E Experiment
by Regina Wyrwoll Andreas Joh. Wiesand
Regina Wyrwoll interviews Andreas Joh. Wiesand
“Artists are exceptionally curious.” Otto Piene
Our contribution, a kind of question-and-answer game, could itself be perceived as a kind of experiment in this publication, since it will largely do without art-historical work analyses. As will be seen in a moment, however, this might be acceptable, because experiments do not necessarily yield results for eternity, but can often inspire discourses.
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.
“Most of these artists, not even thirty years old, whether in Belgium, Denmark, or the Netherlands, were cut off from contemporary art during the war. A dispute, a development, could not happen. In 1945, they were faced with nothing.”[i]
[i] Uwe M. Schneede, ed., COBRA: 1948–51, exh. cat., Kunstverein in Hamburg (Hamburg, 1982). Translation by Andreas Joh. Wiesand.
Starting in 1957, individual COBRA artists participated in the Munich group SPUR, which protested against the “canonical rank of abstract art” and was connected with the Situationist International.[i] The later communard Dieter Kunzelmann also joined SPUR.
RW: Was the cultural awakening after World War II limited to the visual arts?
AJW: For literature, the prominent Gruppe 47 in Germany already proves the opposite. During this period, groups and meetings were often organized in opposition to existing institutions, but occasionally also with public support, like in the case of the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, which came into being as early as 1946 and has shaped the development of contemporary music to this day. In addition, there were informal meetings with avant-garde exhibitions, concerts, readings, or dance performances, where interdisciplinarity or “intermedial” experimentation were part of the program, as the example of the Mary Bauermeister (1934–2023) studio in Cologne shows, where personalities such as George Brecht (1926–2008), John Cage (1912–1992), Merce Cunningham (1919–2009), Mauricio Kagel (1931–2008), Nam June Paik (1932–2006), and Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007) were in discourse, as, incidentally, were Heinz Mack and Otto Piene (1928–2014).[ii]
RW: But radical experiments were already common in the first half of the twentieth century and in some cases much earlier.
AJW: There are indeed many such examples, and also continuing ones, perhaps most famously Wassily Kandinsky’s (1866–1944) synesthetic experiments with color and music, or the Ukrainian Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) with his Suprematist painting Black Square on a White Ground, of 1915. Josef Albers (1888–1976) probably inspired this in the end: with his talent, also shaped by family traditions, he developed new forms of expression, initially with “glass studies,” at the Bauhaus in Weimar and later in Dessau, until he emigrated to America after the National Socialists seized power. In 1935, an American magazine sketched Albers’s workspace at Black Mountain College (North Carolina) as “a laboratory rather than a studio,” and said of him:
[i] Beate von Mickwitz, Streit um die Kunst (Munich, 1996), pp. 56–63.
[ii] Wilfried Dörstel and Reinhard Matz, eds., intermedial, kontrovers, experimentell: Das Atelier Mary Bauermeister in Köln 1960–62 (Cologne, 1993).
“He studies like a scientist determined to discover forms, values, and color relationships that are reliable, and by trial and error to exclude the uncertain and the false.”[i]
[i] Grace Alexander Young, in Arts and Decoration, January 1935, quoted in Charles Darwent, Josef Albers: Leben und Werk (Bern and Vienna, 2020), p. 311.
However, it then took about a decade and a half before he arrived at his now celebrated magnum opus, Homage to the Square, while teaching at Yale.
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).
“Just as aesthetic design does not arise out of nothing, scientific facts cannot be achieved by deductive procedures alone. Rather, an experimental field spans between art and science, in which the aleatory, serendipity, and also material inducements possess a far greater role than imagined.”[i]
[i] Ibid.
One workshop sought to determine the role of “medial triggers” in innovative scientific and artistic processes: “The fact that experimentation with procedures is of such significant importance in both art and science suggests that in both fields the desired outcome often occurs only indirectly and non-intentionally.”[i]
RW: Related changes in both artistic and scholarly strategies have become apparent in the last decade. What are the consequences? Or is it just a matter of new terminology?
AJW: In any case, terms in publication titles on the DGAE homepage[ii] show that the idea of the “researching artist” has apparently become commonplace today. This concerns, for example, terms like “attempt,” “transformation,” “innovation,” “fluidity,” “encounter,” or “laboratory”. After art and music colleges have updated their curricula in this direction or towards “scientification,” especially in the last two decades,[iii] self-descriptions such as “research artist”[iv] can now often be found in artistic biographies and on Internet platforms. In addition, a separate genre, so-called “SciArt”[v]—with a more societal, social, and ecological orientation—hopes to overcome traditional boundaries between art and science.
But all this is less new than some assume, and Silvia Krapf tries to locate it already in ZERO:
[i] Ibid.
[ii] See Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ästhetik (website), http://www.dgae.de/ (accessed August 2023).
[iii] Mick Wilson and Schelte van Ruiten, eds., SHARE: Handbook for Artistic Research Education (Amsterdam, 2013).
[iv] See, for example, Gloria Benedikt (website), https://www.gloriabenedikt.com (accessed August 2023).
[v] The X (formerly Twitter) profile of www.sciart.org.uk describes its activities as “Scientists and artists working together to stimulate the human imagination and make the world we live in more intelligible.” See https://twitter.com/sci_art?lang=en (accessed August 2023).
“The artists’ turning away from the subjective expression of Abstract Expressionism was also reflected in the changed role of the artist and of art. They no longer saw themselves as purely intuitive creators, but as scientists who strove to subject their work to analysis. Works of art emerged from the act of experimentation and exploration, and teamwork was propagated.”[i]
[i] Silvia Krapf, “ZERO—Eine europäische Vision,” in Anja Brug, Silvia Krapf, and Hannah Weitemeier, ZERO: Künstler einer europäischen Bewegung. Sammlung Lenz Schönberg 1956–2006, exh. cat. Museum der Moderne Salzburg Mönchsberg (Salzburg, 2006), p. 22.
RW: In addition to “experiment” and “research,” what other terms come to your mind, especially for artistic ways of working in the ZERO years?
AJW: Some of the things that happen in artistic research phases could perhaps be better described by the term “testing” than by the term “experiment,” because here—similar to technical investigations—less research is done into causes or disruptive factors and more into results hoped for by artists. Occasionally, chance also plays a role.[i]
Especially in music (jazz, contemporary music, some varieties of pop) and in the performing arts, improvisation is added as a further experimental approach. However, variations of this can also be found in the visual arts, beyond ZERO, Fluxus, and Happenings. Since the nineteen-sixties, for example, the Austrian Actionists around Hermann Nitsch (Das Orgien Mysterien Theater) or Otto Muehl were known for their hard-to-calculate, sometimes shocking spectacles, which often led to confrontations with the police or judiciary. In a conversation, Muehl once described the experimental practice of Aktionismus as “therapeutic acting out,” which he had pursued as a kind of research.[ii]
Mack, Piene, Uecker, and others in their circle were among those artistic personalities who questioned cultural traditions and were able to transform old images into new views and images by means of experiments. However, this was not a unique specialty of ZERO.
RW: As early as 1966, ZERO disbanded as a group at the instigation of Heinz Mack—and yet ZERO still exists, at least in the art world. How can that be explained?
AJW: We should not put certain terms in connection with ZERO on the gold scale, but rather understand them as what they often are, namely self-descriptions or often even later attributions. This is also true for the now frequently used term “ZERO movement”: In sociology and social psychology, “movements” are seen as collective actors or organized social systems that use specific mobilization strategies and forms of action to try to influence social change, whether forward or backward. In the case of ZERO, however, both the collective organization and the goal-oriented social action were lacking—the initiators saw themselves as thoroughly competitive individuals with independent artistic goals and signatures who, moreover, unlike Fluxus, remained committed to the concept of the “work” in the old artistic tradition. Possibly their rejection of outdated structures and ways of thinking could still be seen as an indication of a “movement” for which, from the point of view of systems theory, protests are regarded as “elementary operations.”[iii] Piene, Mack, and Uecker, in their “mobilization communication”[iv] for art events, did in part take up the desire or even hunger, especially of younger people in the postwar population, for sociocultural change. However, the ZERO demonstration on July 5, 1961, in the old part of Düsseldorf, was not an example of political or social “protest,” but was intended primarily, and thus self-referentially, as PR for the Schmela Gallery’s publication ZERO 3.[v]
RW: Then what other term would be more appropriate to describe the ZERO collaboration?
AJW: Günther Uecker (b. 1930) even rejected terms like “group” or “association” because the collaboration with other artists at that time was so “open” and informal.[vi] For this reason, too, one could perhaps speak quite neutrally of a ZERO initiative or an artistic “platform”—at first rather regional, then soon Europe-wide. Today, the term “community” might even be appropriate,[vii] which is understood as a group with common or similar interests, values, or ideas, in which experiences are regularly exchanged and where the participants become active for certain goals. Common goals can legitimately include the desire to become better known, to conquer a space in the art market, which was largely closed to new ideas at the time, and thereby to change it in the long term; and indeed, these were important motives for the collaboration at ZERO, as interviews with the protagonists suggest. A resounding success in the art market could not yet be achieved in the few years they spent together, but occurred all the more so following their separation in 1966, after which the ZERO initiators made individual careers in Europe and the USA.
RW: This sheds light on the cultural situation fifteen to twenty years after World War II. How should we imagine the “art climate” during that time?
AJW: Basically, in the first decade of the German postwar period, an art market open to radical new ideas did not yet exist—in literature, some publishers were already more courageous, such as Rowohlt with its “rotation novels” on newsprint. Likewise, there was hardly any cultural policy promoting such endeavors, and most of the relevant prizes or scholarships did not come into being until later.[viii] And the shortage was by no means limited to the material; there were also major sociocultural deficits. The art scholar and psychologist Friedrich Wolfram Heubach castigated aesthetic tendencies and the intellectual climate of the nineteen-fifties as a “stuffy culture of repression” with the “hardly coincidental concurrence of history denial and Informel, conflict taboo and abstractionism, hostility to intellectuals and Ecole de Paris,” accompanied by “invocations of an obscure occidental heritage,” by “militant bigotry” and the search for “actuality” or “depth.”[ix] According to Heubach, therefore, new groupings such as Happenings, Fluxus, and Situationism, directed against such conditions, were also no accident. An exhibition at Wuppertal’s Von der Heydt Museum in 2022[x] suggested that ZERO could be seen as an experimental forerunner of these and other artistic initiatives at the time.
[i] For example, in the case of Heinz Mack’s discovery of the “Light Relief” by accidentally stepping on aluminum foil. See Helga Meister, ZERO in der Düsseldorfer Szene, Piene, Uecker, Mack (Düsseldorf, 2006), p. 61.
[ii] On the relation between art and psychoanalysis, see Harald Falckenberg, ed., Otto Mühl: Retrospektive (Frankfurt, 2005), pp. 29–31.
[iii] Niklas Luhmann, Protest: Systemtheorie und soziale Bewegungen (Frankfurt, 1996).
[iv] Heinrich W. Ahlemeyer, “What is a Social Movement? On the Distinction and Unity of a Social Phenomenon,” Journal of Sociology 18 (1989): 175–91.
[v] Otto Piene, in Meister 2006 (see note 22), p. 35.
[vi] Günther Uecker, in Meister 2006 (see note 22), p. 77.
[vii] Here understood as an “analog” grouping with different artistic interests and signatures, and thus to be distinguished from today’s “virtual communities” that often discuss global challenges (see, for instance, Oliver Basciano, “What Does the ‘Global South’ Even Mean?” ArtReview, August 23, 2023, https://artreview.com/what-does-the-global-south-even-mean/), as well as, of course, from artistic “collectives” à la documenta fifteen. See https://documenta- fifteen.de/en/ (accessed August 2023).
[viii] For data on this for the period from 1945 to the late 1970s, see Karla Fohrbeck and Andreas Joh. Wiesand, Handbuch der Kulturpreise und der individuellen Künstlerförderung (Cologne, 1978).
[ix] Friedrich Wolfram Heubach, “Die Kunst der sechziger Jahre: Anmerkungen in ent/täuschender Absicht,” in Wulf Herzogenrath and Gabriele Lueg, eds., Die 60er Jahre: Kölns Weg zur Kunstmetropole Vom Happening zum Kunstmarkt, exh. cat. Kölnischer Kunstverein (Cologne, 1985), p. 113.
[x] ZERO, POP und Minimal—Die 1960er und 1970er, exh. cat. Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal (Wuppertal, 2023).
RW: If you read the catalogs of the many ZERO exhibitions through the decades, including international ones, it is striking that art scholars, museum people, and critics struggle to identify anything like a common “ZERO signature.”
AJW: The exhibition ZERO, from spring 2015, with works by about forty male and only three female artists (!) at Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam is still considered a milestone on the way to a better understanding of this art initiative. The exhibition made clear that this understanding is less to be gained—as with many other artistic groupings of the twentieth century—through commonalities in subjects and techniques or forms of action of the participants. Rather, the exhibition catalog states, despite some conceptual commonalities,[i] there is a great “heterogeneity” of work. A scholarly symposium held in Berlin, parallel to the show and in cooperation with the Akademie der Künste, also struggled to develop conclusive analytical tools for ZERO art. A report by Barbara Wiegand for Deutschlandfunk Kultur[ii] outlined the approach of the exhibition’s curators, who had arranged some 200 works according to themes such as color, light, structure, and movement, and sought to demonstrate what constitutes ZERO through various research findings:
[i] These could include, for example, a “newfound spatial thinking” in art, as Barbara Könches put it at the ZERO ABC workshop in Düsseldorf on September 2, 2023.
[ii] Barbara Wiegand, “ZERO-Kunst im Martin Gropius Bau: Aus der Leere wollten sie Neues schaffen,” Deutschlandfunk, March 20, 2015, https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/zero-kunst-im-martin-gropius-bau-aus-der-leere-wollten-sie-100.html (accessed August 2023).
“We have to forget everything we have learned. And we have to make an attempt to start all over again, to look for the beginning. And this in a situation where the horror vacui, the emptiness, was all around us. To make the first discoveries in this emptiness, to make experiments and to find a new beginning, that was a very essential moment.”[i]
[i] Heinz Mack, quoted in Wiegand 2015 (see note 33).
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.
“Who would think that the use of silicone rubber and rigid foam in modern foundry technology was originally developed by sculptors for complicated casting techniques? What architect or advertising expert still thinks of Raoul Hausmann and John Heartfield when using photomontage? Who still cares that today’s most widespread printing technique, the offset process, is largely based on an invention made and further developed by artists?”[i]
[i] Günter Drebusch, lecture at the conference Art as an Economic Factor of the Christian Democrats parliamentary group, June 1983, quoted in Karla Fohrbeck and Andreas Joh. Wiesand, Von der Industriegesellschaft zur Kulturgesellschaft? (Munich, 1989), p. 81.
Others highlight the innovative role of creative professionals in artistic experimentation with “new media,” which today also enable non-linear forms of communication.[i] Leading companies in the creative sector have recognized this potential of artistic research and productivity for some time, for example Edgar Bronfman, then CEO of Warner, at the Freedom Foundation Convention in Aspen in 2005: “Technology shapes music and music influences technology. The best proof for that is the iPod.”[ii] Ironically, however, this example illustrates that some technological innovations and related consumer goods can have a relatively short half-life, while artistic innovations linked to them may survive for quite some time.
RW: Can you place ZERO in such processes of valorization and, to some extent, popularization of new technology?
AJW: Otto Piene, who became a professor of environmental art at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1972 and was director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies there from 1974, probably comes closest among the ZERO initiators to this (today no longer exotic) role of the artist through his experiments and strategies of combining art with technical innovations. However, this was long frowned upon in art discourse, as contemporary witness Marita Bombek (University of Cologne) recalls: “That was a taboo. I always argued with him about that back then.” She continues: “He not only thought across disciplines, but also acted that way.”[iii] Stephen Wilson, himself from MIT, analyzes the potential of artists like Piene this way:
[i] Dieter Daniels, Kunst als Sendung: Von der Telegraphie zum Internet (Munich, 2002).
[ii] Andreas Joh. Wiesand in cooperation with Michael Söndermann, The “Creative Sector”: An Engine for Diversity, Growth and Jobs in Europe(Amsterdam, 2005), p. 15.
[iii] Marita Bombek, quoted in Robert Filgner, “‘Ja, ich träumte von einer besseren Welt—sollte ich von einer schlechteren träumen?,’” Kölner Universitätsmagazin 2 (2015), p. 50.
“At the early stages of an emerging technology, the power of artistic work derives in part from the cultural act of claiming it for creative production and commentary. In this regard, the early history of computer graphics and animation in some ways mimics the early history of photography and cinema.”[i]
[i] Stephen Wilson, Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology (Cambridge, MA, 2002), p. 10.
RW: Finally, was there also a “European ZERO hour”?
AJW: In fact, the (quickly successful) European networking could perhaps be seen as one of the most important joint “experiments” of the German ZERO initiators and their partners. After all, that was not a matter of course in the postwar period, when the Nazi years had not yet really been dealt with. They were not afraid to exchange ideas with colleagues (only a few female artists among them) from many other countries with the aim of increasing the visibility of their art, and also to form alliances, especially for exhibitions in various places in Europe. This was then apostrophized both by the artists themselves in the ZERO manifesto of 1963 and later again in a retrospective by Thekla Zell in the catalog of the 2015 Berlin exhibition as the “traveling circus ZERO.” Nevertheless, perhaps apart from similar developments in the Netherlands, the few years the ZERO protagonists spent together are probably better classified as a phenomenon of the German art scene in the mid-twentieth century. Then, over the decades, ZERO was able to maintain, and develop further, its function as a kind of unique Düsseldorf “umbrella brand” with appeal in the international art scene.
This text has been translated from German into English by Andreas Joh. Wiesand.
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