists. The periodicals are “serious”; they “say” that what these artists do should be taken seriously; they deserve the viewer’s attention; they are not to be considered lightly.

The publications we refer to today had relatively small print runs, and the best known, ZERO and Azimuth,also had a short history. The first two issues of ZERO, which appeared in 1958, were published in 400 and 350 copies, respectively. Number three, apotheosis and conclusion at the same time, had 1,225 copies in 1961: its promoters were sure that its reception had increased exponentially. Azimuth, authentic lightning, flare, and brilliance of a very specific moment, had only two issues, which were published in about 500 copies each.

At the end of World War II and for many years following, the center of Europe, including the island of West Berlin, was economically in the hands of Marshall Plan finances. The undisputed military and economic leadership of the United States of America would soon find a translation in what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer called the “culture industry,” as well as in the “prestige crafts” such as the art system. Not only did New York steal from Paris the status of capital of the art world, but the center of gravity shifted across the Atlantic, especially with the power of the academy, and the critical, editorial, and publishing apparatus that would give it credibility and authority. ZERO and its adjacent groups represent the swan song of a Europe that became, after the war, the scene of a play in which industry, commerce, the military apparatus, and science displaced the centrality of culture and heritage, rendering them subsidiary to the fight for global primacy between the two ideological leaders, the United States and the Soviet Union. The intellectual and aesthetic dramaturgy to which I refer occurs at the same time as memorable episodes of the Cold War, and the shift from the beatnik generation to the hippies preceding the revolts of 1968. Is it not strange in this sense that, well into the twenty-first century, we know so little about and are not showing much interest in the “Nove Tendencje” exhibitions held in Zagreb in 1961, 1963, and 1965? The debates that took place in that context are a historio graphical frontier that we should explore without delay.

Two issues of the Dutch magazine Nul=0 appeared. The first, in 1961, featured texts by artists in German, French, and English, along with reproductions of their works. Issue two, which appeared in 1963, was dedicated to the recently deceased artists and real media agitators Yves Klein (1928–1962) and Manzoni.Both editions have a great graphic sobriety that draws attention to the fonts used, which are reminiscent of old typewriters.

Two issues of Azimuth magazine were also published, the first in September 1959 and the second in January 1960. Both follow the same logic: texts by artists and reproductions of works, with the exception that issue number two reproduces the texts in Italian, German, French, and English, demonstrating the international and cosmopolitan ambition of the project.

Published in German, the first two issues of ZERO follow a similar logic, although ZERO is the pioneer magazine that encourages and brings together the largest number of enthusiastic European artists. Issue one was dedicated to the color red and accompanied an Abendausstellung (Evening Exhibition) on the same theme. The volume was preceded by a quotation from Hegel, to which well-known artists and thinkers responded, including Arnold Gehlen (1904–1976), Max Burchartz (1887–1961), Georg Muche (1895–1987), and Klein. Accompanying the 8th Evening Exhibition, issue two would rotate thematically around the idea of vibration in painting—an idea that the young Italian artists of Gruppo T and Gruppo N (enne) would take at face value a year later by investigating the real possibilities of the vibration of objects and surfaces in three-dimensional and animated works.

Only issue three of ZERO, published in 1961 as the last iteration of that editorial project, offers a number of thoughtful pages that go beyond the traditional image-text relationship, composing a conceptually organized visual narrative. Referring on multiple occasions to Dynamo, the exhibition held at Galerie Renate Boukes in Wiesbaden in 1959, ZERO 3 contains several “visual essays” that create a particular iconographic atmosphere, reminiscent, on some pages, of the details of Pop Art or mass media imagery. Not only are works by artists illustrated—with ample representations of Lucio Fontana (1899–1968), Klein, Jean Tinguely (1925–1991), Otto Piene (1928–2014), and Heinz Mack (b. 1931)—but a dense grid of images blurs on the paper, and powerful female lips invite us to read the pronunciation of an inaudible word. A numerical countdown leads us to the liftoff of a rocket that propels ZERO toward the confines of the firmament (the space race would take a further eight years to bring man to the moon). To say goodbye to the volume, a very clear message: “We live. We are for everything.”[i] On the inside pages, a “brutal” intervention by Yves Klein interrupts his text, cutting the page with fire.

[i] Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, “Proclamation,” in Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, eds., ZERO, trans. Howard Beckman (Cambridge, MA, 1973), p. 329.

In 1956, Richard Hamilton and the artists involved in the Independent Group produced the well-known exhibition This Is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, with which the language of advertising, popular culture, and consumerism, and the ebullience of mass media all entered the sacrosanct territory of the fine arts. ZERO, Azimuth, Nul=0, and others would remain at the visual antipodes of the typographic experimentation of the first decades of the century and the overwhelming visual cascade that would soon be imposed in the everyday life of European citizens. I do not intend to compare dissonant aesthetics, but rather seek to understand the motivations and strategies of artists who practiced minimalist abstraction, tried to make painting vibrate, promoted the monochrome almost as a transcendental creed, and followed with fascination Lucio Fontana’s tireless search for a new kind of space, a space made from the void. We are well aware of the interest of artists emerging in the postwar period in popular subcultures linked to the entertainment industry, advertising, consumerism, and the media. European artists did not gloss over the visual and social transformations of their environment, but they did take positions that were highly critical or distant from it all. The almost ascetic sobriety of the work of some of them, as well as the intense conceptual charges of others, did not prevent them from being of “their” time. It was also about offering an aesthetic resistance through art, at the same time that behaviors in the public space embraced forms of collective enjoyment and interaction. They were fascinated by mass media, especially television. Some of them were excellent communicators or entertainers (or clowns, as they have come to be characterized). Their sense of humor and provocation went hand in hand with a great communicative effectiveness, and contrasted with the intense visual constriction of their publications.

The contents of ZERO, Azimuth, and Nul=0, the main publications of that time linked to the scenes of Düsseldorf, Milan, and the Rotterdam-Amsterdam axis, are organized around common principles: texts by artists referring to specific works or projects, texts by critics or museum curators in tune with these ideas, together with illustrations of works by the artists directly or indirectly involved. Books and periodicals created and maintained a sense of community. Modernity had stimulated artists to agglutinate, associate, and organize themselves in order to exist. Artists became authors, editors, and participants in exhibitions that were often linked to the release of the periodicals in question. Another element attracts my attention: in parallel to the celebrated publications, ZERO and the adjacent groups maintained a prolific production of diverse printed matter: posters, foldouts, announcements, invitations, and so on—informational material promoting activities that on certain occasions were accompanied by catalogs. Also, within this variegated category of printed matter we can observe a graphic diversity of great communicative impact. In the exhibition Far from the Void: ZERO and Postwar Art in Europe, presented by the IVAM Centre Julio González in Valencia in 2022, the central corridor of the show, which linked its different rooms and environments, was precisely occupied by a “backbone” of vitrines and display units dedicated to highlighting—as a unifying element of works, artists, and ideas—the books and different publications, films, and documentation produced by the different groups. Books, magazines, and printed material not only provided visual identity in the public space; they also served as conceptual “mortar.” The physical space of the city and the ethereal space created by the media kept them in communication with each other. Art historian and critic Claire Bishop has recently emphasized the problem of the superabundance of documentation in exhibition spaces traditionally reserved for artworks: the artistic heritage is a vast ensemble that is managed according to disparate criteria.[i]

[i] Claire Bishop, “Information Overload,” Artforum 61, no. 8 (April 2023), pp. 122–89.

How can we explain the evident graphic and visual sobriety of the publications analyzed? From all evidence, the artists we are concerned with were not unaware of either the power or the function of creative graphic design as a means of persuasion for their projects. The new aesthetic ideas sought to occupy a space of visibility, a public territory in fabulous transformation. The art publishing industry would begin to recompose itself fundamentally with these artist-led initiatives, both in Europe and in the United States. In the nineteen-sixties, the “big bang” in the arts spread through artist-led publications before the space of the printed page was occupied by publishing companies aimed at profit. Vocations preceded shareholders’ interests.

I believe that the artists gathered around ZERO, Azimuth, and Nul=0, however short the life of each of these projects, did not seek in their publications an alternative space to the traditional exhibition spaces of galleries and museums. Heinz Mack and Otto Piene had invented a new category and a new format of exhibition space: the artist’s own studio, with the opening night providing the space-time coordinates in which the exhibition took place. On the other hand, the openings would continue to use some of the exhibition’s traditional ritual elements, such as the invitation card or the opening speech by a scientific or institutional authority. Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani created their own gallery in Milan, and the Dutch artists “squatted” the most dynamic museum, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, on two occasions. Their Belgian colleagues had access to a new exhibition venue that they organized by themselves in Antwerp, the Hessenhuis, where memorable exhibitions took place in 1959. A few years later, Aspen magazine in the United States would attempt to provide a new type of exhibition space in the form of an experimental magazine, as an alternative to the three-dimensional circuit of Euclidean space as experienced in commercial galleries, museums, or nonprofit spaces. While ZERO, Azimuth, and Nul=0 did not accompany traditional exhibitions, they nonetheless shared public repercussions with them, disseminated ideas contained in them, and distributed parallel intellectual motivations and arguments.

Exhibitions in commercial galleries and a few exhibitions in museums came relatively quickly. Participation and success in major events such as Documenta or La Biennale di Venezia largely failed to materialize – Mack, Piene and Uecker did, however, exhibit in Kassel in 1964.  When the aesthetic forms and ideas of the European ZERO artists arrived in the United States in 1964,[i] they did so under a category or denomination that was relatively alien to their origins, in an international context already completely dominated by the dazzling success of American Pop Art.

The books and publications are part of a wider network of actions and supports that contained the performances, or collective and theatrical actions, and the use of new media (television), at a time of multidisciplinary and anti-academic emergence—addicted to rupture but not disrespectful to existing institutions, innovative but aware of the new orders that were being created little by little. The new art permeated slowly and dissolved into the system, shadowed by the rapidly succeeding trends, groups, and labels established by galleries and art critics.

[i] The exhibition The Responsive Eye took place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York between February 23 and April 25, 1965. The press release for this exhibition reads: “The Responsive Eye exhibition will bring together paintings and constructions that initiate a new, highly perceptual phase in the grammar of art.… Certain of these artists establish a totally new relationship between the observer and the work of art.” Museum of Modern Art (website), https://assets.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_326375.pdf (accessed November 6, 2023).

I imagine that—with all possible differences and distances—the atmosphere of the Evening Exhibitions organized by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene in their Düsseldorf studio might have resembled moods that we have all experienced in our youth. Every creative activity is vital for any artist. And part of the vitality I am trying to describe consisted, I imagine, in rationalizing powerful intuitions that would appear and disappear at any moment, but which needed to be materialized in the studio, where they became works of art. Rationalizing creativity, explaining with ideas and arguments why a work of art is how it is and not any different, is a task that artists after World War II adopted as part of their natural activity.

While it is the artists in the milieu of Futurism, Surrealism, and Dada who initiated the systematic practice of experimental and critical writing with activist or creative intent, and of publishing their own media, books, and magazines, it is the artists related to ZERO and its peer groups in Europe who consolidated the genre in the second half of the twentieth century. Publications that reached three issues or fewer, and that existed for one, two, or three years, combining great graphic simplicity with a high print quality, continue to fascinate us today. Exhibitions in museums and galleries, symposiums, articles, and books are dedicated to them with some regularity, and we find them in specialized public and private collections. In some cases, they are reprinted and reissued; in others they circulate freely in electronic formats. Many of the ideas put forward in their texts seem naïve or outdated to us today. But they undoubtedly refer us to facts, forms, and materials without which today’s art would not be what it is.

The attitude that produced all of this, a genuine form of “do it yourself,” teaches the artist and the intellectual of today that where there is no adequate channel to convey new ideas, it must be created. And it shows that new forms, without ideas to back them up, rarely acquire solidity or relevance. Although auctions and the different art markets do not allow us to speak of an art industry, on account of the economic volume they move, we find ourselves today at the intersection of a series of complex crafts that the digital world and the World Wide Web have altered forever. The printed page will always be different from the screens that surround us. But the latter owe to the former an ability to relate images, words, ideas, and sensations—our intellectual activity and our emotions.

In 1966, Mack returned to Germany, after two years in New York, and reoriented himself artistically. The suggestion to dissolve the three-member ZERO group—which consisted of himself, Otto Piene (1928–2014), and Günther Uecker (b. 1930)—came from Mack that same year. The time was ripe for a résumé. With the speculatively titled Zéro: mögliche Konzeptionen (Zéro: Possible Conceptions),[i] Mack drafted a diagram that summarizes ZERO’s aesthetic program in retrospect. At the moment of the artists’ consensual parting of the ways, it records the ideas that connected the members of the Düsseldorf group and other artists for eight years without a founding event, without a manifesto, and without any obligation of commitment.

With thick arrows and colored pencils, Mack reconstructed the strata of thoughts and ideas upon which ZERO was founded. Here, (art) theory was conceived in its original sense, and at the same time it was Kantian, as it were. It is presented in clear-cut graphics—which, conversely, can always turn from contemplation into theory—the smallest units of which are the key concepts. Mack’s elaborated text-image accomplishes both: it breaks down the artistic ideas into concepts, which are in turn given pictorial form with sketches. The result is an art-theoretical tableau in which the didactic experiences of this former art teacher continue to have an effect, Mack having practiced this bread-and-butter profession (with civil servant status) in parallel with his work as an artist until 1964. The catalog magazine ZERO (1958–61), which he and Piene edited, served as a source of inspiration.

[i] Heinz Mack, Zero: mögliche Konzeptionen, 1966. Felt-tip pen, colored pencil, pencil, ballpoint pen, ink, and collage on white paper, mounted on black cardboard, 74.5 x 100 cm (cardboard), 70.5 x 65 cm (sheet of paper), archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Heinz Mack, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.1.IV.30.

The titular motto of the overview Zero: Possible Conceptions is compositionally bracketed by two black arrows extending from the upper right corner to the lower half of the page; the diagram with the horizontally drawn blue connecting arrow is divided into two according to content. The upper half, structured in five columns, is best read from left to right and from top to bottom. The central concern of assembling the artists into three groups is made clear by including one schematic drawing for each: the coordinate cross, the circular model, and the horizontal line. These stand for “structure,” “centralization,” and “line(s)”—all guiding concepts that share common intersections and are based on formal criteria: “plane,” “point,” and “line.” The mastermind behind this triad of concepts was Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944). His book Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (Point and Line to Plane) was first published as the ninth volume of the Bauhaus Books series in 1926, and three new editions appeared in rapid succession from 1955 to 1963, overseen by the former Bauhaus student Max Bill (1908–1994). Kandinsky made the case for an abstract formal language, which, together with the continuing great interest in “concrete art”—especially among artists—guaranteed the book a lively reception.[i]

For ZERO, the conclusion to be drawn from the painterly elements plane, point, and line inside a curved bracket was “reduction.” What this signified was the “abolition of complexity,” as a subsequent addition inserted in pencil specifies. This went hand in hand with the “tendency towards Minimal Art,” which Mack had personally followed at close quarters in the USA. What the typographic bracket does not address is the implicit thrust of the terms: Art Informel and Tachisme; in short, expressionism of every kind, with which the three ZERO artists had experimented at the outset of their artistic careers, but from which they then freed themselves through formal reduction.

[i] This is why Kandinsky was featured at the beginning of the 1960 exhibition Konkrete Kunst (Concrete Art), organized by Max Bill. See Konkrete Kunst: 50 Jahre Entwicklung, exh. cat. Helmhaus (Zurich, 1960), pp. 9–10.

Halfway down the page, events with a performative character come into view, pushed to the right by a subsequently added short black arrow: “Actions,” “Demonstrations,” “Manifestations,” and “Coloboration” (sic).[i] The common denominator of these groups of works is their expansion of the possibilities for artistic action, combined with the aspiration to generate increased public attention as a “team.” Mack does not, however, disregard the potential dangers involved: pure “provocation” and a relapse into “ideologies.” This alludes—the contradistinction is deliberate—to the appropriation of art by the Nazis, for example, and explains why ZERO’s alliances were with aesthetics and not any political agenda.

Four text boxes contain the central artistic ideas in the characteristic ZERO non-colors of white, black, and gray. Strictly dialectically, Mack always includes “light” in “shadow,” “movement” in “stillness,” the (color) “spectrum” in “monochrome,” and “Landart” (sic) in “space art,” in order to underpin them with central theorems such as “vibration,” and “achromatic”—all programmatic words of “postcolorist painting” (Robert Fleck). Between these specific topics, red arrows establish connections or refer to the major actionist terms above them. In this directional reference frame, “Happening,” on the one hand, and “Landart,” on the other, include artistic directions from which the Düsseldorf ZERO artists have taken essential ideas in order to establish their own aesthetic focuses.

[i] On ZERO’s actions in relation to Happenings and Fluxus events, see Malte Feiler, “Aktionen bei ZERO: Happenings?,” in Klaus Gereon Beuckers, ed., ZERO-Studien: Aufsätze zur Düsseldorfer Gruppe ZERO und ihrem Umkreis (Münster, 1997), pp. 135–48.

Apparently, Mack developed his diagram with its dense information descending in a text-like manner, which at least explains why a page is glued onto the back of the landscape-format page, forming the lower third part of the diagram, and why it was necessary to stabilize the entire portrait-format composition with cardboard backing after the transparent adhesive tape had been removed. Adding this second sheet of paper provided enough space to add another conceptual aspect of ZERO: the consistent use of new materials in art, first and foremost the four elements of “Fire,” “Air,” “Water,” and “Earth,” which are in turn assigned to individual artists.

With the reference to three-dimensional “space” at the bottom of the diagram, a category is invoked that cannot be comprehended topographically. Located between “finite” and “infinite,” the scale can vary from a dot to the universe. ZERO sought the open, pristine space beyond the walls of a museum. Its dimension was light. Like a fountain, it reaches out above the iconic pictorial formula, with its three coordinates, to the artists listed under the headings “Air,” “Water,” and “Earth,” according to Mack’s dictum:

The avant-garde striving to expand into the infinite depths of the sky, into the immense expanse of the oceans, or into the monochrome vastness of the desert, is brought back to human civilization at the bottom of the diagram by geographic indications of place: the centrifugal forces of the ZERO movement can be gauged from the far-flung cities of New York, London, Düsseldorf, Milan, Paris, Amsterdam, and Eindhoven.

Mack’s colors follow a strict code, which—exceptions included—are as follows: spatial terms are in blue, actionist program words are in green, and formative design ideas are written in black. Spatial relationships as well as thematic connections are indicated by red arrows. Time and again, Mack took up a fine pen to add short explanations to the main terms in his beautiful uniform handwriting. In this way, terms are related to one another that correspondingly play key roles in ZERO’s approach to art. At the top, the text bubble “the rest in the unrest” provides a first clue. This paradoxical-sounding formulation goes back to a 1958 text of the same name in which Mack describes the artistic tendency to evolve and expand:

In Zero: Possible Conceptions, the direction of development alluded to here runs progressively from the elementary doctrine of planes and surfaces to issues of design that determine spaces.

By putting together and arranging the conceptual approaches of ZERO and its comrades-in-arms under varying aspects, Mack went beyond what an entire generation of artists held in common aesthetically, in order to differentiate by drawing up ever-new lists of names. What actually united these almost two dozen listed artists (they were exclusively men) from nine different countries was their striving to assert themselves—something they shared with all avant-garde movements. If one takes a closer look at the compilations of names framed by thin lines, it is clear that from the very beginning, Mack, Piene, and Uecker were in contact with numerous artists far beyond the borders of Germany. The keyword “coloboration” (sic), as a synonym for “team work” and “group movement,” is significant here. The artists from Düsseldorf had quickly recognized the advantages of a collaborative, collective approach. So was ZERO a metacollective that could be subsumed under the collective term “zero beweging,” as de Vree insinuated? Or was it rather a “group of groups,” as Piene once put it?[i] Mack’s second diagram provides an answer.

[i] Otto Piene, “ZERO Retrospektive,” in ZERO aus Deutschland 1957–1966. Und heute (ZERO out of Germany 1957–1966. And Today), exh. cat. Villa Merkel (Esslingen and Ostfildern, 2000), p. 38

The background to the creation of the diagram Radius Zero (circa 1970),[i] is quickly told. In 1970, Mack, together with Uecker, was invited to participate in preparing an exhibition on the theme “Radius ZERO.” This was an initiative by Alexander Schleber (b. 1939), director of the Phaidon publishing house in Cologne, who convinced Karl Ruhrberg (1924–2006), director of the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, to support this project, for which Schleber wished to produce a publication. In the end, for organizational as well as financial reasons, the exhibition, scheduled for spring 1973, was never realized. What remains are the documents planning the event—and a diagram by Mack that was intended as the basis for the design of the exhibition’s poster.[ii]

Focusing on Schleber’s theme, Mack took a large folio-size sheet and sketched a complete picture of ZERO’s reach with felt-tip and ballpoint pens. Admittedly, the distance in time from the events cited helped him to recognize the larger context of all the interrelated activities that were directly or indirectly linked to the Düsseldorf triumvirate.[iii] In Mack’s analytical approach, the ZERO movement breaks down into individual collectives.

[i] Heinz Mack, Radius Zero, ca. 1970. Felt-tip pen and ballpoint pen on paper, mounted on gray cardboard, 53 x 69 cm (cardboard), 50 x 65 cm (sheet of paper), archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Heinz Mack, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.1.IV.25.

[ii] See Anette Kuhn, ZERO: Eine Avantgarde der sechziger Jahre (Frankfurt am Main and Berlin, 1991), pp. 57–58, pp. 241–42, n. 240; Anette Kuhn, “Zero im Kontext der europäischen Avantgarde,” in Zero: Eine europäische Avantgarde, exh. cat. Galerie Neher, Essen; Galerie Heseler, Munich; Mittelrhein-Museum, Koblenz (Oberhausen, 1992), pp. 10‒23.

[iii] See Mack 2011 (see note 9), p. 37; Valerie L. Hillings, “Die Geografie der Zusammenarbeit: Zero, Nouvelle Tendance und das Gruppenphänomen der Nachkriegszeit,” in ZERO: Internationale Künstler-Avantgarde der 50er/60er Jahre, (ZERO: International Artists’ Avant-Garde of the 50s/60s), exh. cat. Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, and Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Saint-Étienne (Ostfildern, 2006), p. 76

The result is a topological block model with three vertical formations that consist of a good dozen like-minded groupings. The spatial proximity of these groups on the sheet creates something like a structure, even though their arrangement does not follow any firm national or geographical parameters. First, Mack wrote down the names of the collectives, before adding the names of their protagonists, with details of the groups’ locations or the dates they were founded. In order to keep these different groups of artists apart, Mack drew ovals around them with quick strokes. Here the number “0,” celebrated typographically by ZERO, appears in a new variant of its form: lying horizontally. And, as always in the history of signs, the semantics shift with the transformation. Thus, the transverse ovals may now be understood as germ cells of avant-garde aspirations.

Through subsequent folding, once horizontally and once vertically, a right-angled axial cross has been discreetly inscribed on the paper of the diagram, dividing it into four equal rectangles. Positioned slightly off coordinate “0” in the upper left quarter, “ZERO” in Düsseldorf, with its three protagonists, is the center of the Radius Zero composition. On the chronologically aligned central axis, “ZERO” even presents itself as an ideal center in space and time: between Constructivist-inspired theory at the very top—Władysław Strzemiński’s (1893–1952) Unism and the Mechano-Faktura of Henryk Berlewi (1894–1967) (“Berlevi”), both members of the Polish “Blok Group”—and the “New Realism” in France at the lower end of the central axis. The special position occupied by “Zero” is supported and affirmed by osmotic exchanges with collectives of kindred spirits in neighboring countries. Between the decentralized art scenes, again and again double arrows build bridges, marking connections with gradations of affinity.

A short black double arrow emphasizes the close ties to the Milan circle around the magazine Azimuth, the first issue of which came out in September 1959. In December, the gallery of the same name was founded, which was the most important platform for artists linked to ZERO in Italy until it closed six months later—Gruppo MID was also part of it. The founding of the Milan-based Gruppo T (October 1959) and Gruppo N (pronounced “enne”) in Padua (November 1959) were also inspired by Azimuth. Mack depicted both of these outsiders as a group of islands to the right of the main axis.

Another thick double arrow denotes the strong connection to the Dutch group Nul, separated here into two wings.[i] In contrast, two arrow outlines in violet flag important relationships to the French art metropolis: to GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel), on the one hand, and to New Realism, on the other. The radius of action that Mack shows in his diagram is concentrated on Europe. It was there that a kind of overarching group formation emerged, easily recognizable by the artist circles ringed in red, which were at home on the Rhine, the Lambro, and the Amstel.

[i] Mack characterizes Herman de Vries as a maverick in Radius Zero. Because of his extensive work as a writer, later art historians did not consider him as belonging to the artist group Nul.

Contrary to what the sweeping arrow sign pointing to the “Far East” suggests, ZERO’s actual radius of action was in fact much smaller. The Düsseldorf artists maintained only loose contacts with the Japanese Gutai group, on the left edge of the diagram. Even more difficult, since both politically explosive and aesthetically challenging, was collaboration with avant-garde groups in Argentina (Gruppo Arte Concreto), Spain (Equipo 57, founded in exile in Paris), the USSR (Group Dvizdjenje [Movement]), and Yugoslavia (Nove Tendencije)—all contemporaneous phenomena but without any overt connection to ZERO.[i]

[i] On the collaborative works produced by the collectives mentioned by Mack, see Nina Zimmer, SPUR und andere Künstlergruppen: Gemeinschaftsarbeit in der Kunst um 1960 zwischen Moskau und New York (Berlin, 2002), pp. 264­–93.

What is implied in Radius Zero, but not explicitly stated, are the benefits accruing from alliances between artists, initially based on friendships, that spanned countries and continents: the strategic expansion of ZERO’s sphere of influence with the firm goal of advancing its own internationalization, group show by group show, publication by publication. It will become apparent that this policy of alliance was dictated by changing interests, in which the latent competition inherent in the relationships became increasingly apparent.

While the artist groups circled in the diagram partially touch each other, sometimes forming intersections or rudimentary interlinks, the long thin arrow drawn between “Zero” and the “Gutai Group” represents spatial distance and inner estrangement. The long-distance relationship that ZERO maintained with the collective founded in Osaka in 1954 was initially based on their shared interest in initiating a new beginning for art after World War II. However, neither effective transcontinental bonding forces nor Mack’s assessment of the situation lasted. The ties with the Japanese group grew weaker over time, until Mack, in an act of self-reflective distancing, described it as a “parallel movement” with which ZERO had nothing (any longer) in common, in view of the group’s “poetic” and “Dadaist” objects—a later correction that keeps completely quiet about something they had shared: the Space Art actions carried out both here and there.[i] Of course, this cannot be read from the diagram itself, nor can ZERO’s differences from Nul, GRAV, or Nove Tendencije, which were stated later.[ii]

In Radius Zero, on the other hand, another of Mack’s observations, made at “artesian wells,” found visible expression: the fact that similar artistic ideas were manifesting themselves at the same time in different places could be assigned without difficulty to the “Zero” circle.[iii]

[i] See Mack 2011 (see note 9), pp. 38–41.

[ii] See Hillings 2006 (see note 14), who—partly with reference to Mack and Piene—maps out the differences between the groups mentioned.

[iii] See Heinz Mack in conversation with Stephan von Wiese, “ZERO e Azimuth: Un pozzo artesiano,” in ZERO: 1958–1968 tra Germania e Italia, exh. cat. Palazzo delle Papesse Centro Arte Contemporanea, Siena (Milan, 2004), pp. 165–66; Heinz Mack in conversation with Christiane Hoffmans, in Jürgen Wilhelm, ed., Piene im Gespräch (Munich, 2015), p. 83.

To stay with the artesian wells metaphor: these groupings, which in many places shot out of the ground like geysers, were connected by a “kind of subterranean correspondence.”[i] This is why there was no need for Mack to link all the artists’ groupings in his drawing to “Zero” with arrows. Of the thirteen groups arranged around “Zero,” the trio from Düsseldorf are only directly linked to five. Nevertheless, like communicating cells, as members of transnational, changing exhibition teams they were in constant exchange with each other—be it in letters, by telephone, or in person-to-person conversations. The diagrammatic form that Mack chose to illustrate these interrelated phenomena, however, did not derive from the older “aquatic” symbolism, but from modern network thinking.[ii]

[i] Mack 2015 (see note 19), p. 83.

[ii] See Ulrich Pfisterer and Christine Tauber, eds., Einfluss, Strömung, Quelle: Aquatische Metaphern der Kunstgeschichte (Bielefeld, 2018); Hartmut Böhme, “Einführung: Netzwerke. Zur Theorie und Geschichte einer Konstruktion,” in Jürgen Barkhoff, Hartmut Böhme, and Jeanne Riou, eds., Netzwerke: Eine Kulturtechnik der Moderne (Cologne, 2004), pp. 17–36.

This multipolar network of relationships between like-minded creatives stands out with particular clarity in another of Mack’s abstract pictorial formulas, which was also originally created as a poster design. ZERO (Circles),[ii] undated, is a collage of circular found pieces taken from publications, aligned on symmetrical axes, arranged in lines, and closely interrelated with double arrows. The eleven discs—optical rotors, light reliefs, texts, and a flexi disc, all references to actual artworks—nevertheless do not function like machinery. ZERO’s claim of freedom for art could not be illustrated using a mechanical gearbox. Rather, ZERO saw itself as the rotating force of a movement that in Bern, in 1962, was able to present a list of thirty-three artists (top right) participating in a ZERO exhibition. All the connections denoted by arrows guide the viewer’s gaze directly or indirectly to a telephone dial at the lower center of the collage. Here, the self-stylization as a communicative hub with the telephone-dial number “Mack” speaks for itself. Aware of being the mouthpiece of a larger movement, ZERO sought to usher in a new era. The pictured ZERO-Wecker (ZERO Alarm Clock, ca. 1961)[iii]strikes the hour zero. Later, art history will speak of the first German avant-garde movement after 1945.[iv]

[ii] Heinz Mack, ZERO (Circles), undated (ca./after 1964). Collage, felt-tip pen, and pencil on cardboard, 74.5 x 100 cm, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Heinz Mack, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.1.IV.31.

[iii] The object ZERO-Wecker (ZERO Alarm Clock) by Heinz Mack (ca. 1961, 15 x 13 x 6 cm, alarm clock with collage), is held in the collection of the ZERO foundation, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2008.12.

[iv] See Kuhn 1991 (see note 13), p. 8; Renate Wiehager, “5-4-3-2-1-ZERO: Countdown für eine neue Kunst in einer neuen Welt,” in Klaus Gereon Beuckers, ed., Günther Uecker: Die Aktionen (Petersberg, 2004), p. 23.

But back to Radius Zero: the various groups of artists featured represented ideas that were not identical, but related. Together the protagonists took a stand against contemporary art. The metaphysical term “zeitgeist” has been around since the nineteenth century to describe this kind of aesthetic. Mack spoke soberly and analytically of the “ubiquity” of events.[i] Looking at his diagram, moreover, it is quite clear that the various artist groupings did not succeed in joining forces to establish themselves as an internationally effective “school,” and the fact that Mack, Piene, and Uecker went their separate ways after December 1966 also had a decisive influence on this.

[i] Mack 2011 (see note 9), p. 37. Almir Mavignier, on the other hand, made no secret of his utter astonishment at this phenomenon; see Almir Mavignier, “Neue Tendenzen I: Ein überraschender Zufall” (1969), in Tendencije 4 / Tendencies 4, exh. cat. Galerija Suvremene Umjetnosti (Zagreb, 1970), n.p.

In critical retrospect, when the peak of the ZERO movement had long since passed, Mack described the relationships among the fourteen artist groupings as “neighborhoods,” who had no apparent desire to cross their own property lines.[i] This metaphor evokes notions of ideational range and intellectual property. The latter was no longer shared but defended.

The reasons for this are to be found in the differing DNA of the collectives. Jack Burnham (1931–2019) distinguished between two bloc formations around “Zero”: the artist groups that favored experimental objectivity, anonymity, perceptual psychology, and socialism (GRAV, the groups T, N, and MID, as well as Equipo 47), and those that focused more on individual research, recognition, poetry, idealism, immateriality, luminosity, and nature (“Zero,” Nul, and, with Yves Klein, a section of the New Realists).[ii] As plausible as Burnham’s paradigmatic differentiation may seem at first glance, it mirrors the formation of blocs on the world’s political stage during the Cold War, however little this may be verified on the basis of Mack’s spatial formation of camps. After all, the factions shifted over and over again between 1957 and 1966. The politics of alliances within the ZERO movement has always been subject to a wide variety of self-interests. It was as unstable as the forces competing for recognition on the broad field of the avant-garde.

In their phase of artistic awakening, the Düsseldorf ZERO artists sought intensive contact with other groups as allies for the dissemination, establishment, and assertion of their own position. They welcomed the participation of important initiators, such as their peer Yves Klein (1928–1962) or the grand seigneur of the Concetti spaziali, Lucio Fontana (1899–1968), while they conversely continued—with increasing success—to work toward their own aesthetic sovereignty in the perception of the outside world.

[i] Heinz Mack in conversation with Anette Kuhn, February 6, 1992; see Kuhn 1992 (see note 13), p. 12.

[ii] Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century (New York, 1969), p. 247.

Indicative of this was the Düsseldorf ZEROists’ consternation when New York gallery owner Howard Wise (1903–1989) initially proposed to present their works in “close proximity” to their former idols in November–December 1964.[i] Genealogical fallacies (along the lines of “Aha! So these are the fathers of ZERO!”) were on no account to be put into the minds of the American visitors.[ii] After all, this was ZERO’s first solo show in New York.[iii] The suggestion that one picture by Fontana and one by Klein—both names are found in Mack’s diagram—could be hung in the gallery owner’s office, so that no direct connection was intended or drawn, reassured the ZEROists.[iv]

This shift in emphasis in dealing with kindred spirits is also apparent in Radius Zero. The pioneers are listed in the footer without any connecting arrows—first and foremost Max Bill, the founding director of the Ulm School of Design, mentioned and highlighted in red in the diagram. The invitation of the ZEROists to the 1960 exhibition Concrete Art in Zurich was later to earn Bill the ambivalent praise of being an “(occasional) supporter.”[v] In addition to Bill, and listed horizontally with names side by side, are Fontana, Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967), Barnett Newman (1905–1970), Piero Dorazio (1927–2005), and Jesús Rafael Soto (1923–2005)—all mavericks and authoritative artists for ZERO, amicable encounters with whom were of great importance to the Düsseldorf artists, at least as long as their own careers were not overshadowed by them.[vi]

[i] “We, that is, Uecker and I, were quite shocked, when we heard that H.[oward] W.[ise] wanted to hang a picture of Fontana and Yves in our exhibition.” Heinz Mack in a letter to Otto Piene, September 21, 1964, 13 pages, quotation on p. 12, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Heinz Mack, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.1.2688_14 (underlines in the original; the first in red).

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] “It is after all our exhibition and Fontana is Fontana and Yves is Yves.” Ibid., p. 13.

[iv] See ibid.

[v] Otto Piene, “ZERO 1989,” in Gruppe Zero, exh. cat. Galerie Schoeller (Düsseldorf, 1988), p. 27; cf. Konkrete Kunst 1960 (see note 7).

[vi] See Heinz Mack, “Aus meinem Leben” (“From My Life”), in Heinz and Ute Mack, eds., Heinz Mack: Leben und Werk. Ein Buch vom Künstler über den Künstler / Life and Work. A Book from the Artist about the Artist. 1931–2011 (Cologne, 2011), pp. 12, 15; Mack 2011 (see note 9), pp. 37–38.

In Radius Zero, Mack, Piene, and Uecker claim to occupy a key position in art history, located between the Polish avant-garde of the nineteen-twenties and the American variant of Concrete Art. However, part of the truth of this (ambivalent) self-historicization is that ZERO did not want to have received its inspiration from these predecessors. The objection came from its own camp:“ZERO” had arisen out of itself, without taking any pride in ancestry such as the historical avant-gardes.[i][i] See Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Stammbäume der Kunst: Zur Genealogie der Avantgarde (Berlin, 2005).

He and his two comrades-in-arms only learned about artists such as Strzemiński and his Unism much later, through the Parisian gallery owner Denise René (1912–2012), once again in the history of art invoking the allegory of the phoenix rising from the (postwar) ashes.[i] ZERO’s “elective affinities,” Piene insists, were exclusively personal relationships. These are manifested in ZERO publications, ZERO exhibitions, and ZERO actions.[ii]

[i] Looking back, Mack places ZERO firmly in the tradition of Strzemiński; see Mack 2015 (see note 19), p. 86.

[ii] See Piene 1988 (see note 32), p. 24.

There have been avant-garde movements that drew up a diagrammatic image of themselves to give themselves a program from the outset, and then again there have been others that only in retrospect ascertained the aesthetic principles, ideological underpinnings, and historical constellations that had favored their success. ZERO is one of the latter. Looking back and historicizing, Mack worked out what had ideationally connected the ZERO movement for eight long years. Created in the years after 1964 and 1970, for a long time these diagrams did not have the status of stand-alone works, even though the signatures and dates on some of them proclaimed them as such. It is symptomatic of this nonrecognition that the diagrams were not included among the works for sale in the 1992 exhibition organized by the gallery owners Otmar Neher and Walter Heseler. Moreover, they did not appear in the catalog at all.[i] With the advent of the “diagrammatic turn” in arts and humanities studies after the turn of the millennium, this attitude changed fundamentally.[ii] In the course of a reevaluation of diagrams as aesthetic artifacts, Mack’s diagrams are now no longer seen as unartistic illustrations of abstract facts or contexts. On the contrary: graphical representation is now a genre of its own in art history—and consequently also includes the examples in Heinz Mack’s oeuvre.

[i] See Zero: Eine europäische Avantgarde 1992 (see note 13).

[ii] See Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, die Kunst der Diagrammatik: Perspektiven eines neuen bildwissenschaftlichen Paradigmas, 2nd ed. (Bielefeld, 2017), pp. 25–28.

Regina Wyrwoll: Experiments in art: Are they the necessary prerequisite for something new to emerge?

Andreas Joh. Wiesand: Art and literature depend on change, to which experiments can contribute. Unlike rule-based scientific experimentation, these experiments can involve rule-breaking, and occasionally they even have to. As philosopher Otto Neumaier puts it: “Art depends on an expansion of the use of rules, on a change of rules; for example, works of poetry also each belong to a language, but it would be fatal for them if their use of language were largely to coincide with that of an everyday communication.”[i]

That visual artists in particular experiment with the techniques, colors, and other materials they use is well known, at least since the beginning of the twentieth century. However, not all such experiments lead to the hoped-for results or even become constitutive elements of a new artistic “movement,” as ZERO is sometimes referred to today. Heinz Mack (b. 1931) is a good example of this, because before turning away from Art Informel and Tachisme, he had, as he himself writes, “painted Tachisme for a while; my studio looked like a pigsty.” “All my experiments put me in an uncertain position,” he recalls, and this experience then led to the decision of a radical new beginning and the attempt “to create something that is quite simple, as simple as possible.”[ii]

Experiments therefore do not necessarily deliver the completely new but are rather an open-ended component of artistic work processes. John Coltrane, jazz legend of the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties, put it this way: “I’ve got to keep experimenting. I feel that I’m just beginning. I have part of what I’m looking for in my grasp, but not all.”[iii] New themes and a change in the use of materials, instruments, or techniques can be based on the fact that previous experiments and resulting findings end up being consciously, sometimes radically, discarded—which, however, did not stop ZERO artists and many others from further experimenting, at least until they successfully set artistic “trademarks”.[iv]

RW: Was the rejection of mainstream art movements and this kind of experimentation in the postwar period a unique characteristic of ZERO?

AJW: No, there were many radical artistic initiatives in Germany and numerous other countries. For example, already in 1948, artists from three countries founded the (very short-lived) group COBRA (an abbreviation for Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam). Their program was to “join forces in the struggle that must be waged against the degenerate aesthetic views that stand in the way of the formation of a new creativity.” Uwe M. Schneede writes about this in the catalog of a Hamburg exhibition:

[i] Otto Neumaier, Vom Ende der Kunst: Ästhetische Versuche (Vienna, 1997), p. 10. See also Otto Neumaier, ed., Grenzgänge zwischen Wissenschaft und Kunst (Münster, 2015).

[ii] Heinz Mack, quoted in Heike van den Valentyn, ed., Heinz Mack, exh. cat. Kunstpalast (Düsseldorf, 2021), p. 41. Translation by Andreas Joh. Wiesand.

[iii] Quoted from the album cover of John Coltrane, My Favourite Things, Atlantic 1361, 1961.

[iv] This is the thesis of Thomas Ayck in his report “Kunst als Markenzeichen” (“Art as a Trademark”) for the German TV series Titel-Thesen-Temperamente on November 3, 1972, with special regard to the development of Heinz Mack and Günther Uecker.

RW: Could the example of Josef Albers not suggest that artistic and scientific experiments have a lot in common?

AJW: The question of differences or similarities between experiments in scientific research and those in artistic work is currently quite controversial.

Katharina Bahlmann[i] scours art theory and philosophy for conceptual clarity and stumbling blocks to artistic experimentation. According to her, “artistic experimentation consists in working with differences, in exploring the possibilities of redirecting the gaze and negotiating meaning through it.”[ii] She addresses similarities between artistic and scientific experiments, each of which work on their own “frame of reference,” including philosophical ones. In doing so, she refers, among others, to Thomas Kuhn,[iii] who became famous for his reflections on the conditions for a “paradigm shift,” that is to say, a great upheaval in science (and beyond). In the end, however, she insists “that there is an essential difference between the reshaping of the scientific world and the art world: The reshaping of the scientific world becomes a necessity when more and more facts speak against an existing theory. Artistic experimentation, on the other hand, remains unaffected by considerations of contradictory logic. An artistic point of view is not refuted or invalidated; at most, it loses significance.”[iv] We may assume, however, that for a paradigm shift in art, radical views, experiments, or self-empowerments alone are not sufficient.

Nicole Vennemann[v] also sees artistic experiments in contrast to result-oriented experiments in science, as open-ended research actions designed by artists, within which participation is possible (as partially happened among the ZERO artists).

However, some experts now seem to be moving away from this sharp distinction. The announcement of the symposium Zufall und Einfall: Creative Media in Art and Science of the German Society for Aesthetics (DGAE), November 2023 in Linz, even declared them to be “misconceptions,”[vi] because:

[i] Katharina Bahlmann, “Das künstlerische Experiment zwischen Fortschritt und Wiederholung,” in Ludger Schwarte, ed., Kongress-Akten der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Ästhetik (VIII. Kongress der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Ästhetik 2011), vol. 2: Experimentelle Ästhetik, http://www.dgae.de/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Bahlmann_Exp_Fortschritt_Wdh.pdf.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962).

[iv] Bahlmann 2011 (see note 9).

[v] Nicole Vennemann, Das Experiment in der zeitgenössischen Kunst: Initiierte Ereignisse als Form der künstlerischen Forschung (Bielefeld, 2018).

[vi] See DGAE–Plattform#3: Zufall und Einfall: Medien der Kreativität in Kunst und Wissenschaft, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ästhetik, November 9–11, 2023, http://www.dgae.de/dgae-plattform3/ (accessed July 2023).

RW: Do artistic tests or experiments aim solely at aesthetic innovation or do they sometimes also influence social change?

AJW: The influence of artists and intellectuals on social developments—not only in the cultural sphere, but also in economic and technical fields—should not be played down: They often deliver impulses at the interfaces of communication processes and are, at the same time, creators of new messages and views with the ability to translate them into aesthetic forms. On the one hand, their influence can be decisive, when it comes to testing new technical means and, on the other hand, when it comes to pointing out alternative sociopolitical perspectives. Today this concerns, for example, the meaning and consequences of “globalization”; in earlier times, overdue political changes that must also reach the minds and hearts of various sections of the population were at stake: the political upheavals in central and eastern Europe about thirty-five years ago provide many examples of “midwives” from art and literature.

The situation in Germany in the nineteen-fifties, shortly after the end of the Nazi regime and the catastrophe of World War II, could suggest a similar scenario: Wasn’t it time for a new start, radically questioning established political views and, equally, unclear artistic positions? At the time, this new beginning, seen as a whole, was only partially successful; Adenauer’s motto “no experiments” was the order of the day—although the planning of German rearmament, which began only a few years after the war, could actually be seen as a far-reaching experiment …

RW: How do such innovations come about through art?

AJW: Social change can depend on “aesthetic irritations” to the point of overturning traditional images and beliefs that stand in the way of innovation. The economist and social scientist Michael Hutter has researched such experiments and processes for decades. In addition to the well-known artistic, economic, and technological innovations such as those of the Bauhaus movement, to which Mack[i] and others in the ZERO environment also referred, Hutter points, for example, to the role played by artists, writers, and composers from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance to the nineteenth century in shaping our perceptions of space and time, which are “among the most fundamental cognitive conventions in human interaction.”[ii]According to his observations and those of other researchers, artists such as Ghirlandaio or Velasquez, for example, made decisive contributions to a view of the world in which the traditional distinction between a celestial and an earthly sphere could be overcome. In that context, the artistic invention of central perspective enabled the development of new techniques, e.g., in geometry, construction, and spatial planning as well as the planning of economically motivated expeditions around the globe—and in that process, however, colonial conquests.

RW: Today, the ever more rapid development of new technologies is of great importance in social upheavals. Do artists play a role there as well?

AJW: Some observers conclude—as previously indicated by the example of the DGAE—that only art, science, and technology together can form the basis for creativity, innovation, and productivity in society. Innovations in the development and artistic validation of new technologies, sometimes not intended by those involved, have occurred throughout history. Only occasionally did artists try to make this potential of their work clear to politicians. Günter Drebusch (1925–1998) of the association Deutscher Künstlerbund, for example, mentions Willi Baumeister (1889–1955), who first made the screen printing technique known in Germany around 1951, and continues:

[i] Mack states that “at the Bauhaus, people thought constructively and positively about harmonious coexistence in civil society. The fact that art was not only for loners and romantic ivory tower dwellers, but could make social imperatives and moral demands, impressed me a lot at the Bauhaus. After all the war events, the clarity of this visual language was more than welcome.” Heinz Mack, quoted in Meister 2006 (see note 22), p. 52.

[ii] An overview of these research findings is provided in Michael Hutter, “Structural Coupling between Social Systems: Art and the Economy as Mutual Sources of Growth,” Soziale Systeme 7 (2002): 290–312.

A sunflower seed was glued on top with the following note: “Jean Tinguely recommends that you plant this sunflower seed in good soil before following the instructions below.”[i] The destructive gesture of the one artist is counterbalanced here by the creative impulse of the other.

[i] Daniel Spoerri, “Pyromanische Anleitung,” in Mack and Piene 1961 (see note 10), n.p.

As a relatively young, interdisciplinary academic field, art market studies examines, among other things, the various influences of actors and networks in the art market on the formation of the visual arts canon. This includes gallery owners as a relevant group, who often accompany young artists from the beginning of their professional careers: artists’ works are often presented to the public and sold for the first time in galleries; exhibition catalogs are compiled and produced, large-format works are financed in advance, and contacts with exhibition institutions are arranged. Gallerists work as the gatekeepers of the art market. Sociologist Hans Peter Thurn points out that the “gallery owner … slips into the guise of a public relations officer” for the artist.[i] This refers to the fact that gallery owners give speeches, write texts, publish editions, and pursue other activities to publicize and advertise new artists, their novel approaches, and their respective works. To render visible the achievements of individual actors and collaborations between artists and gallery owners requires in-depth, source-based studies. The ZADIK (Zentralarchiv für deutsche und internationale Kunstmarktforschung—Central Archive for German and International Art Market Studies), with its specialized archive on the history of the art market, holds a wealth of archival material on various galleries associated with the ZERO movement, including Rochus Kowallek in Frankfurt am Main (A 18), Galerie art intermedia (Helmut Rywelski) in Cologne (A 103), and Galerie Hubertus Schoeller in Düsseldorf (A 71).

Thanks to the research achievements of recent years—such as Thekla Zell’s extremely well-founded study—we now have deeper insights into the collaboration of some artists with galleries during the period from the end of the nineteen-fifties to the beginning of the nineteen-sixties—a period that was important for the constitution of ZERO. However, the years after the “officially” declared end of the artists’ collaboration in the context of ZERO, by Heinz Mack (b. 1931), Otto Piene (1928–2014), and Günther Uecker (b. 1930), in 1966, still need to be examined in more detail. This chapter aims to provide examples of this and to encourage further research.

[i] Hans Peter Thurn, Der Kunsthändler: Wandlungen eines Berufes (Munich, 1994), p. 124.

The importance of high-profile events for establishing ZERO from the very beginning is well known, starting with the Evening Exhibitions, which, in the words of Thekla Zell, functioned “as a gateway to the public in the sense of a proto-gallery.”[i] Zell also explicates the cooperative idea of the artists, who presented their works both in Galerie Schmela and Galerie 22 in Düsseldorf as well as in the Evening Exhibitions, and she traces the transition from the studio and the Evening Exhibitions to the gallery. This became apparent, for example, with ZERO 3, the third issue of the magazine, in 1961, since this issue was not presented in the studio like the previous ones, but in Galerie Schmela,[ii] and was at once the first comprehensive documentation and the conclusion of the first constitutive phase of ZERO. It was accompanied by the Zero: Edition, Exposition, Demonstration, the first event of the new movement organized by Mack, Piene, and Uecker, which took place under the name “ZERO.”[iii] Not only did Schmela and his wife Monika organize the first solo exhibitions by Mack, Piene, and Uecker in a German gallery,[iv] but Alfred Schmela’s activities as a whole were essential to the constitution and establishment of ZERO in Germany. This is evidenced by Otto Piene’s famous statement that “Zero was just as important to him as he was to Zero,”[v] which appeared in the 1993 publication ZERO: Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Günther Uecker, by the art critic Heiner Stachelhaus. There were also other important protagonists, like Rochus Kowallek with D(ato) Galerie, or Galerie D, Gerhard von Graevenitz and Jürgen Morschel with Galerie Nota, and Kurt Fried with Studio F. Their work is also explored in greater depth by Thekla Zell.

[i] Thekla Zell, Exposition ZERO: Vom Atelier in die Avantgardegalerie. Zur Konstituierung und Etablierung der Zero-Bewegung in Deutschland am Beispiel der Abendausstellungen, der Galerie Schmela, des Studio F, der Galerie Nota und der D(ato) Galerie(Vienna, 2019), p. 131.

[ii] See ibid., p. 127.

[iii] See ibid., p. 134. The Demonstration was reprised at Galerie A in Arnhem, December 9–30, 1961; see “Chronologie,” in ZERO: Internationale Künstler-Avantgarde der 50er/60er Jahre (ZERO: International Artists’ Avant-Garde of the 50s/60s), exh. cat., Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, and Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Saint-Étienne (Ostfildern, 2006), p. 276. Tiziana Caianiello points out that in 1959 there had already been an exhibition in the Rotterdamse Kunstkring with the title Zero, in which the Düsseldorf artists had not participated. See Tiziana Caianiello, “Ein ‘Klamauk’ mit weitreichenden Folgen: Die feierliche Präsentation von ZERO 3,” in Dirk Pörschmann and Mattijs Visser, eds., ZERO 4321 (Düsseldorf, 2012), p. 513.

[iv] See Zell 2019 (see note 2), p. 133.

[v] Otto Piene, in Heiner Stachelhaus, ZERO: Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Günther Uecker (Düsseldorf, 1993), p. 155.

The joint ZERO exhibition in Bonn in 1966 (November 25 to December 31) and the accompanying ZERO Midnight Ball, which, with its motto “ZERO is good for you,” gathered around two thousand partygoers[i] at Rolandseck railway station (November 25–26, 1966), were “officially” regarded as the end of the collaboration between Mack, Piene, and Uecker, and thus of ZERO. However, both the original core members as well as artists who had exhibited under the ZERO banner continued their careers as artists, and Mack, Piene, and Uecker also undertook further activities together. These activities, as well as the work of galleries, exhibition venues, collectors, and auction houses, were essential for the reception and particularly the enduring establishment of what is now firmly anchored in the art-historical canon under the term “ZERO.”

This chapter examines the example of the activities of the gallery owner Hubertus Schoeller. His archival holdings at ZADIK include his invitation cards, compilations of press cuttings, and correspondence, as well as documents relating to the preparation of exhibitions,[ii] catalogs,[iii] and festivals. The interview conducted with Schoeller in July 2023 by the author, which is referred to here variously, provides valuable additional information.[iv]

[i] See Thekla Zell, “The ZERO Traveling Circus: Documentation of Exhibitions, Actions, Publications 1958–1966,” in Dirk Pörschmann and Margriet Schavemaker, eds., ZERO: Die internationale Kunstbewegung der 50er und 60er Jahre (ZERO: The International Art Movement of the 1950s and 1960s), exh. cat. Martin-Gropius-Bau and Stedelijk Museum (Berlin, Amsterdam, and Cologne, 2015), p. 169.

[ii] These include correspondence about loans, the acquisition of works for sale, and plans for hanging artworks.

[iii] These include requests for permission to publish or reprint, requests for help in compiling the lists of ZERO exhibitions, collections of material about past exhibitions, galley proofs, and documents concerning the distribution of catalogs.

[iv] Hubertus Schoeller in an interview with Nadine Oberste-Hetbleck, Düsseldorf, July 11, 2023.

Hubertus Schoeller took over the Düsseldorf gallery Ursula Wendtorf and Franz Swetec at Bilker Strasse 12 in 1974,[i] at a point in time when ZERO was already “history.” At the time, the gallery did not have a specific program focus, although ZERO artists had been featured strongly in the five years it had been in existence, as can be seen from the exhibition invitations.[ii]

Schoeller took over the gallery the following year and later, in March 1980, moved to new premises at Poststrasse 2 in Düsseldorf, with the new name of Galerie Hubertus Schoeller “and the interior designed by Nils Sören Dubbick to match the gallery’s program. Until his last exhibition in August 2003, he presented the work of over fifty artists from the USA, Argentina, Brazil, Russia, and almost all the European countries.”[iii]

[i] After taking over the gallery with the exhibition Sovak, Schoeller at first traded under the name “Galerie Ursula Wendtorf und Franz Swetec, Inhaber [owner] Hubertus Schoeller.” In 1976, he changed the name to “Galerie Schoeller vorm. [formerly] Wendtorf + Swetec.”

[ii] Piene was represented with three solo exhibitions, and Uecker also had a solo show. Mack only participated in a group exhibition at the end of 1974. In addition, Hermann Bartels, Hermann Goepfert, Walter Leblanc, Oskar Holweck, and Ferdinand Spindel also exhibited elsewhere under the ZERO banner.

[iii] See the ZADIK inventory profile of Holding A 71, https://zadik.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/archiv/bestandsliste/a-71-schoeller-duesseldorf (accessed January 4, 2024).

Where “artists” are mentioned above, as well as in what follows, it should be pointed out that the artists represented by Galerie Hubertus Schoeller were almost exclusively male. Exceptions included the solo exhibitions of Aurélie Nemours and Hannelore Köhler, as well as individual female artists who participated in group exhibitions.[i] As a whole, however, the program was dominated by male artists, which also reflected the situation in the art market at that time.

[i] Vera Molnar, Nelly Rudin, Dadamaino, and Garcia Varisco were each featured in a group exhibition at Galerie Schoeller. When the gallery was owned by Ursula Wendtorf and Franz Swetec, artists such as Gerlinde Beck, Rune Mields, Claudia Kinast, Mira Haberernova, and Karina Raeck had appeared in its program.

What did the gallery represent in terms of content? In a nutshell, it can be said that “for Schoeller, reduction to the essentials and material perfection were the core elements of his art program.”[i] In the years after taking over the gallery, and especially since its move to the new premises, Schoeller specialized in Constructivist Concrete Art and the art of the ZERO group.

[i] See the ZADIK inventory profile of Holding A 71 (see note 14).

The role that ZERO played for Galerie Hubertus Schoeller is already indicated by its exhibition program with regard to Mack, Piene, and Uecker.[i] In addition, there were the exhibition projects outside the gallery, such as the joint project ZERO: A European Avant-Garde[ii] in 1993, which Schoeller supported, and also the presentations at art fairs, for example, in Cologne or Basel. Over and above these three artists, there are many other artists in the gallery’s program who exhibited in the context of ZERO—for example, Christian Megert (b. 1936), Bernard Aubertin (1934–2015), Hermann Goepfert (1926–1982), Jef Verheyen (1932–1984), Hermann Bartels (1928–1989), and Walter Leblanc (1932–1986), as well as Almir Mavignier (1925–2018), Jesús Rafael Soto (1923–2005), Dadamaino (1930–2004), Uli Pohl (b. 1935), and the Nul group with Jan Schonohoven (1914–1994), Armando (1929–2018), Jan Henderikse (b. 1937), and Henk Peeters (1925–2013).

[i] Of the three original ZERO artists, Piene was the first to have a solo exhibition after Schoeller took over the gallery in 1976/77—six further solo shows followed (in 1980, 1984, 1987/88, 1991, 1995, and 2000), plus three group shows (in 1977/78, 1978/79, and 1988). Mack’s works were presented in three solo exhibitions (in 1993/94, 1998, and 2001) and he was represented in five group shows (in 1977/78, 1978/79, 1981/82, 1986, and 1988). Uecker was represented in three group shows (in 1978/79, 1981/82, and 1988).

[ii] The exhibition was shown at three locations—Galerie Neher in Essen, Galerie Heseler in Munich, and the Mittelrhein Museum in Koblenz—and was accompanied by a catalog.

In the years after Alfred Schmela and his colleague Hans Mayer, who had paved the way for Concrete Art and ZERO after collaboration between the three artists Mack, Piene, and Uecker had ended in 1966, Schoeller regarded himself as a lone figure in Düsseldorf who continued to enable the ongoing representation of ZERO in Germany:

Schoeller’s work, which ZADIK has already addressed to some extent in two thematic monographic exhibitions, will be explored in greater depth below. The focus is on a project by Schoeller that stood out in its commitment to raising ZERO’s visibility, and which initially began with an exhibition mounted for the 700th anniversary of the founding of the city of Düsseldorf, as part of a “parallel” campaign by Düsseldorf galleries on the subject of “Düsseldorf Artists.”[i] In his exhibition, titled Gruppe Zero, Schoeller presented a total of forty-two works by thirty-two artists from September 16 to November 16, 1988, all dating from the period 1957 to 1960.

[i] Ute Grundmann, “Die Kunst im Kontrast,” NZR (Neue Rhein/Ruhr Zeitung), no. 217, September 16, 1988: “Since 1983, they [parallel actions] have accompanied major exhibitions with joint actions.”

In preparation for this exhibition, Schoeller spoke at trade fairs such as Art Basel with owners of works from the relevant period—collectors and artists—and endeavored also to locate exhibits that were for sale. In his efforts it was particularly Piene who supported him: he designed the poster for the exhibition[i] and was also a lender of exhibits. A glance at the list of lenders for the show reveals that a large proportion of the artworks were lent by artists; some of them lent their own works, but some also lent works that they owned by fellow artists. The municipal museum in Leverkusen, Schloss Morsbroich, also supported the exhibition with a loan. The works in the exhibition did not date exclusively from the period, but some had specific historical links: both Almir Mavignier’s Störung (Verschiebung eines Zentrums)—Disturbance (Shift of a Center)—and Yves Klein’s untitled round, red ceramic object.[ii] had been exhibited at ZERO’s 7th Evening Exhibition in 1958; Verheyen’s untitled painting had featured at the Bienal Internacional de São Paulo in 1967; and Uecker’s sculpture New York Dancer had been shown in Amsterdam at the Nul exhibition in 1965, as well as at the above-mentioned exhibition by Mack, Piene, and Uecker in Bonn in 1966.

[i] Letter from Hubertus Schoeller to Otto Piene, Düsseldorf, August 9, 1988, with Piene’s handwritten response to Schoeller, August 16, 1988. The poster could be purchased at the gallery for DM 15, or DM 50 for a copy signed by the artist.

[ii] The lender of this last work was none other than the prominent architect Werner Ruhnau, as the press reported. See Helga Meister, “Aus der Jugend der ZERO-Stars,” WZ (Westdeutsche Zeitung), November 5, 1988.

The local press praised the show as an “exhibition worthy of a museum”[i] and spoke of the “large crowds drawn by the Schoeller Gallery’s Zero exhibition.”[ii] Schoeller had expressly chosen the Düsseldorf galleries’ combined event for his exhibition in order to attract as much attention as possible. After the very positive reception, he decided to publish a catalog of the exhibition project. Here Piene also played a role, as Schoeller recalls:

[i] Ibid.; see also “Von Galerie zu Galerie: Die goldenen Jahre der Avantgarde,” Düsseldorfer Hefte, no. 19, October 1, 1988.

[ii] “Auftrieb bei ‘parallel,’” Rheinische Post, no. 218, September 19, 1988.

In fact, the archival material—correspondence with galleries, museums, collectors, and academics—shows that Schoeller spent more than six months on intensive research, the concept, and editing.[i] A distinctive feature of Schoeller’s catalog is its ambition to go beyond merely documenting the exhibition. In addition to reproducing the works exhibited and photos of installation views, it contained statements by the three ZERO artists[ii] on the then current state of ZERO, an archival documentation of all invitations to the Evening Exhibitions,[iii] the covers of the issues of ZERO magazine with their tables of contents, and historical photos from the ZERO period. In addition—and this was truly labor-intensive—Schoeller compiled a chronological “List of Group Zero Exhibitions.” From this, he then transferred the names of the artists to an alphabetical directory, which shows in chronological order the ZERO exhibitions in which each artist had participated. Why did he do this? Schoeller recalls:

[i] See the collection of correspondence from the period April 19 to September 28, 1989, ZADIK, A 71, VIII: Zero-Katalog, Zero Ausstellung 1959–96. Notes on the letters show that much information was obtained by personal communication or by telephone.

[ii] Schoeller 2023 (see note 10): “And then I asked Mack, Piene, and Uecker for their views on ZERO today. Piene writes quite clearly: ZERO is still valid today, Mack says it was an important period, but it’s over, and Uecker doesn’t respond at all, which is also an answer.”

[iii] Schoeller 2023 (see note 10): “Also included were all nine invitations to the Evening Exhibitions that I had received from Piene.”

With the increasing distance of time from the project, Schoeller reflects:

“It was a point of reference, although I would do it differently today. Back then, I only included the exhibitions that had ZERO in the title. So some of them, like the Antwerp exhibition [Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision, 1959, at the Hessenhuis Museum], were left out and Adolf Luther (1912-1990) is also not included—today, I would include them.”

This ambitious project of Schoeller’s demanded extensive research and the help of numerous people and institutions. Schoeller asked for confirmation that the respective exhibitions had indeed taken place, requested the lists of participating artists, asked for flyers or invitations, and placed an order to purchase any catalog that had been published. The result is a rich collection of material and ephemera from the ZERO period in the Schoeller collection, a veritable treasure trove, which at the same time is an illustration of ZERO’s geographical expansion at that time.[i] It was not without reason that Schoeller, taking up an idea of Heinz Mack’s, drew up a map of the world showing the ZERO exhibitions that had been identified. This also brought with it a fresh insight for the gallery owner, because on the map the ZERO exhibitions that had taken place clearly exhibited a dominant north–south expansion. The geographical visualization of the outreach of exhibitions or art fairs, for example, is a method that has become increasingly dominant in exhibition research in recent years, often with the support of the digital humanities. Schoeller made this approach fruitful avant la lettre and says himself that “this was more of a catalog for research and work than a catalog of pictures.” The gallery distributed the catalog, which it had produced itself in a print run of 1,500 copies, priced DM 76. The release of the publication was celebrated with a party on December 9, 1989, in keeping with the ZERO tradition. Schoeller reports:

[i] See ZADIK, A 71, VII.

The festive ZERO evening described by Schoeller and filmed by Werner Raeune on video took place on the aforementioned date of December 9, 1989, from half past eight until midnight in Galerie Hubertus Schoeller. In point of fact, the motif of the black cardboard hat was based on something comparable in ZERO’s history: at the Expositie Demonstratie in December 1961 at Gallery A in Arnhem, black cardboard tubes with white ZERO lettering were worn.[i] On February 10, 1964, Mack, Uecker, and Piene took part in the Monday parade, the highlight of German Carnival, in Düsseldorf, where they also wore tall black cardboard hats.[ii] This object, which was already familiar in the ZERO context, was supplemented by the sparklers. The appreciation shown by the guests for the props at the party is striking: recognizing them as collector’s items, they had the hats signed by the artists, as well as the catalog.

[i] See photo 29.2, in Pörschmann and Visser 2012 (see note 4), p. 454.

[ii] Caianiello, in Pörschmann and Visser 2012 (see note 4), pp. 510–26, takes an in-depth look at the ZERO presentations and their links to avant-gardes of the past such as Dada, and in particular Futurism. She also explores the connection between the three Düsseldorf artists and elements of German Carnival on pp. 521–22.

The response to the celebration was remarkable: the video and the photographs already show that the crowd was large. A note on a beer mat in the archives confirms that 410 people had registered for the event and that 350 actually attended.

Schoeller rates highly the significance of the event for the visibility of ZERO: “I would say that that was the first time ZERO was resurrected again. Because the first time, as far as I remember, the Kunsthaus Zurich put on a very good ZERO exhibition [Zero: Image Presentations of a European Avant-Garde 1958–1964,June 1 to August 5, 1979, after the official end of the ZERO movement],[i] then there was a break.” And in fact, things did start moving to a certain extent regarding the visibility of ZERO at the end of the nineteen-eighties. The Lenz Schönberg private collection, which toured to several locations around the world, played a role in this.[ii] In 1988, however, Armin Zweite noted in the accompanying catalog: “Despite a variety of efforts, it can scarcely be said that the goals of ZERO have gained greater significance in the awareness of the art-interested public.”[iii] With regard to art-historical research, scholarly projects that address the movement’s history are significant, such as Anette Kuhn’s[iv] doctoral thesis of 1988 and Schoeller’s publication. The press reports were impressed by his documentation: “What is characteristic of this group of artists is meticulously listed here.… Because this is the first time it has been done [sic] and so comprehensively, gallery owner Schoeller has presented the long overdue handbook and reference work which should be emphasized all the more emphatically.”[v] This author’s assessment was correct: with his publication, Schoeller created an important reference work that was definitely the basis for several museum exhibitions that subsequently took place. Looking back in 2006, Günter Herzog described Schoeller’s publication as “one of the most complete documentations of the history of the movement to date.”[vi]

[i] According to Ursula Perucchi-Petri, the exhibition “provided a historical overview of the phenomenon Zero.” Ursula Perucchi-Petri, in Zero: Bildvorstellungen einer europäischen Avantgarde, 1958–1964, exh. cat. Kunsthaus (Zürich, 1979), p. 6. In addition to art-historical texts on the artists in the exhibition, the catalog contains historical photos, text excerpts from past catalogs, interviews, and twenty artist biographies.

[ii] After the first presentation at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main in 1974/75, a larger part of the collection was shown in a movie theater auditorium in Salzburg city center in 1985, and then, shortly after Schoeller’s gallery opened, in the exhibition Gruppe Zero at the end of September 1988, in the Städtischen Galerie in the Lenbachhaus in Munich. See ZERO: Vision und Bewegung. Werke aus der Sammlung Lenz Schönberg, exh. cat. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus (Munich, 1988). Schoeller also remembers the international presentations: “In the 1990s, it was the Lenz Collection that toured the world as an exhibition—Madrid, Moscow….” Schoeller 2023 (see note 10). See Hannah Weitemeier, ed., Sammlung Lenz Schönberg: Eine europäische Bewegung in der bildenden Kunst von 1958 bis heute, exh. cat. Zentrales Künstlerhaus am Krimwall Moskau (Stuttgart, 1989).

[iii] Armin Zweite, “Vorwort,” in ZERO: Vision und Bewegung 1988 (see note 30), p. 7.

[iv] Working under the supervision of doctoral advisor Eduard Trier at the Ruhr University Bochum, Kuhn was one of the first scholars to engage with ZERO in an academic context. See Anette Kuhn, Zero und Yves Klein: Aspekte einer deutschen Avantgarde der sechziger Jahre, Ph.D. diss. (Ruhr University Bochum, 1988).

[v] “Schoeller, Düsseldorf,” Handelsblatt, no. 26, February 6, 1990, p. 26.

[vi] Günter Herzog, “Editorial Notice,” sediment—Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Kunsthandels, no. 10: “ZERO ist gut für Dich” (“ZERO is good for you”), (Nuremberg, 2006), p. 7.

This made it possible to describe the close connection between Schoeller and ZERO in more detail in the years that followed, and to shed light on further projects. Time and again, his gallery provided a platform for ZERO-related presentations—including the joint presentation of the aforementioned monograph ZERO: Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Gunther Uecker by Heiner Stachelhaus with Econ publishers on May 12, 1993.[i]

[i] In the foreword to his book, Stachelhaus 1993 (see note 6) states with regard to the resonance of ZERO at that time: “An additional motivation [for writing this book] is that the interest of collectors, museums, and galleries in ZERO has gradually increased in recent years.”

Hubertus Schoeller’s enduring commitment to ZERO and Constructivist Concrete Art in general was also evident in his activities beyond the gallery. In 2003, the year his gallery closed, he established the Hubertus Schoeller Foundation at the Leopold Hoesch Museum in Düren, which holds his collection of Constructivist Concrete Art. In 2006, he was a co-initiator of the exhibition ZERO: Internationale Künstler-Avantgarde der 50er/60er Jahre (ZERO: International Artists’ Avant-Garde of the 50s/60s) at the Museum Kunstpalast, which was curated by Jean-Hubert Martin together with Heike van den Valentyn and Mattijs Visser—ideas for the exhibition were developed during a discussion with Otto Piene and Jean-Hubert Martin at the Schoeller Gallery.[i] As part of this exhibition, the black cardboard top hats that featured in Schoeller’s ZERO party were also revisited. The internationally oriented retrospective exhibition also acted as a major stimulus for establishing the ZERO foundation in 2008,[ii] whose Circle of Friends Schoeller chaired for many years. The enduring bond between gallery owner and artist is also reflected in the following statement, which Hubertus Schoeller recalls:

[i] At this time, there were further exhibition projects related to ZERO: the Lenz Schönberg collection was shown at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg Mönchsberg from January 21 to March 26, 2006, and the ZADIK exhibition ZERO ist gut für Dich took place at the Art Cologne fair from February 15 to 19, 2006.

[ii] See www.kunstpalast.de/de/programm/sammlung/zero-foundation (accessed January 4, 2024); www.zerofoundation.de (accessed January 4, 2024).

This text has been translated from German into English by Gloria Custance.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the US art market was dominated by the demand for European artworks. The nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties in particular were defined by Old Masters and European Impressionists. Contemporary European artists, many of whom had been forced to flee their home countries as refugees following the Nazi takeover of power in 1933, also contributed to the importation of European art into the USA. The Société Anonyme, founded by Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) together with Man Ray (1890–1976) and Katherine Dreier (1877–1925) in 1920, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), founded in 1929, and the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), founded in 1939, each initially focused almost entirely on European art. In 1930, MoMA mounted the exhibition Painting in Paris, from American Collections, which evidenced American collectors’ preference for the masters of French modernism.[i]

[i] See Norman Rosenthal, “Amerikanische Kunst: Eine Sicht aus Europa,” in Christos M. Joachimides and Norman Rosenthal, eds.,Amerikanische Kunst im 20. Jahrhundert: Malerei und Plastik 1913–1993, exh. cat. Martin-Gropius-Bau and Royal Academy of Arts (London and Berlin, 1993), p. 13; Gail Stavitsky, “Museen und Sammler,” in Joachimides and Rosenthal 1993, p. 166; Thomas Kellein, “Es ist die schiere Grösse: Die Rezeption der amerikanischen Kunst in Europa,” in Joachimides and Rosenthal 1993, p. 211; Britta E. Buhlmann, “Art Is Not an Object but an Experience,” in Abstrakter Expressionismus in Amerika, exh. cat. Pfalzgalerie and Ulmer Museum (Kaiserslautern, 2001), p. 19. Symbolism, Cubism, and Fauvism were the most talked-about art movements at that time. Many American artists went to Paris, the art capital of Europe, to learn from the main proponents of these movements, while Marcel Duchamp emigrated to New York during the First World War, working there to establish an infrastructure of private collectors, gallery owners, artists, and museums.

In the postwar period, Germany faced cultural challenges due to the occupation, resulting in a return to prewar art. On the relationship between the occupying powers and art in Germany, Jill Michelle Holaday writes: “Initially, the Allies championed the ‘degenerate’ art burned by the Nazis, but not contemporary art. Expressionism came to symbolize an art appropriate for a new democracy.”[i] However, many German artists and critics disagreed with this and considered prewar Expressionism outdated.

During the growing tensions between the USA and the USSR, cultural policy gained more attention and culture was instrumentalized as a political tool:[ii]

[i] Jill Michelle Holaday, Die Gruppe ZERO. Working through Wartime Trauma, Ph.D. diss. (University of Iowa, 2018), pp. 10–11.

[ii] See Carsten Kretschmann, Zwischen Spaltung und Gemeinsamkeit: Kultur im geteilten Deutschland (Berlin, 2012), pp. 15ff, 35; Brüning 2022 (see note 6), p. 35. The Allies also set the tone in the field of culture. They sought to create new structures, to regulate them and, above all, to control them rigorously.

This return to abstract painting after 1945 thus also represented a dissociation from National Socialist realism. At least in the three zones occupied by the Western Allies, there was a direct break with this era.[i]

The introduction of American fine art into Germany in the postwar period was initially slow. It was barely noticeable at all in Düsseldorf. After the unification of the US and British occupied zones in 1947, American influence spread to the Rhine-Ruhr region. The Cultural Exchange Program, which was intended to enable individual artists and creatives in the USA and Germany to visit each other’s countries, had been launched in 1946, but the absence of a market for art in Germany nevertheless spread a feeling of isolation around the art academies. Heinz Mack commented on this in a conversation with Betty van Garel:

[i] See Kretschmann 2012 (see note 9); Brüning 2022 (see note 7), p. 35.

The reception of American art in Europe took place primarily via MoMA, which had its own pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia in 1948, and became an important cooperative partner for various departments of the US government. Starting in 1952, an international touring exhibition program was set up at MoMA under the direction of Porter A. McCray, consisting of the museum’s contemporary art collection. This made the institution one of the foremost exhibition organizers in Europe in the following years.[i] After MoMA’s first touring exhibition, Twelve Contemporary American Painters and Sculptors, was shown in Paris, Zurich, Düsseldorf, Stockholm, Helsinki, and Oslo, from April 1953, it still took almost five years for American art to become one of the biggest influences on the development of the German art market. The Documenta exhibition of contemporary art, which took place for the first time in Kassel in 1955, made an important contribution to this. At Documenta 2 in 1956, an entire room was dedicated to Jackson Pollock, who had recently died.[ii]

From 1953 to 1957, the Düsseldorf ZERO artists experimented with various styles and created works that certainly exhibited Expressionist tendencies. However, like the Minimalists in America, they turned their backs on this style. The means that they used to expand their art included novel materials such as silver foil, spotlights, plexiglass, and aluminum; plus, with their Demonstrations, their art entered the experiential realm.[iii] A similar phenomenon could be observed in New York at around the same time, as Allan Kaprow (1927–2006) noted:

[i] See Brüning 2022 (see note 6), pp. 38–42; Kellein 1993 (see note 2), pp. 211ff; Werner Abelshauser, Deutsche Wirtschaftsgeschichte seit 1945 (Munich, 2004), p. 114. In the nineteen-fifties, exhibitions put on by the American Federation of Artsand the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service sought to bring American art to a wider audience at home and abroad. However, as no contemporary American art was included, the focus was not on publicizing current trends.

[ii] See Brüning 2022 (see note 6), pp. 38–42; Kellein 1993 (see note 2), pp. 211ff; Abelshauser 2004 (see note 13), p. 114.

[iii] See Holaday 2018 (see note 8), p. 13; Valerie Hillings, Experimental Artists’ Groups in Europe, 1951–1968: Abstraction, Interaction, and Internationalism, Ph.D. diss. (New York University, 2002), p. 124.

The ZERO artists did use similar techniques and forms as the New York Minimalists, but their works often had a transcendental meaning.

The ZERO artists Uecker, Piene, and Mack, as well as others belonging to this circle, had already been in contact individually with several institutions in America, some years before the big ZERO show took place. Robert Pincus-Witten notes that

That both Mack and Piene were interested in the American way of life is evidenced by an invitation from Louis Garinger to the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies in Austria in 1959.[i] Yves Klein (1928–1962), meanwhile, traveled to New York in 1961 for a two-month stay and to visit his first solo exhibition at the Castelli Gallery, which opened its doors on April 11, 1961. (Castelli had already presented Klein’s work in a 1959 exhibition, Works in Three Dimensions, along with works by John Chamberlain, Marisol, and Robert Rauschenberg.) At that time, it took approximately eight days to cross the Atlantic aboard a liner. In general, traveling was much more complicated, expensive and, above all, time-consuming than it is today.[ii]

[i] Louis Garinger to Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, Salzburg, December 22, 1959, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Heinz Mack, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.1.I.1335; estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.I.506.

[ii] Leo Castelli had had a gallery in Manhattan since 1957, where he at first showed European and French art. However, he was quick to include American Abstract Expressionism in his program.

The exhibition received a rather negative response from the New York audience, with reviews being critical. Only three sponge sculptures were sold, and not a single monochrome. Additionally, the exhibition attracted far fewer visitors than in Europe. According to the critics, “Klein was still far from being recognized as the most influential artist to have emerged in postwar France.”[i]

In May 1961, the Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles presented the works of “Yves le Monochrome.” At the time, Klein was thinking about creating a giant Méta-matic/Anthropometry machine in collaboration with Jean Tinguely. His idea of dipping hired models in blue paint and having them leave their traces on a large white canvas was never realized.[ii]

During his first visit to the USA, Pontus Hultén, then director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, met the engineer Billy Klüver, and together they set the course for Jean Tinguely. Tinguely achieved fame in the USA with his Homage to New York of 1960. The idea for his self-destructing machine is said to have come to him in January 1960, when he was in New York for his first solo show, at the Staempfli Gallery. His Méta-maticdrawing machines were his entrée to the young New York art scene and caught the attention of Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns (b. 1930), Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), and others. Rauschenberg contributed his first kinetic object to the Homage, titled Money Thrower for Tinguely’s H.T.N.Y.—a toaster that released silver dollars, spewing them into the audience.[iii]

Alongside Tinguely, his close friend Daniel Spoerri (b. 1930) was also represented in the 1961 exhibition The Art of Assemblage at MoMA, the museum purchasing his work Kichkas Frühstück (Kichka’s Breakfast), in 1960.

[i] Klein-Moquay and Pincus-Witten 2009 (see note 17), p. 35.

[ii] See Klein-Moquay and Pincus-Witten 2009 (see note 17), pp. 44ff.

[iii] See “Autodestruktive Aktionen,” in Jean Tinguely: Super Meta Maxi, exh. cat. Museum Kunstpalast and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (Düsseldorf and Cologne, 2016), pp. 70ff; Roland Wetzel, preface and introduction to Robert Rauschenberg—Jean Tinguely: Collaborations, exh. cat. Museum Tinguely (Basel, 2009), p. 7; Kellein 1993 (see note 2), p. 217.

Hans Haacke (b. 1936) was one of the first in the ZERO circle to live in America for a longer period of time—from 1961 to 1963. He moved to the USA in 1961 on a Fulbright scholarship and enrolled as a scholarship holder at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia, in 1962. On September 8, 1962, he wrote to Otto Piene from Philadelphia, informing him that he would be going to New York the following week. He then enrolled at the Pratt Graphic Art Center, where he remained until 1963. Despite taking a dim view of America as a consumer society—where “everything is offered for sale and consumed: goods, opinions, mass manipulation, religion, racial hatred, everything”—and predicting the arrival of the “American way of life” in Germany, he nevertheless appreciated his stay,[i] and, in a letter of March 21, 1963, he even considered extending his stay in New York for another year, describing it as an “outrageously fascinating city.”[ii]

Although Haacke rejected the GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel), founded in Paris in 1960 to focus on perceptual phenomena in art, he acknowledged that “their exhibition in NY was good,”[iii] since Pop Art was otherwise predominant in every gallery.[iv] Thus Haacke missed the challenge of colleagues who worked in the same manner as ZERO. In view of the fact that Pop Art, with its bright colors and large dimensions, clearly set itself apart from ZERO’s art, Haacke’s temporary embrace of GRAV seems only logical. On September 1, 1963, he decided to return to Germany.[v] However, he did not stay in Cologne very long, and returned to the United States permanently in 1965.

[i] Hans Haacke to Otto Piene, New York, March 21, 1963, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.I.1345.

[ii] Hans Haacke to Otto Piene, Philadelphia, September 8, 1962, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.I.1344.

[iii] Hans Haacke to Otto Piene, Philadelphia, September 8, 1962, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.I.1344.

[iv] The nineteen-sixties is considered the decade in which Pop Art established itself in the art market and institutions, and spread throughout Europe. Pop Art, which predominantly focused on consumption, was advantaged by John F. Kennedy’s economic policy, which was based on the idea that the stability of the economy could be maintained by stimulating each and every individual to engage in consumption. See Brüning 2022 (see note 6), pp. 163–64; Willi Paul Adams, Die USA im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2008), pp. 83–84.

[v] See Hans Haacke to Otto Piene, Hempstead, New York, July 18, 1963, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.I.1869.

Günther Uecker, Otto Piene, and Heinz Mack were also represented in US exhibitions before 1964. In fact, Hermann Warner Williams, the director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, had already contacted Otto Piene as early as February 1962, as he had been commissioned to select artworks for the International Exhibition of Modern Art, supported by the Federal Republic of Germany.[i]

[i] See Hermann Warner Williams to Otto Piene, Washington, DC, February 27, 1962, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.I.695.

This exhibition, titled Sixteen German Artists (announced as Fifteen German Artists by Warner Williams), was displayed at several US institutions from 1962 to 1963.[i] Piene was represented with five artworks: Smoke Painting, Red (1961); Wave of Darkness (1961); Smoke Painting #1 (1962); Smoke Painting #2 (1962); and Light Ballet (1962).[ii] In the exhibition catalog the Smoke Paintings were titled Pulse, Pulse, Impulse (1961); Fire Flower (1962); and Sun Result (1962). Piene’s Light Ballet suffered damage on more than one occasion, first in the Corcoran Gallery and later in the Addison Gallery of American Art at the Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts.[iii]

[i] See exh. cat. Sixteen German Artists, 1962, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Heinz Mack, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.1.VII.254.

[ii] See Hermann Warner Williams to Otto Piene, Washington, DC, July 20, 1962, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.I.697.

[iii] “The Exhibition is presently at Andover, and I would be grateful if you could send replacements for the two parts AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.” Donelson F. Hoopes to Otto Piene, Washington, DC, March 7, 1963, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.I.1352.

Heinz Mack was also involved in this exhibition, as evidenced by a letter from the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Washington, DC, in December 1962, thanking him for participating. The exhibition catalog lists five of his works, all of which were lent by Galerie Schmela: Dynamic Structure in White (1960); White Oval (1960); Dynamic Structure in White on Black (1961); Light Relief (1961–62); and Dynamic Structure in Black (1962).[i]

Both Mack and Piene were awarded prizes at the fourth Guggenheim International Award Exhibition in 1964, which was funded by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The traveling exhibition showcased the work of artists from all over the world; however, the number of artists from each country was restricted to five.[ii]

[i] See Dr. Hanns-Erich Haack to Heinz Mack, Washington, D.C., December 6, 1962, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Heinz Mack, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.1.94.

[ii] The Guggenheim International Award (GIA) was established in 1956 and held every two years, with the exhibition traveling to two further American cities.

The museum’s curator, Lawrence Alloway, was a close observer of the European art scene. For the exhibition, he chose Piene’s Pink Fire Flower (1963),[i] and Heinz Mack’s, Cardiogram of the Cyclops (1961–62) after visiting Düsseldorf in August 1963 for the examination of Piene’s work.[ii] In addition, in late 1963 the Dalzell Hatfield Gallery expressed interest in Heinz Mack’s sculpture Teller-Object (Plate Object), and offered him an exhibition platform, while Piene was selected by Alloway for a second exhibition at the Guggenheim in the same year.[iii]

A work by Uecker in the collection of the American artist George Rickey was shown in the group exhibition On the Move: Kinetic Sculptures (1964) at the Howard Wise Gallery. In the following year, Uecker was represented in eight group exhibitions in America. Among other presentations, his works were featured as part of the Rickey Collection at the Albany Institute of History and Art, New York, at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin—which presented An Exhibition of Retinal and Perceptual Art—and in the exhibition Quantum 1 at the Sachs Galleries, New York.[iv]

Piero Dorazio (1927–2005), who belonged to the extended ZERO circle, was at that time teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. He had already spent a year in America in 1953, and took up a teaching position at Penn in 1959. On an undated postcard, he informed Piene that he had suggested him for a semester’s stay at the university.

[i] See Hillings 2002 (see note 15), p. 220; Lawrence Alloway to Otto Piene, New York, August 8, 1963, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.I.1949_2.

[ii] See Lawrence Alloway to Otto Piene, New York, August 21, 1963, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.I.1950_2.

[iii] See D. Hatfield to Heinz Mack, Los Angeles, November 20, 1963, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Heinz Mack, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.1.157. In the event, the exhibition at the Guggenheim was postponed, or rather split into two parts: a show of American graphic art followed by a show of works by European artists. See Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum to Otto Piene, New York, April 9, 1964, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.I.1954.

[iv] See Hillings 2002 (see note 15), p. 220.

A letter from the university dated March 5, 1964, indicates that the institution had already tried to engage Piene as a guest lecturer for the 1963 fall/winter semester.[i] Unfortunately, he had had to decline due to lack of time:

[i] See Piero Dorazio to Otto Piene, Philadelphia, undated, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.I.1471; Thomas B. A. Godfrey, Philadelphia, June 20, 1963, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.I.1977_2.

During Piene’s time in Philadelphia, Mack was invited to the university for a day to present his Sahara Project: “I understand from Otto that you will be in this country during the month of November and if you are in New York and can visit us at the School for a day, we should be happy.”[i]

[i] Thomas B. A. Godfrey to Heinz Mack, Philadelphia, October 1, 1964, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Heinz Mack, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.1.I.965; Heinz Mack to Thomas B. A. Godfrey, October 17, 1964, estate of Heinz Mack, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.1.I.966.

By this point in time, ZERO had arrived in America. Almost at the same time as the exhibition in Pennsylvania, gallery owner Howard Wise presented the first exhibition of the triumvirate Mack, Piene, and Uecker in his New York space.[i] Heinz Mack’s pronouncement, “New York now or never!,”[ii] proved to be true. Philadelphia was followed by a new phase for some of the artists, in which they enjoyed far greater participation in exhibitions in the USA. Up to this point, German postwar art had gone relatively unnoticed in America. In Valerie Hillings’s opinion, “the interest in the show by the press marked a shift in American attitudes towards German art.”[iii]

[i] See Thekla Zell, “The ZERO Traveling Circus: Documentation of Exhibitions, Actions, Publications 1958–1966,” in Dirk Pörschmann and Margriet Schavemaker, eds., ZERO: Die internationale Kunstbewegung der 50er und 60er Jahre (ZERO: The International Art Movement of the 1950s and 1960s), exh. cat. Martin-Gropius-Bau and Stedelijk Museum (Berlin, Amsterdam, and Cologne, 2015), p. 132.

[ii] See Stachelhaus 1993 (as in note 1) p. 160.

[iii] For further information about ZERO and the USA, see Rivers Ryan 2015 (see note 1); Kuhn 1991 (see note 1), pp. 51–52; Hillings 2002 (see note 15), p. 223.

This text has been translated from German into English by Gloria Custance.

In March 1958, Heinz Mack (b. 1931) and Otto Piene (1928–2014) sent thirty-one letters to people from various walks of life, asking them to respond to the question “Does contemporary painting conspicuously shape the world?”[i] This action can be seen as a prelude to the journalistic activities of Mack and Piene, who were in the process of developing the concept for the magazine ZERO 1, and wished to use people’s answers to the question in place of a foreword. The two young artists were not afraid of big names and so, for example, they contacted the physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) and the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969). Heisenberg let it be known via his office that he was traveling and didn’t have time to answer the question, but Adorno replied with a long letter, although he didn’t want to be part of the project. He also requested that “this letter not be published in any shape or form or used publicly.”[ii]

[i] Dirk Pörschmann, “ZERO bis unendlich: Genese und Geschichte einer Künstlerzeitschrift,” in Dirk Pörschmann and Mattijs Visser, eds., ZERO 4321 (Düsseldorf, 2012), pp. 424–42, 427.

[ii] Theodor W. Adorno to Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, March 18, 1958, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.I.1162; Werner Heisenberg to Otto Piene, March 20, 1958, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.I.969.

Although very few of those contacted took part in the project—in the end the texts of only six people were published—Mack and Piene’s project, especially for the ZERO period, can be seen as the start of a constantly growing network, which is accessed primarily via a sizable body of correspondence. Well over 6,000 letters are held in the ZERO foundation archive today, which testify to the lively communication among the ZERO artists, and those who were to become ZERO artists. The correspondence paints an animated and above all international picture of the ZERO network. This is also clear from the languages in which the letters are written; there are many in German and English, but also letters in Croatian, Spanish, French, and Italian, to only name a few.

Today, many of the letters would probably be classed as business correspondence, as their contents are mainly concerned with joint exhibitions or the sale of artworks. However, on taking a closer look at the letters, it becomes clear that the dividing line between private and professional is not as clear-cut as one might initially assume. In many letters, telegrams, and postcards, personal matters are discussed alongside professional affairs, congratulations are conveyed, and best wishes for a happy vacation are sent, all of which bear witness to the close friendships that existed between individual protagonists. Testament to this is the large number of postcards in the archive. Günther Uecker (b. 1930), for example, sends Heinz Mack “best wishes” from France and says he has been fishing with Yves Klein (1928–1962).[i] Or the postcard from Heinz Mack, Walter Leblanc (1932–1986), Getulio Alviani (1939–2018), and Nanda Vigo (1936–2020), sent from Milan with best regards to Otto Piene in Düsseldorf, who was probably unable to attend the meeting in Italy.[ii]

[i] Günther Uecker to Heinz Mack, n.d., archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Heinz Mack, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.1.I.873.

[ii] Walter Leblanc, Heinz Mack, Nanda Vigo, and Getulio Alviani to Otto Piene, n.d., archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.I.1914.

However, it is not only the acquaintances and friendships that existed which can be traced through the correspondence. The letters also bear witness to the first contacts between artists—for example, one of Heinz Mack’s first letters to Lucio Fontana (1899–1968), dated July 1960, requests him to write an article for theZERO 3 magazine.[i] Newly established contacts were also strengthened through written exchanges, as can be seen from a letter by Hans Haacke (b. 1936) to Otto Piene in November 1960. Haacke writes that he has pleasant memories of his visit to Düsseldorf, and tells Piene about his new acquaintances in Paris, Bernard Aubertin (1934–2015) and Yves Klein. But that’s not all—Haacke also tells us that “the ‘Mack et Piene’ firm … is known here as an operation where new things are tried out in which one should perhaps take an interest,” thus painting a vivid picture of the far reach of ZERO’s influence in France.[ii] In addition to first contacts and the expansion of the circle of acquaintances, the correspondence also provides information about when relationships and collaborations came to an end. For example, in April 1963, Almir Mavignier (1925–2018) wrote that he wanted no more contact with ZERO for the time being, and did not wish to participate in any more events of the ZERO circle.[iii]

[i] Heinz Mack to Lucio Fontana (draft), July 2, 1960, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Heinz Mack, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.1.I.316.

[ii] Hans Haacke to Otto Piene, November 1, 1960, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.I.847.

[iii] Almir Mavignier to Heinz Mack, April 28, 1963, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Heinz Mack, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.1.I.809.

A

Abe, Nobuya

Ackermann, Oscar

Adorno, Theodor

Adrian, Marc

Aengevelt, Leo

Albers, Josef

Alberts, Eduard

Alfieri, Bruno

Alloway, Lawrence

Altenstadt, Ulrich S. von

Alviani, Getulio

Apollonio, Umbro

Argan, Carlo Giulio

Arman

Aubertin, Bernard

Aue, Marianne

Aue, Walter

Aust, Günter

B

Baerwind, Rudi

Baier, Hans Alexander

Bänfer, Carl

Barlen, Dieter

Barras, Henri

Bartels, Hermann

Battisti, Eugenio

Baukloh, Friedhelm

Baum, Gustav Adolf

Baum, Stella

Baumgärtel, Gerhard

Beck, Heinz

Becker, Andreas

Bek, Bozo

Belloli, Carlo

Bendixen, Klaus

Berndt, Jürgen

Bethsold, Werner

Bette, J. Michael

Beuys, Eva

Bhavsar, Natvar

Blicke, Maurits

Bill, Max

Blomenroehr, Bernd D.

Böcker, Christa

Boom, Raoul van den

Börner, Klaus

Boukes, Renate

Boveri, Margret A.

Bowen, Denis

Bowness, Alan

Breier, Kilian

Brüning, Peter

Brusberg, Dieter

Buchholz, Erich

Burchartz, Max

Burgauer, Curt

Burnham, Jack

Bury, Pol

Busse, Hal

C

Calderara, Antonio

Castellani, Enrico

Cauduro, Ed

Chatterji, Nimai

Christen, Andreas

Chruxin, Christian

Cladders, Johannes

Clert, Iris

Clüsserath, August

Copier, Dirk

D

Dadamaino

Dahmen, Ursula

Damiano, Charles

Dasi, Gerardo Filberto

Daume, Willi

Dauphin, Gerald

Deilmann, Harald

Dietrich, Hansjoachim

Doldinger, Klaus

Domnick, Greta

Dorazio, Piero

Dorfles, Gillo

Dotremont, Philippe

Drescher, Renate

Dreste, Hans

E

Eckert, Engelbert

Eichler, Hans

Engel, Otmar

Engelskirchen, Hein

Engert, Bernhard

Epple, Waldemar

Epple, Waldemar

Erb, Leo

Ertel, Kurt Friedrich

Estenfelder, Cam

Etecheverry, Diégo

Evans, David

F

Fackler, Helmut

Faigle, Walter

Fassbender, Franz

Fata, Ferruccio

Faulhaber, Ulrich

Fedeck, Walter

Feigel, Marie-Suzanne

Fischer, Ernst

Fischer, Klaus Jürgen

Fitzsimmons, James

Fleischmann-Roepcke, Anna

Fontana, Lucio

Franken, Heinrich

Freese, Jan

Fried, Kurt

Friedman, Martin

Friedrich, Gerhardpaul

Fuchs, Günther

Fuegen, Willy

Funcke, Brigitte

Fyvel, Tosco R.

G

Gardiner, Margaret

Gebhard, Klaus

Geccelli, Johannes

Geelhoed, Lex

Gehlen, Arnold

Geiger, Rupprecht

Gekeler, Hans

Gerber, Helmut

Gerhardt, Renate

Gerlach, Rose D.

Gerstendörfer, J. J.

Gerstner, Karl

Gielow, Wolfgang

Gloudemans, Jan

Godfrey, Thomas B. A.

Goepfert, Hermann

Goeritz, Mathias

Gorges, Claus

Gorzolka, Otto

Gossel, Christa

Gossel, Hans Bernd

Götz, Karl Otto

Graevenitz, Gerhard von

Greef, Ulrich Volker

Green, Samuel Adams

Gribaudo, Ezio

Grisebach, Hanna

Grobe, Gustav

Grochowiak, Thomas

Grohmann, Will

Groschwitz, Gustave von

Grosse, Helmut

Günther, Volkmar

H

Haacke, Hans

Haas, Helmuth de

Haftmann, Werner

Hajek, Otto-Herbert

Hake, Wolfgang

Hammarberg, Jarl

Hammond, John E.

Harms, Gudrun

Hartmann, Adolf

Hartung, Gerd

Hartung, Karl

Hastings, Margarte

Hausmann, Raoul

Hehns, Dietrich

Heimzely, Marc

Heisenberg, Werner

Helms, Dietrich

Hennig, Emil

Herstand, Arnold

Hewitt, Francis R.

Hildebrand, Heide

Hiltmann, Jochen

Hoehme, Gerhard

Hoeydonck, Paul von

Holtmann, Heinz

Holweck, Oskar

Honisch, Dieter

Horn, Karl

Hulten, Pontus

Hündeberg, Jürgen von

I

Iserloh, Hans

J

Jappe, Georg

Jürgen-Fischer, Klaus

K

Kage, Manfred

Kahmen, Volker

Kalinowski, Horst Egon

Kalish, Ursula

Kandzia, Christian

Kaufmann, Herbert

Kawakita, Michiaki

Keller-Hämmerle, Alfons

Kemp, Willi

Kepes, György

Kirschbaum, Walter

Klapheck, Konrad

Klebus, Herbert

Klein, Yves

Kleint, Boris

Knoche, Werner

Knöll, Niklaus

Knorr, Anneliese

Koestler, Arthur

König, Willi

Korn, Karl

Kowallek, Rochus

Kraayenhof, Hans

Kreiterling, Willi

Kricke, Norbert

Krippendorf, Klaus

Krüger, Gerhard Georg

Kühl, Siegfried

Kultermann, Udo

Kusama, Yayoi

L                

Laszlo, Carl

Latham, John

Laugs, Heinz Werner

Leblanc, Walter

Leering, Jean

Lehmbrock, Josef

LeParc, Julio

Leuze, Ursula

Linfert, Carl

Lipman, Jean

Lippsmeier, Georg

Liverani, Gian Tomaso

Lo Savio, Francesco

Löffelholz, Franz

Lohmeyer, Brigitte

Lorenz, Marianne

Lück, Herbert

Lückeroth, Jupp

Lufft, Peter

Luther, Adolf

M

Mack, Heinz

Mack, Margret

Mack, Ute

Mäckle, Richard

Maglietta, Nina

Mahlow, Dietrich

Manfred, Ernest

Mansch, Joachim

Manzoni Meroni, Valeria

Manzoni, Piero

Marck, Jan van der

Mari, Enzo

Marx, Eberhard

Massironi, Manfredo

Mavignier, Almir

McCray. Porter

Megert, Christian

Meinborn, Els

Meisner, Günter

Melland, David

Menninger, Klaus

Mestrovic, Matko

Meyerholz, Hans

Mikorey, Franz

Moeller, Hans

Moldow, Ira

Moll, Paul

Morschel, Jürgen

Motte, Manfred de la

Muche, Georg

Müllenholz, Leo

Müller, Hans-Jürgen

Müller-Hauck, Janni

Murakami, Moriyuki

N

Naegeli, Eduard

Nebel, Karl

Nebelung, Hella

Neuerburg, Doris

Neufert, Peter

Neumann, Eckhard

Noah, Heinz

Nordland, Gerald

Novarro, Eddy

Novarro, Nana

O

Oehm, Herbert

Oestereich, Jürgen

Oppen, Hans von

Otto, Wolfgang Th.

P

Paik, Nam June

Pée, Herbert

Peeters, Henk

Pellegrini, Aldo

Perkins, G. Holmes

Petersen, Ad

Petersen, Peter Jes

Petitot, Léonce

Pfennig, Reinhard

Piek, Heinz

Piene, Otto

Pietzsch, Eva

Plaoutine, Nicolas

Platschek, Hans

Pohl, Uli

Pomodoro, Arnaldo

Pomodoro, Gio

Popper, Frank

Puvogel, Edgar H.

Q

Quinte, Lothar

R

Radin, Paul

Rahn, Eckart

Rainer, Arnulf

Ramsbott, Wolfgang

Rathke, Wolfgang

Raum, Walter

Reindel, Wolfgang

Rekort, Hartmut

René, Denise

Renger, Konrad

Restany, Pierre

Reydams, Jacqueline

Richter, Hans

Rickey, George

Río, Eustolio del

Rodker, Joan M.

Roeckenschuss, Christian

Roh, Franz

Roh, Juliane

Rose, Barbara

Rosenquist, Jim

Rosenthal, Nan

Rosenthal, Sol Roy

Rot, Diter

Rothe, Wolfgang

Rottloff, Helgard

Rotzler, Willy

Ruhnau, Werner

Ruhrberg, Karl

Rumbler, Helmut

Ruths, Heiner

S

Salentin, Hans

Schiessel, Johanna

Schirmer, Lutz

Schmalenbach, Werner

Schmela, Alfred

Schmela, Monika

Schmidt, Thomas

Schmied, Wieland

Schneider, Aenne

Schneider-Esleben, Paul

Schnitzler, Dieter

Schönenberger, Horst

Schreib, Werner

Schröder, Anneliese

Schroeter, Rolf

Schuldt, Herbert

Schulze-Vellinghausen, Albert

Schumacher, Emil

Schurz, Carl

Schwager, Frithjof

Schwarz, Arturo

Schweicher, Curt

Schweighofer, Fritz

Schwickert, Ludwig

Schwippert, Hans

Sedlmayr, Hans

Seel, Eberhard

Seide, Wilhelm

Seitz, Fritz

Seitz, Wilhelm C.

Seyfried, Ludwig

Shimbun, Yomiuri

Siepmann, Heinrich

Simmat, William E.

Slotnick, Merv

Sloves, Jack

Sonnabend, Michael

Soprano, Edoardo

Soto, Jesús Rafael

Spielberg, Joan

Spielberger, Roman

Spielmann, Heinz

Spindel, Ferdinand

Spoerri, Daniel

Stachelhaus, Heiner

Stahl, Lotte

Stankowski, Anton

Stassig, Franz

Staudt, Klaus

Stempel, Hans

Stiehl, Hans Adolf

Stielow, Reimar

Stolz, Elisabeth

Storck, Gerhard

Sturm, Robert

Szeemann, Harald

T

Thwaites, John Anthony

Tigerman, Stanley

Tilmann, Gustav

Tinguely, Jean

Tischer, Manfred

Trier, Eduard

Trost, Horst E.

Trouillard, John

Tunnard, Peter H.

U

Uecker, Günther

Ungers, Oswald Mathias

V

Vanista, Josip

Verheyen, Jef

Vietta, Egon

Vigo, Nanda

Vircher, Antoinette

Vismara, Zita

Vogel, Albert

Vogel, Hermann

Vollmer, Franziska

Vostell, Wolf

Vree, Paul de

vries, herman de

W

Wacker, Karl-Heinz

Walter, Hans-Albert

Wasmuth, Johannes

Wedewer, Josef

Wedewer, Rolf

Wehling, Oskar

Weidler, Charlotte

Wember, Paul

Westphal, Bernd

Wiegers, Hartmut

Wiehager, Renate

Wilhelm, Jean Pierre

Wilkes, Günter

Williams, Emmett

Williams, Hermann Warner

Willing, Jürgen

Winkler, Gerhard

Wise, Howard

Wolfshohl, Ernst-Otto

Wormland, Theo

Wunderwald, Alfred

Wunderwald, Erika

X

Y

Z

Zander, Josef

Zillmann, Adolf

This text has been translated from German into English by Gloria Custance.

In 1955, Pontus Hultén, along with Victor Vasarely (1906–1997), Roger Bordier (1923–2015), and Robert Breer (1926–2011), organized the group exhibition Le Mouvement at the Galerie Denise René in Paris. This exhibition kicked off the Kinetic Art hype of the nineteen-sixties. It featured works by Yaacov Agam (b. 1928), Pol Bury (1922–2005), Alexander Calder (1898–1976), Marcel Duchamp, Robert Jacobsen (1912–1993), Jesús Rafael Soto (1923–2005), Jean Tinguely (1925–1991), and Victor Vasarely—some of the pioneers and most important representatives of Kinetic Art.

This influential exhibition is widely regarded as the first show of moving art, featuring the entire spectrum of Kinetic Art, of which there are several subcategories,[i] including optically moving works (Op Art), whose effects only unfold through the viewer’s movement. Other objects depend on direct physical interaction with the viewer, who can change them (play objects). Still others move due to the effects of natural forces such as water, gravity, and wind (mobiles, magnets), or else have motors and thus move on their own (machine works).[ii]

[i] For more information about the exhibition Le Mouvement, see Le Mouvement: Vom Kino zur Kinetik, exh. cat. Museum Tinguely (Basel, 2010).

[ii] How many subcategories there are, what may be included in kinetics, and how these different subareas should be designated, remains unspecified. There is no consensus within the research community.

According to Anina Baum, Kinetic Art gained “popular resonance”[i] in the nineteen-sixties, at the moment when, in addition to real movement, real light was increasingly entering the art scene. Light and movement—the two terms are inextricably linked in the art world—and it is therefore not surprising that they appear together in the titles of several exhibitions in the nineteen-sixties. Their connection can be seen concretely in another aspect of Kinetic Art: light kinetics.

Light kinetics derived from three sources: color (light) organs, photography and film, and theatrical projections. The Bauhaus provided further stimuli in the nineteen-twenties with a variety of light actions, but it was László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) who first combined kinetics with light art. His Light Space Modulator of 1930 is one of the most significant works in the field of light kinetics, which only achieved its breakthrough as an independent art form in the nineteen-fifties with Frank Malina’s first Tableaux Lumineux in 1955. This art form, which methodically endeavors to create moving light effects, was the area of Kinetic Art that made the greatest progress in the second half of the nineteen-sixties.[ii]

[i] Baum 2011 (see note 3), p. 96.

[ii] See Frank Popper, “Die Lichtkinetik/Light Kinetics,” in Lichtkunst aus Kunstlicht / Light Art from Artificial Light: Licht als Medium der Kunst im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert / Light as a Medium in 20th and 21st Century Art, exh. cat. ZKM Karlsruhe (Ostfildern, 2006), pp. 424–47.

Exhibitions contributing substantially to this development include: Licht und Bewegung (Light and Movement) at the Kunsthalle Bern, 1965; Lumière Mouvement et Optique, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels,1965; Light and Movement, Modus Möbel GmbH, Berlin, 1965; KunstLichtKunst at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, 1966; Licht und Bewegung, Art Center TVENSTER, Amsterdam, later at Galerie Al-Veka, The Hague, 1966; Lumière et Mouvement at the Musée Municipal d’art Moderne in Paris, 1967; Light/Motion/Space, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1967; Light and Motion, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts, 1967; and others.

Light and Movement—Kinetic Art at the Kunsthalle Bern was one of the largest survey exhibitions on the subject of kinetics. For the first time, an exposition focused on the relationship between real movement and light. The idea for this exhibition goes back to Christian ” (b. 1936), who returned to his hometown of Bern in 1960, after a stay in Paris. He began to organize smaller exhibitions of contemporary art there, as he found the Bernese art scene extremely conservative and wished to work against this.[i]

In an interview in 2019, Megert described how the exhibition Light and Movement came about:

[i] See Stephan Geiger, “ZERO in Bern: A New Hub in the International Network,” in Caianiello and Visser 2015 (see note 17), pp. 237–51; Thekla Zell, “O-Ton,” in ZERO-Heft, no. 11 (2019), pp. 24–31.

Together with Harald Szeemann (1933–2005), then director of the Bern Kunsthalle, whom Megert had known since his school days, he compiled a list of artists for this “ZERO exhibition.” For reasons of space—the Kunsthalle was too small for such a long list of artists—it was divided into Kinetic Art and monochrome art.[i] Whereas Megert emphasized his collaboration with Szeemann on the concept, Szeemann subsequently claimed to have been its sole author.[ii] However, a letter from 1964, which Megert wrote to Hermann Goepfert (1926–1982), proves that he was significantly involved in the realization of the exhibition.[iii]

Oskar Holweck (1924–2007) also received a letter announcing the exhibition, as his reply dated March 29, 1965, shows: “I have also not heard any more about the major Aktuell exhibition at the Bern Kunsthalle from June 5 to September 9, 1965, announced in your letter of 8.XII.64.”[iv]

Holweck is referring to the Galerie Aktuell in Bern, with which Megert had a close relationship. The gallery acted as an intermediary for the Kinetic Art exhibition, making its contacts with contemporary artists available to the museum. At Megert’s suggestion, the Galerie Aktuell had opened as a space for contemporary art in the apartment of Silvia and Kurt Aellen in Kramgasse. Silvia Aellen, the gallery’s director at the time, also worked at the Kunsthalle Bern, and in her dual role she was an important interface between the two institutions.[v] Commenting in 1966, Anastasia Bitzos also remembers how,

[i] See Geiger 2015 (see note 33), p. 251.

[ii] See Harald Szeemann, “Die Berner Kunstszene in den sechziger Jahren,” in Bern 66–1987, exh. cat. Kunsthalle (Bern, 1987), pp. 31–35.

[iii] Christian Megert to Hermann Goepfert, Bern, December 8, 1964, Christian Megert archive, Bern, Box 1964. The letter lists over thirty artists, most of whom are either now associated with ZERO—like Holweck, Luther, and Vigo—or else belonged to Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel, Gruppo N, Gruppo T, Nul, or Equipo 57. Megert also reports on the financing of the exhibition and outlines preliminary ideas for allotting the space.

[iv] Oskar Holweck to Christian Megert, Saarbrücken, March 29, 1965, Christian Megert archive, Bern, Box 1965.

[v] See Silvia Aellen, Kurt Aellen, and Lydia Megert, “Die Galerie Aktuell,” in Bern 66–1987 1987 (see note 36), pp. 22–26.

The Aellens provided the space, Megert supplied the contacts, and his brother, Peter Megert, a graphic designer, was in charge of the posters and invitation cards.[i] Peter Megert (1937–2022) not only designed the gallery’s printed matter, but also the posters for Licht und Bewegung and Weiss auf Weiss at the Kunsthalle Bern, which again underlines the close relationship between these two institutions at the time.

[i] See Aellen, Aellen, and Megert 1987 (see note 39), p. 23.

The poster for Light and Movement clearly announces the exhibition’s theme. The title, in German, French, Italian, and English, is set in white on a black background. Through superimposition, displacement, and transparency, the lettering blurs before the eyes. At the same time, the words seem to glow from inside the poster. The impression is that of a neon sign seen when moving past it quickly.

No correspondence between Christian Megert and Harald Szeemann exists regarding the elaboration of the Light and Movement exhibition. According to Megert, their exchanges on the project only took place in personal conversations;[i] thus it is not possible to reconstruct what happened in the period from December to April. Differences of opinion between the two parties finally led to Christian Megert’s withdrawal from the organization of the exhibition in April 1965, which he mentions in his reply to Oskar Holweck:

[i] Telephone conversation between Christian Megert and the author, June 14, 2023.

Harald Szeemann was very interested in Kinetic Art, as can be seen from the drafts for the exhibition catalog.[i] For him, Duchamp, Malevich, Gabo, El Lissitzky, Ray, Tatlin, Vantongerloo, and Moholy-Nagy represented the fundamental positions of Kinetic Art.[ii]

In the end, over sixty artists participated in Light and Movement—Kinetic Art, with more than 150 works. Shown in Bern from July 3 to September 5, 1965, it traveled in the same year to the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (October 14 to November 14), and to the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (December 3 to January 9, 1966), and in the following year to the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in the Kunsthalle am Grabbeplatz, Düsseldorf (February 2 to March 13, 1966). Alongside pioneers of Kinetic Art such as Agam, Calder, and Duchamp, a number of artists were represented who are now considered part of the ZERO circle, such as Pol Bury, Hermann Goepfert, Gerhard von Graevenitz, Hans Haacke, Walter Leblanc, Jesús Rafael Soto, Paul Talman, and Jean Tinguely.

[i] Harald Szeemann papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California, Box 282, Folder 15.

[ii] Harald Szeemann, Kinetische Kunst, draft design of the catalog, Harald Szeemann papers, Getty Research Institute, Box 282, Folder 15, pp. 2–3.

Jesús Rafael Soto was the most strongly represented artist in the exhibition, with twenty-four works. The oscillation generated in his artworks is intensified by the movement of the viewer. His aim was to achieve pure vibration, behind which the actual work should recede.[i] Pol Bury, who was represented with eleven works, used the protruding elements of his motorized reliefs—metal rods, nails, piano strings, nylon thread—to create organic worlds, as they move slowly, at times almost imperceptibly, toward a monochrome background. Alongside Tinguely, he emerged as an important innovator in the field of machine aesthetics, though the motors driving his works remained concealed behind the objects.[ii]

Tinguely, who succeeded in continually improving his works’ mechanization, and thus made significant progress in producing changeable objects, was represented by eight machine works. Even before you see one of his objects, you can usually hear it—it squeaks, creaks, rattles, and rumbles. Circles and rods seem to move effortlessly against and on top of one another, endlessly building new shapes. The artist creates real movement in which the individual elements are in a constant state of metamorphosis.[iii]

Hans Haacke and the initiator of the exhibition, Christian Megert, were represented with four works each. Haacke’s objects were designed to present “the perceptual edge from actual and virtual movement in real time as an accumulation and release of intensity.”[iv] One of Haacke’s focuses has been the unstable nature of the material in permanent kinetic installations. Ecological and biological processes of movement are shown in natural processes, such as condensation, precipitation, and evaporation, as well as expansion and contraction due to temperature changes.

[i] Soto used the moiré effect, in which a periodic grid is created by superimposing regular grids.

[ii] See Gilles Marquenie, “Time in Motion,” in Pol Bury: Time in Motion, exh. cat. Bozar, Centre for Fine Arts (Brussels, 2017), pp. 13–31.

[iii] See Jean Tinguely: Super Meta Maxi, exh. cat. Museum Kunstpalast and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (Düsseldorf and Cologne, 2016).

[iv] Chau 2014 (see note 3), p. 64.

The three ZERO artists from Düsseldorf also received invitations. On February 24 and 25, 1965, Harald Szeemann wrote to Otto Piene and Heinz Mack in his capacity as director of the Kunsthalle Bern.[i] However, no meeting between them appears to have taken place, because on March 23, 1965, Szeemann sent another letter to Mack: “I was in Düsseldorf on the 9th of this month and arranged with Uecker that you, Uecker, and Piene, and perhaps Megert, would design a room with objects together.”[ii]

[i] “This summer, the Kunsthalle Bern is showing an overview of the subject of light and movement. I would like to show some of your works in this exhibition. I shall be in Düsseldorf on March 8 and 9 and should like to pay you a visit after having made an appointment by telephone.” Harald Szeemann to Heinz Mack, Bern, February 25, 1965, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Heinz Mack, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.1.I.987; Otto Piene, Bern, February 24, 1965, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.I.2402.

[ii] Harald Szeemann to Heinz Mack, Bern, March 23, 1965, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Heinz Mack, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.1.I.988.

Mack replied to him from New York at Easter, 1965:

“At the invitation of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, which has generously supported me, I have made a Light Carousel for the Nul exhibition (15.4.–7.6.); it is made of aluminum, rotates, and is illuminated with five spotlights. As I personally find the work very beautiful, I would like to see it exhibited in Bern.”[i]

[i] Heinz Mack to Harald Szeemann, New York, Easter 1965, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Heinz Mack, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.1.I.989.

Szeemann agreed to Mack’s suggestion and contacted the Stedelijk Museum to have the Light Carousel (now destroyed) sent to Bern, following the Amsterdam exhibition. In the end, though, Mack was not represented with this work in the Bern exhibition, and his Light Carousel was first displayed in Brussels.[i]

The Bern exhibition catalog mentions only one work per Düsseldorf ZERO artist. Piene showed a Lichtmaschine (Light Machine), of 1965, Uecker a Lichttrommel (Light Drum), of 1960, and Mack was represented with a Silberrotor (Silver Rotor), of 1965.

[i] See Harald Szeemann to Heinz Mack, Bern, May 7, 1965, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Heinz Mack, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.1.I.990.

Mack began incorporating motors into his works as early as 1959. His group of Rotors are among the first motor-driven constructions he created. These works are boxes with corrugated, transparent front panels, and, inside, a second glass or aluminum disk with a relief-like surface structure that rotates. The artist also referred to these works as “Light Engines,” “Light Dynamos,” and “Rotor Reliefs.”[i] “Behind textured glass, which distorts and blurs the objects, disks with bumps and indentations rotate, presenting a cycle of moving light to the viewer’s eye.”[ii] The slow rotation of the textured disk inside creates a constantly changing, flowing image on the top glass plate. Movement enters into a symbiosis with light and is experienced as moving energy.

Uecker’s Light Drum consists of a disk rotating horizontally around a fixed central axis, driven by an electric motor. Artificial light illuminates the panel from two sides, and “the round nail head” creates an “ideal reference to the disk shape of the field of light.”[iii] Some of the nails are illuminated by rays of light, while others are not illuminated at all. Areas of light and shadow alternate, while the slow rotation shows the vibrations via the structure of the nails.

[i] See Baum 2011 (see note 3), p. 97.

[ii] “Hinter Reliefglas, das die Objekte verzerrt und verschwimmen lässt, drehen sich Scheiben mit Buckeln und Vertiefungen, dem Auge des Betrachters einen Kreislauf bewegten Lichtes darbietend.” Minou, “Spiel mit Glas und Licht,” newspaper clipping from the Neue Ruhr Zeitung, Friday, November 29, 1963, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Heinz Mack, inv no. mkp.ZERO.1.II.196.

[iii] Dieter Honisch, Uecker (Stuttgart, 1983), p. 62.

Tinguely, Mack, Soto, Bury, Piene, and Uecker were the artists who participated most frequently in the more than thirty exhibitions on kinetics that were mounted in the nineteen-sixties. The ZERO artists began seeking movement, vibration, and dynamics outside the canvas as early as the late nineteen-fifties. These were not understood as inherently pictorial phenomena. The artists increasingly created works that moved within themselves, were motorized, or set in motion by the viewer. The mobile works did not just suggest variability; they actually created an infinite number of realizations.

The artists all pursued the theme of representation of movement in very different ways, and demonstrated the entire spectrum of kinetics within artistic practice: optical movement; objects that rely on direct physical interaction with, and manipulation by, the viewer (play objects); works that move due to natural forces such as water, gravity, and wind (mobiles, magnets); and art objects with their own motorization (machine works).

Undoubtedly, one of the most important exhibitions on kinetics and art was Light and Movement at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1965, initiated by Christian Megert and given its final form by Harald Szeemann. The title of the exhibition also references another area of Kinetic Art: light kinetics. The three Düsseldorf ZERO artists, Mack, Piene, and Uecker, devoted themselves increasingly to this area of Kinetic Art in the mid-nineteen-sixties. Their works differed significantly from Tinguely’s machines, with their ironic undertones and rotation in all directions; from Pol Bury’s Surrealist-inspired world of moving reliefs; and from the playful lightness which Soto achieved in his works, using the moiré effect. While Mack, Piene, and Uecker initially focused on optical movement, as vibration within an image, motorization opened up the possibility of depicting this as a dynamic event, beyond the two-dimensional.

This text has been translated from German into English by Gloria Custance.

In political and cultural discussions, the phrase “turning point in history” is often used in connection with zero situations: above all in the general political context, under the keyword “zero hour”; and during World War I, for example in Russia, and after World War II in Western countries, first and foremost in Germany, under the keyword “zero.”

In both cases (zero hour, zero), these are terms that are used more frequently in contexts of contemporary political history and the development of the visual arts than in the context of music. However, there are many indications that the time has come to change this situation, and to use the keyword “zero” in the context of music and other fields more than has hitherto been the case in music-related and overarching music contexts.

There is an audio piece that introduces these contexts in its very first seconds with the loudly spoken keyword “Die Mauer” (The Wall). The radio play My 1989, by Georg Katzer (1935–2019), which was written in 1990 and premiered the same year, begins with this keyword. At the time the work was written, very many listeners would have recognized the voice of the man who was speaking: it was Erich Honecker (1912–1994), the longtime (and, on October 18, 1989, deposed) leader of East Germany, which was on the verge of collapse after the Berlin Wall was opened on November 9, 1989.

Both the East German president (as defender of the Berlin Wall, built under his supervision in 1961), and later also the head of security, Erich Mielke (1907–2000)—who in the further course of the play, in front of the East German parliament, praises his “loving” surveillance of the people in his country—have their say in this radio play: as exponents of a system of rule that allows individual persons, privileged by a dictatorship, to rule over many subjects.

The search for a zero point and for new developments that start from this zero point has played an important role in many areas of historical development in the twentieth century, including in the fields of literature, the arts, and especially music. This was particularly important in the middle of the last century, at the turning point after the end of the Second World War. 1945, the year the war ended, not only marked a turning point in the field of politics, but also in the field of music and the other arts. At the time, it appeared clear what had irrevocably come to an end in various areas. What was less clear at first was how things could continue, and what new approaches would be possible.

In Germany, after its unconditional surrender in 1945, new developments began under the control of the four occupying powers. The division of Germany into three Western zones (British, French, and American) and one Eastern (Soviet) zone, which subsequently led to the division of Germany into a West German and an East German state, and the different political power relations in East and West (which were then to change fundamentally only decades later in the turning year of 1989), meant that innovative artistic tendencies were initially developed primarily in the West, and in contact with neighboring Western countries.

In the first postwar years, the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music developed into an important forum for the field of new music, where important French pioneers of the avant-garde music would make appearances beginning in 1947. The first, in that year, was René Leibowitz (1913–1972), then the leading expert on Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music (Schoenberg had been driven into exile by the Nazis; Leibowitz had survived in hiding). Next, in 1949, came Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992), who had begun a renewal of French music independently of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music, and whose idiosyncratic student Pierre Boulez (1925–2016) would also later play an important role in Darmstadt.

At the Darmstadt Summer Courses in 1951, Olivier Messiaen aroused the interest of a young German composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen. In Darmstadt, Stockhausen had heard a recording of a radically new piano piece by Olivier Messiaen, which the latter had composed two years earlier during his stay in Darmstadt: Mode de valeurs et d’intensités. In this piece, all the conventions of previous music are radically questioned and abandoned: traditional rhythms, motifs, and chords no longer exist. Each tone stands only for itself with its own characteristics (pitch, volume, duration). As a zero point, as a starting point, and as a starting point for something new, the individual tone presents itself here with its basic properties of pitch, volume, and duration.

This composition is the key work with which Messiaen made a lasting impression on many of his current and later students, including the Frenchman Pierre Boulez, the Belgian Karel Goeyvaerts (1923–1993), the Greek Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001), and the German Karlheinz Stockhausen. Messiaen encouraged these and other composers to seek and find their own positions starting from point zero. None of his later famous students ever copied Messiaen’s radical Piano étude or any of his other music. Rather, each studied and processed it in their own way:

– Boulez was inspired to compose a piano duet that was structurally even more rigorous and radical, with precisely serially preplanned tone points (Structures, Book I, especially the first piece, written in 1951: Structures Ia);

– Stockhausen, inspired by Messiaen’s étude, composed the ensemble piece Kreuzspiel (Crossplay) in 1951, as “punctual music” with constantly changing pitches, volumes, rhythms, timbres, and wide-ranging movements in tonal space;

– and Xenakis, encouraged by Messiaen, developed formalized music based on ancient Greek music theory and modern mathematics (also in connection with architectural projects, which he realized first as a collaborator of Le Corbusier and later on his own).

The first work with which Xenakis’s new musical design ideas became internationally known was the orchestral piece Metastaseis, premiered at the Donaueschingen Music Festival in 1955. In this composition, Xenakis defines the zero point of musical construction differently than Boulez and Stockhausen had done before him: all the stringed instruments start on the same note, and then extended glissandi begin, in which each individual string player finds their own path of ascent or descent in tonal space according to strict specifications that the composer has put down on graph paper (like an architect), and which he later rewrote as a score in traditional notation, for practical reasons of performance.

In Structures Ia and Kreuzspiel, the punctual music of Boulez and Stockhausen starts from individual tone points (and in Stockhausen’s case also noise points), the basic provisions of which are predetermined according to strict construction schemes—according to rules that in many details are easier to read in the score than to hear directly. In Xenakis’s orchestral piece, however, the diverging glissandi sounds of the string instruments are clearly identifiable from the outset as a directed process. This is also apparent in the composer’s sketch, but not in the orchestral score prepared by Xenakis based on the information contained in the graphic: this is written in traditional notation and contains precise instructions for all players, and is therefore more difficult to read. In a concert introduction to his piece, Xenakis provided a neat explanation of the difference between the two scores: the graphic notation is easy to read, but not easy to play; the traditional notation is easy to play, but not easy to read.

In this orchestral piece, Xenakis clearly demonstrated that even music for traditional orchestral instruments that starts from one note (the lowest note of the violins) can be meaningful and novel.

At the time when he composed the orchestral piece Metastaseis, Xenakis did not have access to a studio with equipment that would have enabled him to realize and compose technically produced sounds. This only became possible for him in the years that followed: he composed a music tape with metamorphosed sounds of an earthquake (Diamorphoses, 1957), and he made concrete entrance music for the Philips Pavilion (designed by Xenakis) at Expo 58, the World’s Fair in Brussels (Concret PH, 1958).

It is characteristic of the music and musical thinking of Iannis Xenakis that in various pieces composed since the nineteen-fifties, the zero or starting points of the musical construction are set quite differently, yet each approach is plausibly continued in its own way. In this context, the focus on the opening note as the initial stage can go so far as to repeat that note throughout the piece, as Xenakis did in a composition for boys’ choir and orchestra in which the singers recite the entire text on one note (Polla ta dina, 1958).

Another example: after the turning point of 1968, Xenakis wrote popular percussion music whose progressions are easily comprehended by the listener, and oscillate in ever-changing patterns between periodicity and aperiodicity—for example, in Persephassa (1969), for six percussionists, or in the solo piece Psappha, of 1975.

While Xenakis’s musical constructions, which start from the zero point, often proceed from mathematical structures (for example, from the sieve theory, as the basis for structuring rhythms or tonal scales), other approaches, proceeding more strongly from inner musical developmental thinking, are found in many variants, especially in the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Since the early nineteen-fifties, Stockhausen had been interested in composing technologically generated music, because at that time he believed that his rigorous structural ideas could only be realized with technologically produced sounds.

His first tape production, the concrete Étude, realized in Paris in 1952, did not meet with the approval of the Paris studio director Pierre Schaeffer. Étude remained unperformed for a long time and decades later was still only occasionally played in concert performances; however, in the end it was also included in the edition of Stockhausen’s complete works on CD. The strange career of this short piece can probably be explained by the fact that Schaeffer was neither aesthetically nor technologically sympathetic to music that in strict systematization derived from a single source set as a zero point. It was only in Cologne that Stockhausen got the opportunity to create music that consistently started from the zero point of single synthetic basic materials: sine tones. Stockhausen created such monochromatic zero-point music in 1953 with his first electronic work, to which he later gave the title Studie I.

Six decades later, in a contribution from the younger generation, a composition was created that is also formed from the simplest elementary sounds, from sine tones: the 2019 audiovisual Sinusstudie by Chinese composer Jia Liu (b. 1990). However, in Jia Liu’s work, unlike Stockhausen’s, the sine tones appear at the smallest intervals, from which, when superimposed, the most subtle tonal animations result through the interferences. In this piece, all the sine tones are in constant motion—united at the same pitch at the beginning and at the end, but in the larger context in manifold animations: with dynamic fluctuations at the beginning of the piece and with dynamically animated tones spreading throughout the tonal space; and at the end of the piece with a return to the initial stage, to the dynamically animated tone. Here, similarly to another composition written in 2020 by the same artist, with the title Ringstudie II/b, tones no longer appear in predominantly static yet constantly changing constellations of fixed tones, but in dense strata of gliding tones; in Sinusstudie the audience can follow the constantly changing tonal movements on the screen, and in Ringstudie II/b they can be followed on the computer screen as clearly contoured processes of waxing and waning.

Musical cells of wide-ranging movements of sound (which can be described as continuously moving models in contrast to the ever-changing sound constellations of “fixed” tones in Stockhausen’s electronic Studie I) have existed in radical new music since the early nineteen-fifties. The first example is found at the beginning of one of the most scandalous pieces of post-1945 music: Le Voile d’Orphée (The Veil of Orpheus). A major work written by Pierre Henry in 1953, it is the final movement of a joint composition with Pierre Schaeffer that was premiered at the 1953 Donaueschingen Music Festival, where it caused a spectacular scandal. On the one hand, it took aim at echoes of traditional opera music (favored by Schaeffer), and, on the other hand, it was also directed against the wild, entirely novel streams of sound in Henry’s closing music, which the composer made extremely loud (to drown out the noise being made by the audience), whereupon most of the audience fled from the hall.

The gliding sounds and sound trajectories of this music emerged as a consequence of music that had started from a completely different zero point than Stockhausen’s early electronic work: namely, as music of a completely new kind of continuity, the kind of music that could only be achieved with new sounds, which could only be produced in a studio, and not with human voices and traditional instruments alone.

In 1955, two years after the premiere scandal provoked by Schaeffer and Henry, another composition, albeit less controversial, caused a sensation in Donaueschingen: Metastaseis (1953–54) by Iannis Xenakis. A piece of music for a large orchestra, it begins with all the strings playing dense glissandi. All strings begin with the same note, the lowest note of the violins, and from that note each violinist plays a glissando (glide) of their own—the higher strings upwards, the lower strings downwards. After a time, all the strings stop playing at the same time, each on a different note, so that many notes are densely layered in the wide tonal space. After a time, all the strings’ sustaining notes suddenly turn into tremolo notes, which begin extremely loudly and then fade away in diminuendo until a triangle is struck, interrupting the stream of sound and creating a first major caesura.

This widely expanding opening (rhythmically enlivened by a few percussive accents played on the woodblock) is followed later, at the end of the piece, by a development in the opposite direction: the notes of a dense chord played by the strings fill the wide tonal space and move toward each other in opposite directions, before they finally meet on a common final note (which is somewhat higher than the opening note), with these rising and falling tremolos concluding the piece.

The movements in tonal space here invented by Xenakis are a first plastic model of his musical thinking, which proceeds from characteristic structural models that can change alternately in different works or groups of works. In the early orchestral piece Metastaseis, such structural models are found primarily at the beginning and end of the work, while there are also tonal structures inside that are more closely related to modernized twelve-tone music than to mathematical structural models.

In Xenakis’s later works and groups of works, often based on other mathematical structures, there are striking instances of the structuring of other aspects as well, for example, of rhythms (in percussion pieces such as the sextet Persephassa, 1969, and the solo piece Psappha, 1975), or of tone sets or scales (in the piano pieces Herma, 1960/61, and Mists, 1981). In these and other works, the listener can also perceive certain acts of structuring as artistic reactions to turning points in time, as, for example, in the glissando and noise structures of the orchestral piece Metastaseis; in the radio play Pour la paix, of 1981 (to a text by Françoise Xenakis, a writer and former resistance fighter), where they relate to visual or sonic experiences during World War II (Xenakis was active in demonstrations and in the resistance); or in Nuits (1967), a commemorative piece for political prisoners. In these and other works, models can be found of a rigorously structured, politically committed music, which invites comparison with the aspects of a political stance in the work of the ZERO artists (for example, their active resistance against the slogan “No experiments,” with which the conservative CDU/CSU parties waged their campaign for the general election to the German Bundestag in 1957, later on winning an absolute majority), or in the work of other pioneers of new music, such as Luigi Nono (1924–1990), whose strict serial music in Il Canto Sospeso (1956) presented and processed quotations from the final letters received from political prisoners.

We also find examples of strict structural innovations that are comparable in terms of music but different in terms of musical policy positions, or in which musical and political radicalism present themselves in tensions that are sometimes difficult to resolve—as, for example, in the politically committed music of Luigi Nono since the early nineteen-fifties and its transformations in his late work; since nineteen-sixties the politically determined turn away from the avant-garde in the work of Cornelius Cardew (1936–1981), who in the changed from being a former collaborator of Stockhausen’s into his opponent in the field of music; or the beginnings of a politically critical reorientation of the radio play in the work of Mauricio Kagel (1931–2008); or the beginnings of politically committed piano music in Frederic Rzewski’s (1938–2021) work; or the beginnings of a confrontation between strictly structured minimal music and speech texts critiquing contemporary times in the work of Steve Reich (b. 1936).

These and other examples indicate that many aspects found in music and in other areas of cultural life (for example, in the visual arts and in architecture, as well as in the combination of different fields in modern radio drama) that can be subsumed under the keyword “zero” can still provide many incentives for specialized or interdisciplinary research and discussion today. How important, in this context, the tension between primarily political and primarily art-immanent questions might become, and how this might be managed, would have to be clarified in further discussions and research within and outside of music and its interconnections with political and cultural life.

As an example of an important field of work in this context, here are some subject-specific and interdisciplinary aspects under the heading of movement:

In the context of music, one speaks of movement both in the narrower literal sense, and also in the figurative sense—for example, in the transition from one pitch to another, if the second pitch is close to the first, we speak of a step; otherwise, if it is farther away, we speak of a jump. Movement, not in the figurative sense but in the narrower sense, actually only occurs when one note slides over to another, in a glissando. Such a glissando, however, can be a problem for the traditional understanding of music.

In traditional notation, the glissando usually exists only as a simple line that leads from one notehead to another. In straightforward cases, such as the glissandi of the strings in the orchestral piece Metastaseis by Xenakis, this may suffice. However, it may be that more complicated tonal movements are prescribed, as, for example, in Xenakis’s composition for solo violin Mikka (1971), or in a central place in the composition Kontakte (1958–60) by Stockhausen. Here, a glissando appears in a central position, beginning in the middle register and leading downward from there in a curving movement. After the glissando has moved downward in this manner for a long time, it transforms. Similar to the gliding sound of a slowing motorcycle, the coherent gliding sound begins to disintegrate—it gradually dissolves into gliding pulses that become slower and slower over the course of the continuing movement before finally coming to rest. These pulses turn into staccato repetitions of the same note, which then—announced by a short signal with some downward staccato pulse notes—lead to a lower note, which is also repeated in staccato, and on which the two soloists (accompanying the electronic music) then also begin. This is clearly a representation of a purely intra-musical process: the transformation of the melodic (downward) movement of a gliding sound (glissando) into slowing tone repetitions and then finally into a long, sustained electronic tone.

In this connection, Stockhausen speaks of the “unity of musical time.” By this he means that sonic processes can change a lot when they are significantly accelerated (like the many electronic sounds that Stockhausen uses in his piece in rapid motion, as it were), or when they are severely slowed down (like the gliding sound that begins the central section of the piece just described, which reveals in slow motion the origins of the sounds used, most of which are highly transposed and accelerated).

In this composition and at this point, then, it is primarily a matter of purely intra-musical processes, which the composer also described in detail in a published commentary. Stockhausen did not publicly mention other meanings and contexts at the time the piece was composed—for example, the assignment of electronic sounds to a heavenly sphere and instrumental sounds to an earthly sphere. This might suggest an interpretation of the concluding part of the composition, with its dominant electronic sounds and sparse accompaniment of instrumental sounds.

Quite different from Stockhausen’s Kontakte is the problem of interpreting a computer music composition by Jean-Claude Risset, written some years later. In this piece, there are “infinite glissandi,” which might give listeners the impression of a never-ending plunge. The title of this piece might also indicate that these sounds may be heard outside of music, as the composer designated it a computer suite for the stage play Little Boy,about the first atomic bomb to be used in war, dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The problem of moving on after reaching the zero point is articulated here both within the music and in the overarching context of a historical turning point in time.

It is a great stroke of luck that so much material has survived from the ZERO op zee (ZERO on Sea) project, planned for 1966 but ultimately never realized.[i]

Newspaper articles[ii] advertising the project, which was initiated by the Dutch Internationale Galerij Orez (International Gallery Orez) as early as 1965, demonstrate just how serious the efforts were to use the Scheveningen pier and the surrounding coastline, sea, and airspace for an exhibition of contemporary art.

The large number of very concrete project sketches[iii] by the twenty-nine international ZERO artists[iv] who were invited illustrate how differently they handled the natural features of the envisaged exhibition location. While some scaled existing works to the local conditions, others created new works that made productive use of the natural forces at work in the unusual setting. They conceived works that remained closely connected to their previous ZERO art, but which at the same time reflected on the connection between art and nature. In particular, in addition to the designs by the Japanese artists, who were connected to the Gutai group, these included all the works by Hans Haacke (b. 1936), Heinz Mack (b. 1931), Otto Piene (1928–2014), and Günther Uecker (b. 1930). Like all the others, these four artists submitted individual designs, but there is one written project sketch in particular that stands out, which they submitted jointly.[v] Both the equal contribution list of their names at the top of the letter to Galerij Orez and the description of the proposal as “unsere ZERO=Praesentation” (“our ZERO presentation”)[vi] make it clear that the project by Haacke, Mack, Piene, and Uecker was an extraordinary collaboration.

How did this unique collaboration come about? And what was the connection between the Düsseldorf ZERO group and Hans Haacke, who today is primarily known as a Conceptual artist with a political dimension to his work?

[i] See the following primary texts on ZERO op zee: Caroline de Westenholz, “ZERO on Sea,” in Tiziana Caianiello and Mattijs Visser, eds., The Artist as Curator: Collaborative Initiatives in the International ZERO Movement 1957–1967 (Ghent, 2015), pp. 371–95; Ulrike Schmitt, Der Doppelaspekt von Materialität und Immaterialität in den Werken der ZERO-Künstler 1957–67, Ph.D. diss. (University of Cologne, 2013), pp. 163–70; Anette Kuhn, ZERO: Eine Avantgarde der sechziger Jahre (Frankfurt am Main and Berlin, 1991), pp. 85–86.

[ii] See, for example, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Heinz Mack, inv. nos. mkp.ZERO.1.II.237; mkp.ZERO.1.II.238.

[iii] Today they are held in the Municipal Archives of The Hague.

[iv] Armando, Bernard Aubertin, Hans Bischoffshausen, Stanley Brouwn, Gianni Colombo, Lucio Fontana, Hans Haacke, Jan Henderikse, Norio Imai, Kumiko Imanaka, Yves Klein, Yayoi Kusama, Heinz Mack, Tsuyoshi Maekawa, Christian Megert, Sadamasa Motonaga, Schuki Mukai, Saburo Murakami, Henk Peeters, Otto Piene, George Rickey, Werner Ruhnau, Shozo Shimamoto, Hans Sleutelaar, Ferdinand Spindel, Günther Uecker, Nanda Vigo, Toshio Yoshida, and Michio Yoshihara.

[v] Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Günther Uecker, and Hans Haacke to the Internationale Galerie Orez, copy from Otto Piene to Heinz Mack, New York, August 23, 1965, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Heinz Mack, mkp.ZERO.1.I.653.

[vi] Ibid.

Unlike Mack, Piene, and Uecker, Hans Haacke did not live in Düsseldorf in the late nineteen-fifties. Born in Cologne, he studied in Kassel, and he says he saw ZERO works for the first time in 1959 and was impressed by the novelty of this art, especially the use of light and shadow.[i] It was probably at the end of 1959 that Haacke contacted Piene for the first time, as evidenced by Haacke’s subsequent letter.[ii] His interest in the magazine ZERO was responded to positively[iii] by Piene just three days later, and Haacke’s request to visit him—“If I’m ever in the Düsseldorf area, I’d like to come and visit you, if that’s all right with you”[iv]—must also have met with a sympathetic response. This initial contact led to a lively correspondence from 1961 to 1965; letters between Haacke and Mack have also been preserved.

The art scene in the USA is an important topic in their letters. Haacke had already got to know the USA in 1961, when he went there as a scholarship holder; afterwards, he had moved back temporarily to a studio in Cologne in 1963, before emigrating to the United States permanently in 1965. From the mid-nineteen-sixties at the latest, exhibitions and extended or long-term work stays took the artists of the Düsseldorf ZERO group abroad. And so Haacke and Piene exchanged ideas about the shared basis of their approach to art (“To my knowledge, ZERO has not yet reached New York”;[v] “I have found a few people who sympathize with our ideas—even before I met them”[vi]), reported on exhibitions that their colleagues had been unable to attend in person,[vii] and arranged contacts and exhibition opportunities for each other.[viii]

That Haacke’s artistic interests were closely linked to those of the ZERO artists is apparent from his early works. Ce n’est pas la Voie lactée (This Is Not the Milky Way), of 1960, for example, is executed in a canvas-filling, vibrating, all-over painting style that chimes with ZERO’s partiality for “grid structures, new materials, new techniques, and the fundamental renunciation of handwriting.”[ix] Les Couloirs de Marienbad(The Corridors of Marienbad), of 1962, is an acrylic glass panel with a regular pattern of nubs that is duplicated by a mirror underneath. The artist’s obvious interest in light and shadow, reflection and dynamics, which are largely dependent on the movements of the viewer, is also in line with the artistic objectives of ZERO.

There are striking formal parallels in the works of Haacke and Mack, for example, in the Silberreliefs (Silver Reliefs).[x] In 1965, Haacke also noticed that there were similarities in their plexiglass works, so he contacted Mack in order to counteract in advance any suspicions that the one had copied something from the other.[xi] The Condensation Cubes created by Haacke in 1963 are rectangular plexiglass containers in various formats, which contain water; this gives rise to a never-ending cycle of evaporation and condensation. The fine veil of droplets that condenses on the boxes’ transparent surfaces gives the simple and rather cool character of the work a poetic structure.

And at first glance, Mack’s Licht, Regen, Schatten (Light, Rain, Shadow)[xii] is very similar. However, Mack’s acrylic glass cube has an electric heating plate underneath, which constitutes a significant difference because the heat drives the condensation process constantly and evenly. By contrast, Haacke’s “water boxes” are subject to natural accelerations and decelerations of this process, due to external fluctuations in the environment, such as room temperature, number of people in the room, and so on. Last but not least, the silver base of Mack’s cube clearly places it within the cosmos of his oeuvre.

The fact that Haacke exhibited together with the ZERO artists on ten occasions between 1962 and 1965, and thus participated in important group shows, such as Nul (1962) at the Stedilijk Museum, Amsterdam, or in 1963 at the Halfmannshof, Gelsenkirchen, firmly locates him within the active ZERO network at this time.[xiii] How the collaboration between the four artists for the ZERO op zee project actually came about, however, cannot be verified precisely today.

What is certain is that together they proposed seventeen numbered projects and that these cannot be definitively assigned to any individual artist’s oeuvre. The ideas range from the spectacular (such as no. 9, “Revue with ZERO cabaret acts”; no. 10, a sort of “guard” in costume—a traditional feature of German carnival; and no. 12, “Fireworks”) to participatory actions (no. 4, “ZERO messages-in-bottles,” and no. 5, “Kaleidoscopes”). These are complemented by ideas for projects that play out on the sea (for example, no. 7, “Silver skin on the sea”; no. 13, “Fountains in the sea,” using circulation pumps; and no. 3, “Buoys”) and in the air (no. 14, “Smoke sculptures”; and no. 2, “A black cloud of steam”); these would have been clearly visible from the coast. Movement, driven by different aggregate states of water and air, as well as the energy of waves and wind, were actively incorporated into these proposals.

A further approach, which would even have combined different types of movement—the movement of waves, boats, and, most importantly, the movement of living creatures, namely seagulls—is set out in the draft for project no. 6, “Seagull Island (Möweninsel).” According to the original plan, the project would have been realized as follows:

[i] Jürgen Wilhelm, ed., Piene im Gespräch (Munich, 2015), p. 45.

[ii] Hans Haacke to Otto Piene, Kassel, May 20, 1960, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO. 2.I.1067_1.

[iii] Otto Piene to Hans Haacke, Düsseldorf, May 23, 1960, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO. 2.I.1067_2.

[iv] Haacke to Piene, May 20, 1960 (see note 8).

[v] Hans Haacke to Otto Piene, Philadelphia, November 25, 1961, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.I.1343_1.

[vi] Hans Haacke to Otto Piene, Philadelphia, September 8, 1962, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.I.1344.

[vii] Haacke told Mack about an exhibition in San Francisco. See Hans Haacke to Heinz Mack, Seattle, April 10, 1966, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Heinz Mack, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.1.I.530_1.

[viii] Hans Haacke to Heinz Mack, Cologne, May 24, 1965, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Heinz Mack, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.1.I.529.

[ix] Gabriele Hoffmann, Hans Haacke: Art into Society—Society into Art (Weimar, 2011), p. 11.

[x] Compare Hans Haacke, A7-61 (1961) and D6-61 (1961), with (besides many others) Heinz Mack, Silberregen (1959), in Dieter Honisch, Mack: Skulpturen 1953–1986 (Düsseldorf, 1986), work 511, p. 158. See also Luke Skrebowski, “Jack Burnham, ZERO, and Art from Field to System,” in Tiziana Caianiello and Barbara Könches, eds., Between the Viewer and the Work: Encounters in Space(Heidelberg, 2019), pp. 65, 67, https://books.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/arthistoricum/catalog/book/541 (accessed November 27, 2023). Skrebowski positions Haacke’s A7-61 (1961) next to Mack’s Lamellae-Relief (1959–60).

[xi] Hans Haacke to Heinz Mack, Cologne, July 20, 1965, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Heinz Mack, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.1.I.529.

[xii] This work is dated 1962. See Honisch 1986 (see note 16), work 182, p. 158.

[xiii] The exhibition Group Zero, organized by Otto Piene at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, in 1964, is an important example, because it resulted in further invitations to participate in US exhibitions for Haacke and others. See https://icaphila.org/exhibitions/group-zero/ (accessed November 24, 2023).

Echoes of this idea are found in the individual biographies of Haacke’s works more frequently than any other.

Two years later, in 1968, on the basis of his reflections connected with ZERO op zee, Haacke created Lebendes Flugsystem / Living Airborne System,[i] which is significant for his oeuvre as it is the first of several works featuring animals:

[i] Hans Haacke also realized the idea for “Messages-in-bottles,” project number four of the joint ZERO presentation, for the Places and Processes exhibition curated by Willoughby Sharp in Edmonton, Canada, in 1969. Haacke had numerous messages in bottles thrown into the North Saskatchewan River, with a request for feedback if they were found. For more details on this project see Willoughby Sharp, “Place and Process,” Artforum 8, no. 3 (November 1969), https://www.artforum.com/features/place-and-process-210698/ (accessed November 24, 2023).

Otto Piene was also still thinking about seagulls after 1966. In 1968, he planned The Birds Sculpture as part of the Boston Harbor Project, his fourteen-part project sketch[i] for which is preserved in the archive of the ZERO foundation.[ii] It is very similar to ZERO op zee project idea no. 6:

[i] Archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.IV.171.

[ii] For the context of the Boston Harbor Project—which, like ZERO op zee, was never realized—see the detailed studies in Blakinger 2019 (see note 27), pp. 365, 381. At the time, Boston Harbor was severely polluted; this attracted nationwide attention and led to discussions about environmental policy. The US Clean Water Act of 1972 was a consequence of this. Today, the Boston Harbor Projectrefers to a large-scale environmental project (1985–2001), which cleaned up the severe environmental pollution in the harbor that had been the subject of much debate since the nineteen-seventies.

Piene’s proposals for Boston Harbor are closely linked to his work at CAVS—the Center for Advanced Visual Studies—and above all with its founding director György Kepes. With this institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Kepes established an unprecedented combination of art and technology. Piene, who “during the ZERO era had already developed within this movement his concept of a symbiosis of nature—art—technology,”[i] fitted perfectly into this concept and, after many years of correspondence,[ii]Kepes finally managed to get Piene to come to CAVS as a fellow of the first generation, starting in 1968. For Kepes, close collaboration between artists and scientists was of primary importance. The 200th anniversary of the Siege of Boston in 1776 served as an opportunity to initiate far-reaching interdisciplinary collaboration.[iii] In this spirit, Piene’s project proposals for the Boston Harbor Project would have achieved their spectacular effects through enormous specialist know-how alone, as point no. 12 illustrates: “Nightly Display of Artificial Clouds.… I don’t know how to do it but I want to do it. Let’s ask the scientists.”

What all of Piene’s ideas have in common is that they are characterized by light and air; only the The Birds Sculpture quoted at the beginning stands out, because it would not have required any technological components. What does this say about Piene’s conception of nature, that the swarm sculpture nevertheless remained part of his vision?

A closer look at Piene’s oeuvre reveals that the ostensible opposition of belief in technology and in nature’s material actually constitutes his art. Both in the ZERO years up to 1966 and afterwards, two opposing directions are always apparent, which the artist seeks to reconcile.

Piene states:

[i] Anette Kuhn, “Otto Piene,” in Künstler: Kritisches Lexikon der Gegenwartskunst (Munich, 1991), p. 3.

[ii] See György Kepes to Otto Piene, Massachusetts, November 23, 1965, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.I.2815; Otto Piene to György Kepes, New York, January 28, 1966, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.I.2817; György Kepes to Otto Piene, Massachusetts, February 1, 1966, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.I.2814; György Kepes to Otto Piene, Massachusetts, March 11, 1966, archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.I.2819.

[iii] In Piene’s words: “Communal projects (such as Kepes’s starter project: ‘The Boston Harbor Project’—meant to be ‘Bicentennial’—a Denkmodell [thought model]) brought the individuals together in (sometimes ‘heated’) discussion.” See Otto Piene, “In Memoriam: György Kepes, 1906–2002,” Leonardo Electronic Almanac, August 4, 2011, https://www.leoalmanac.org/in-memoriam-gyorgy-kepes-1906-2002-by-otto-piene/ (accessed November 2, 2023).

However, his fire paintings (from the late nineteen-fifties onwards) demonstrate that the natural element of fire is not just represented, but is also an active “material” that coproduces the works. On the one hand, Piene is influenced by Yves Klein’s work and his view that nature is a medium conveying spirituality,[i] and on the other, in his use of fire, he hands over a certain artistic agency to the material—the power to act. Then, ultimately, he ties his works back to representational depictions through their titles, as exemplified by those that touch upon the world of plants.[ii]

Later, in his Sky Art, the symbolic forms of natural phenomena coalesce with Piene’s interest in their scientific foundations, and they are technically realized as inflatable sculptures, which results in poetic works such as his Regenbogen (Rainbow) inflatable, of 1972.[iii]

Although the Boston Harbor Project—like ZERO op zee before it—did not become a reality, a visual realization does actually exist. In the Sky Art portfolio (1969), a collection of twenty-five lithographs,[iv] Piene printed the texts of his project suggestions and illustrated them on the bottom half of sheet no. XX. With fine white strokes, he sketches a huge flame, an enormous beam of light, a vapor cloud of seawater, a tall mast on which sails flutter in the wind, as well as an artificial rainbow against a black background. The Birds Sculpture can be seen in the lower left-hand quarter of the sheet, depicted as a rather roundish swarm consisting of detached curves and hooks. These stylized seagulls form a loose yet coherent volume—albeit a fast-moving and fleeting one.

[i] See the unpublished MA thesis in the library of the ZERO foundation by Florence Macagno, ZERO entre Nature et Technologie (Université Paris IV La Sorbonne, 2011), p. 85.

[ii] One example among many is Otto Piene, Green Fire Flower I (1967), 48 x 68 cm. Piene also often refers to his circular, central fire marks on canvas as “eyes.”

[iii] See Barbara Könches, “On Rainbow by Otto Piene: A Sign of Hope in Orange, Yellow, Green, Indigo, and Violet,” in Anton Biebl and Elisabeth Hartung, eds., Art and Society 1972–2022–2072 (Berlin, 2023), pp. 138–49.

[iv] Otto Piene, Sky Art (1969), collection of the ZERO foundation, Düsseldorf, donated by Otto Piene and Elizabeth Goldring, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2014.15. According to Ante Glibota, Sky Art is “the natural consequence of Piene‘s invention of this art genre and his intensive exploration of its characteristics and possibilities. The portfolio is thus divided into three parts: items that familiarize us with … Sky Art; illustrations and interpretations of already realized aerial projects; and finally those that refer to potential or future events with plans and projects.” For further information see Ante Glibota, Otto Piene (Paris, 2011), pp. 617, 628. See also Blakinger 2019 (see note 27), pp. 346, 350.

Günther Uecker certainly did not encounter the natural phenomenon of a flock of seagulls for the first time in connection with ZERO op zee; he grew up on the Wustrow peninsula in the Baltic Sea.[i] In 1970, seagulls were the subject of two of his filmic works.[ii]

In Möweninsel (Seagull Island),[iii] the camera focuses on a hill on which a large colony of seagulls are nesting. The distant birds look like the heads of nails that have been hammered irregularly into a plate. In Schwebend schweben (Hover Hovering)[iv] we see a flock of seagulls on the wing. The typical hook shape of the beating wings stands out against the bright, monochrome sky.

The films look rather like sketches, and the additions “in motion” (in Bewegung) or “static” (statisch) to their titles indicate that the two films are conceived as contrasting each other. The subtitle of Möweninsel (Seagull Island) also makes it clear that its original idea derives from ZERO op zee. Both these films are in the context of several short films made the same year, which use a strong black-and-white contrast to explore everyday phenomena experimentally with the camera, such as a repeatedly slamming door (Lichtspalt [Chink of Light]. Banging Door) or a view of the landscape (Hochmoor [Upland Moor]). According to Sigrid Wollmeiner, the productive peak of Uecker’s cinematic work in 1970 coincided with his engagement with nature.[v] In her understanding, the films are “actions in and with nature in the figurative sense.… Nature takes the lead role within the framework set by the artist and presents itself.”[vi] The films can therefore be assigned to the category of “accentuation of sections of nature”—one of three focuses that Wollmeiner has educed for Uecker’s nature-related works.[vii] Besides Uecker’s films, his collaboration with Jef Verheyen on the Vlaamse Landschappen (Flemish Landscapes) project in 1967 is a good example of this. The installation of white frames, taller than a human, in the landscape around the small Belgian town of Mullem can be interpreted as a commentary on the aesthetic category of “landscape,” which only ever exists as a subjectively realized excerpt of the perception of nature.

Central to Uecker’s relationship to nature after his ZERO years is the fact that he worked predominantly on artistic actions, both in the museum and outdoors. These action-based works are accompanied by media communicating them: film, photography, and texts (the Uecker Zeitung newspaper).

Repeatedly and demonstratively, Günther Uecker situates his own person (and thus, by extension, humans and their subjective perception) at the center of his relationship with nature. His works reflect humankind’s actions on and with nature, and can be seen as establishing contact, which derives from the ZERO idea of bringing the relationship between humankind and nature back into harmony.[viii] In Uecker’s understanding, humanity is not in opposition to nature, but does not coexist smoothly with it either. As Xiao Xiao has recently pointed out, as well as Sigrid Wollmeiner, Uecker’s warning about the destruction of nature is a very important subject for him.[ix]

With regard to his action Nagelfeldzug (Nail Campaign), of 1969, in which the camera accompanies the artist as he nails up an area or objects in urban spaces, Uecker sees the nails in this work as an “ambivalent sign of creating order, but also the aggressive and destructive intervention of humankind in nature.”[x]

Uecker’s art visualizes how humankind leaves its marks on the “earth,” exemplified in the simple action, captured on film, with the descriptive title Gehen über Schnee (Walking on Snow), of 1969.

In his Sandmühlen (Sand Mills)[xi], which he worked on from 1965, electronically driven apparatus incessantly plows through sand using strings, only to obliterate these traces again shortly afterwards. Here as elsewhere, the question of how to deal with interventions in nature in the future resonates in Uecker’s work.

Uecker and his colleagues were fascinated by light as an immaterial natural phenomenon during the ZERO period, and, afterwards, more and more concrete natural materials were added. Stones, string, wood (often in its “natural” state—that is, unworked wood like a tree trunk or branch), ashes, sand, and soil became and remained important natural materials for him, including for his sculptural and canvas-based works.

[i] See Dieter Honisch, Günther Uecker (Stuttgart, 1983), p. 8. The publication includes a photograph showing the view from his parents‘ house; readily noticeable are the seagulls sitting on the groynes.

[ii] The descriptions refer to prints taken from film stock. A comprehensive, well-founded analysis of Uecker‘s cinematic work is still pending.

[iii] See Honisch 1983 (see note 39): Günther Uecker, Möweninsel, 1970: Zero on Sea, 1965, Möwenskulptur statisch (1970). 16 mm film, black/white, 3 min.

[iv] See Honisch 1983 (see note 39): Günther Uecker, Schwebend schweben, 1970, Möwenskulptur in Bewegung (1970). 16 mm film, black/white, 3 min.

[v] Sigrid Wollmeiner, “Land-Art oder Natur-Kunst? Günther Ueckers Auseinandersetzung mit der Natur und ihrem Material,” in Klaus Gereon Beuckers, ed., Günther Uecker: Die Aktionen (Petersberg, 2004), p. 129.

[vi] Ibid., p. 129.

[vii] As a further focus, she says that Uecker‘s nature-oriented works make the viewer aware of a “relationship that exploits and destroys nature,” in order ultimately “to surrender to nature” in and with his works. See ibid., p. 129. These cannot be clearly separated.

[viii] Otto Piene formulated this for ZERO as follows: “One of our most important intentions was to reharmonize the relationship between humans and nature—we see in nature possibilities and stimuli, the effects of the elements and their material form: sky, sea, the Arctic, deserts; air, light, water, fire as creative media; the artist is not a refugee from the ‘modern world,’ no, the artist uses new technical resources as well as the forces of nature.” Otto Piene, quoted in Dirk Pörschmann and Margriet Schavemaker, eds., ZERO: Die internationale Kunstbewegung der 50er und 60er Jahre (ZERO: The International Art Movement of the 1950s and 1960s), exh. cat. Martin-Gropius-Bau and Stedelijk Museum (Berlin, Amsterdam, and Cologne, 2015), p. 244.

[ix] See Xiao Xiao, Philosophie und Künste Ostasiens im Werk von Günther Uecker (Weilerswist-Metternich, 2023), pp 101–3. Further, Xiao sees themes of “destruction” both as a pictorial violation, as it were, and as the endangering of people by other people.

[x] Günther Uecker, quoted in Wollmeiner 2004 (see note 43), p. 127.

[xi] For example, Günther Uecker, Sandmühle (1970/2009), collection of the ZERO foundation, Düsseldorf, donated by Günther Uecker, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2008.69.

Heinz Mack was the only one of the four artists involved in the joint ZERO presentation for the ZERO op zeeproject who did not take up the idea of a seagull sculpture in later years.

Nevertheless, the seabirds also occupied him outside of the collaboration. In a letter to Henk Peeters, who was close to the Internationale Galerij Orez in The Hague, he took seagulls as a comparative image for constellations of works featuring sailing ships or buoys, which were intended to be artificial yet at the same time reminiscent of natural phenomena.[i] He later created works that can be linked to other ideas of the “ZERO presentation.” For example, Feuer im Wasser (Fire in the Water) (no. 1) can be compared to his Feuerschiffe (Fire Boats), which first appeared in the film Tele-Mack, of 1969.

Furthermore, no. 16, Fire Fighting Boat (“At the exhibition opening, the boat, while moving, shoots up jets of water into the air”), is comparable to Mack’s Wasserwolke (Water Cloud) for the 1972 Olympic Games, an enormous fountain on the Olympic Park Lake in Munich. A vertical fountain of water, the Water Beam,[ii] was also envisaged for Piene’s Boston Harbor Project. Both artworks are related to garden and landscape design, in which fountains have been a design feature in connection with water systems for centuries.