F Fire

Over 174,000 hectares of land in Greece burned last summer in the largest forest and bush fires in the history of the European Union.[i] Also in 2023, Canada experienced its most devastating forest fire season since records began.[ii] Such disasters are due to heatwaves, among other things, that are exacerbated by human-made global warming, and the ecological consequences for flora and fauna are devastating. Although we live in a highly technological civilization, we experience fire as an overwhelming, elemental force of nature, just as people must have experienced it in ancient times. For centuries, Christians believed that this force of nature was a “punishment from God”—purgatory and the embers of hell.[iii] However, when it is tamed and tended, fire is an essential basis of technology and culture, whether as a warming hearth, a forge fire, or, above all, a source of light. This dual character of the elements was already described by Ovid (43 BCE–17 CE) in the Metamorphoses (first century CE). His natural philosophical observations describe nature as an

[i] See “Seasonal Trend for European Union: Fires Mapped in EFFIS of Approx. 30 ha or Larger,” European Forest Fire Information System (website), https://effis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/apps/effis.statistics/seasonaltrend (accessed October 6, 2023).

[ii] Dan Stillman, “This is Canada’s Worst Wildfire Season on Record, Researchers Say,” The Washington Post, September 15, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/09/13/canada-wildfire-smoke-climate-change/ (accessed October 6, 2023).

[iii] Gernot Böhme and Hartmut Böhme, Feuer, Wasser, Erde, Luft: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Elemente (Munich, 2014), p. 287.

Of the generation who grew up during World War II (1939–45), ZERO founders Heinz Mack (b. 1931) and Otto Piene (1928–2014) experienced all the negative aspects of fire during their childhood and youth. As a boy, Mack took a photo with his “accordion Agfa” folding camera when the city of Krefeld was bombed. This led—unconsciously, according to Mack—to his later drawing Schwarze Strahlung (Black Radiation), 1960, where the charcoal hatching towers upwards like the beams of anti-aircraft searchlights.[i] And when Piene developed his Light Ballets, he referred to his experiences as a young Luftwaffe auxiliary:[ii] “So far, we have left it to the war to devise a naive light ballet for the night sky, just as we have left it to the war to illuminate the sky with colored signs and artificial and instigated conflagrations.”[iii]

In the art of ZERO, we find unstable and volatile substances such as fire and smoke, as well as ice, water, mist, wind, and light—substances with which the artists sought to “immaterialize” their works.[iv] They declared the four elements of earth, water, air, and fire to be the tools of their art, seeking to bring about harmony in the relationship between humankind and nature.[v] Mack and Piene illustrated this intention in the publication ZERO 3: the first pages showed images of the starry night sky, the sun behind a veil of clouds, the surface of the sea with reflected sunlight, a blanket of snow covering the land, and sand dunes in the desert.[vi] Mack, Piene, Uecker, and their artist friends were seeking to touch the entire cosmos, as their works, texts, and projects illustrate.

[i] See 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), p. 68.

[ii] Thomas Kellein, Zwischen Sputnik-Schock und Mondlandung: Künstlerische Grossprojekte von Yves Klein zu Christo (Stuttgart, 1989), p. 62.

[iii] Otto Piene, “Wege zum Paradies,” in ZERO 3, eds. Heinz Mack and Otto Piene (Düsseldorf, 1961), n.p.

[iv] Ulrike Schmitt-Voigts, Der Doppelaspekt von Materialität und Immaterialität in den Werken der ZERO-Künstler 1957–67, Ph.D. diss. (University of Cologne, 2013), p. 12.

[v] See 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), p. 376.

[vi] Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, eds., ZERO 3 (Düsseldorf, 1961).

An important text in this context is Heinz Mack’s Sahara Project, conceived in 1958/59 and first published in ZERO 3 in 1961. In the text, Mack presents a jardin artificiel with thirteen stations, in which his sculptural objects interact with the space and the light of the desert. The project is based on the idea that artistic works that capture, collect, and potentiate the light on their surface become vibrating “apparitions of light” in immense, light-flooded spaces such as the Sahara. The Sahara Project contains many proposals for integrating fire into the Jardin Artificiel: rasters of rising columns of smoke and fire, catapults of light, and artificial suns.[i]

[i] Heinz Mack, “The Sahara Project” (1961), in Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, eds., ZERO, trans. Howard Beckman (Cambridge, MA, 1973), pp 180–84.

In the years following the conception of this project, Mack made several visits to the world’s sand and ice deserts to realize his Jardin Artificiel; his expeditions to the largest sand dune seas of the Sahara, the Grand Erg Oriental and Occidental, are particularly worthy of mention. In 1968, he filmed parts of the award-winning film Tele-Mack with Hans Emmerling (1932–2022) and Edwin Braun in Tunisia, and in 1976 the Expedition into Artificial Gardens took place in Algeria, which the photographer Thomas Höpker documented for Sternmagazine and in a lavishly illustrated book.[i]

[i] Tele-Mack, 1968, directed by Hans Emmerling and Heinz Mack, camera: Edwin Braun, 45 min., 40 sec. (Institut für Moderne Kunst Nürnberg, produced by Telefilm Saar on behalf of Saarländische Rundfunk and WDR, Westdeutsches Fernsehen); Axel Hecht, “Heinz Mack und Thomas Höpker, Expedition in künstliche Gärten,” Stern, 29, no. 45, November 4–10, 1976, pp. 36–56; Henri Nannen, ed., Expedition in Künstliche Gärten (Hamburg, 1977).

In 1997, Mack executed further stations of the Sahara Project in the Wahiba Sands of Oman. He installed a Light Stele, fourteen meters high, that consisted of twenty-one aluminum reflectors, which were spanned and held in place by thin nylon ropes. Positioning the Light Stele on the crest of a high sand dune, he waited for dusk to take the perfect photo. During sunset, which only lasts for a few minutes in the desert, Mack was able to photographically capture a completely unique light phenomenon. In each of the twenty-one reflectors, the setting sun was multiplied many times as a red ball of light, while the sky and sand turned the same color.[i]The Great Light Stele, with its fiery red evening light, as photographed by Mack in the Wahiba Sands, is clearly associated with the element of fire, with the glow of the sun, which governs the diurnal rhythm that determines life, light, and color on our planet.

[i] Uwe Rüth, “Heinz Mack und sein Sahara-Projekt,” in MACK: Licht der Wüste, Licht des Eismeers, exh. cat. Skulpturenmuseum (Marl, 2001), p. 34.

The photo of the Great Light Stele in the Wahiba Sands also emphasizes the media aspect of the Sahara Project. Mack took the reflectors to the desert, installed his Light Stele there, and photographed it. He then dismantled the stele and transported all the parts back to his studio.[i] The Light Stele was only a visible, tangible reality for a brief period of time in the Wahiba Sands; the viewer’s reception of the object takes place solely through its photographic reproduction.

[i] Sophia Sotke, Mack—Sahara: Von ZERO zur Land Art. Das Sahara-Projekt von Heinz Mack, 1959–1997 (Munich, 2022), p. 104.

When Tele-Mack was screened on WDR (West German Broadcasting) in 1969, Mack pointed out that the film was not a feature about an art exhibition, but that the film itself was the exhibition: “The premiere and the duration of the exhibition are identical.” [i] It was about showing works of art exclusively and only once on television, as Mack explained: “All the objects that I show in this exhibition can only be made known to the public through television, and will be destroyed by me in the end.”[ii]

[i] Heinz Mack, quoted in Eo Plunien, “Silberstelen in der Sahara,” in Die Welt, January 23, 1969 (Archive Heinz Mack).

[ii] Heinz Mack, quoted in Barbara Hess, “Abendschau: Drei Filme über Kunst,” in Ulrike Groos et al, eds., Ready to Shoot: Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum, exh. cat. Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (Cologne, 2003), p. 19.

The film Tele-Mack features another work by Mack that utilized the luminous and destructive power of fire. First designed in 1963 for the Foire de Paris fair, the Feuerschiff (Fire Ship) consisted of a raft carrying a wooden frame, like the rafters of a roof, which was set in motion on the water. It combined the elements of fire and water, whereby the water was a surface that reflected the fire. Fireworks were attached to the wooden frame, elements soaked in phosphorus were fixed to the struts, and tubs full of petrol were ignited on the roofridge, forming a comb of fire. Mack had devised a choreography for the fire, which he planned to direct precisely by remote control. On a quarry pond near Mönchengladbach, Mack staged the Fire Ship for the film Tele-Mack:he let it glide on a string onto the lake with the aim of igniting the pyrotechnics on an hourly basis. “However, it was a damp evening and the remote ignition didn’t work,” recalled Hans Emmerling. “So we had to pull the ship ashore again and light it with a torch. When everything was on fire, we filmed it with three cameras.”[i] As a construction that first performs a spectacle of light before it ultimately self-destructs, the Fire Ship is an immaterial light event that transcends the materiality of the work.[ii] “Although it might appear that I have devoted my work exclusively to light,” Mack wrote in 1966, “I want to declare that my sole intention has always been, and still is, to make objects whose mode of appearance is immaterial.”[iii] In addition to light and movement, he uses fire to this end.

[i] Hans Emmerling in conversation with Annette Bosetti, in Jürgen Wilhelm, ed., Mack im Gespräch (Munich, 2015), p. 60.

[ii] In 1968, the Fire Ship was filmed for the TV production Tele-Mack at a quarry pond near Mönchengladbach. The work was reprised in 1979 at the Lichtfeste (Light Festivals) in Duisburg and Stuttgart, and in 2010 at Düsseldorf’s Medienhafen.

[iii] Heinz Mack, “Licht ist nicht Licht” (1966), in Mack: Lichtkunst, exh. cat. Kunstmuseum Ahlen (Cologne, 1994), p. 1.

In 1960, Mack presented Hommage à Georges de La Tour at the Galerie Diogenes in Berlin. A picture by this Baroque artist, in whose paintings candlelight is omnipresent, was projected onto the wall.[i] Mack traced the contours of the depicted candle and redrew them with phosphorescent paint. After the opening address, he switched off the projector so that only the phosphorescent outline of the candle on the wall could be seen in the darkness. On a piece of mirror foil two meters square, he arranged 200 lighted candles in a strict pattern in the gallery’s basement. “On the evening of the vernissage, about the same number of people filled the basement rooms and it soon became very warm,”[ii] Mack recalled. Using a white tablecloth that had first been dipped into a bowl of water, two young women extinguished the “fire board”—reminiscent of a fakir’s bed—by holding the cloth over the flickering, vibrant flames and then dropping it at the moment Mack called out “ZERO” during the countdown. “Due to being suddenly plunged into darkness, our inner eye projected an unreal afterimage.”[iii] Mack reprised the candle installation in a modified form in 1965 at the Galerie Schmela (Schmela Gallery) in Düsseldorf.

[i] The painting, Die Auffindung des Heiligen Sebastian (The Finding of Saint Sebastian), ca. 1649, in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, is a copy of a work by Georges de la Tour.

[ii] Heinz Mack, “Kommentar zur 1. Hommage à Georges de La Tour in der Galerie Diogenes, Berlin 1960,” in Mack: Lichtkunst 1994 (see note 19), p. 181.

[iii] Mack, “Kommentar,” in Mack: Lichtkunst 1994 (see note 19).

Otto Piene, whose “Feueratelier” (fire studio) still exists in the ZERO foundation’s building, also used the destructive power of fire as a strategy for creating art. In 1957, he began using stencils with punched holes to apply paint to canvas.[i] From 1959 onwards, these Rasterbilder (Grid Paintings) were followed by his Rauchzeichnungen (Smoke Drawings), for which Piene “sieved” the smoke from a circle of candles or kerosene lamps, through the grid holes, onto paper. The smoldering smoke passed through the holes and left patterns of dots on the paper’s surface, evoking the interplay of light and shadow, structured in series. Piene also used fire to create charred residues on canvas or paper. He slightly burned the layers of paint applied to canvases to create thick blackened surfaces with subtle color variations, sometimes displaying figurative forms. His Fire Paintings exhibit the crusts and bubbles left behind by fire on the canvas, which frequently form round shapes reminiscent of the sun or the moon. Poetic titles such as Die Sonne brennt (The Sun Is Burning) (1966) refer to the stars and the elements.[ii]

[i] See Edouard Derom, “The New Definition of Painting,” in ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s–60s, exh. cat. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, 2014), p. 88.

[ii] See Susanne Rennert and Stephan von Wiese, eds., Otto Piene: Retrospektive, 1952–1996, exh. cat. Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (Cologne, 1996), p. 51; Edouard Derom, “Burning, Cutting, Nailing,” in ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow 2014 (see note 23), p. 142.

Manfred Schneckenburger (1938–2019) described Piene as a “magician” of the elements of fire, air, and light. According to him, Piene was “the most precise artistic strategist for the various intersections of the panel painting with the new processes of light, fire, and smoke.” His paintings can be described as “manifestations of the elements themselves” because Piene used fire to explore the natural melting processes of pigment, smoke, and fixative. The results are paintings in which the flowing, streaming, gelatinizing, dying off, and formation of bubbles are halted at the moment of coagulation. Thus Piene transformed the panel painting into an instrument for capturing, structuring, and nuancing immaterial optical energy.[i]

[i] Manfred Schneckenburger, “Die schiere Schönheit und der Wolkenzug,” in Ante Glibota, ed., Otto Piene (Villorba, 2011), pp. 87–88.

The two ZERO founders, Mack and Piene, were not the only artists to use destruction by fire as a strategy of artistic creation. In particular, some members of the Nouveaux Réalisme movement—who came together in 1960, headed by the critic Pierre Restany (1930–2003)—used fire and destruction to create art, such as Arman (1928–2005) and Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002).[i] The Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri (b. 1930) contributed a “Pyromaniacal Guide” to the magazine ZERO 3. On the last page of the publication, readers were invited to burn the magazine with a match that was enclosed. After explaining in detail how to strike a match, it said:

[i] Arman made a collage on paper of an exploded firework, and also, in a spectacular action, blew up a sports car, which he then presented on the wall as a quasi-destroyed readymade (White Orchid, 1963). Niki de Saint Phalle pursued a similarly destructive-creative approach with her series Tirs, beginning in 1961. See Pierre Restany, “Die Beseelung des Objekts” (1961), in Dirk Pörschmann, ed., ZERO und Nouveau Réalisme: Die Befragung der Wirklichkeit, exh. cat. Stiftung Ahlers Pro Arte (Hannover, 2016), pp. 57–64.

Similar to Mack’s Fire Ship, the self-destructing installations by Jean Tinguely (1925–1991) stage the power of fire and explosions as an ephemeral art event. In 1960, he realized his sensational Homage to New York in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art, in which a kinetic sculpture of monumental proportions self-destructed in an automated process.[i] After his success in New York, American television became aware of Tinguely and produced a film in the Nevada desert about his Study for an End of the World No. 2, in 1962. Together with Niki de Saint Phalle, he collected debris, scrap metal, bulk waste, fireworks, and dynamite, and deposited these on the Jean Dry Lake in Nevada. The construction of the sculpture from these materials and its spectacular explosion were filmed by NBC.[ii] As with Mack’s Fire Ship in the film Tele-Mack, the reception of Tinguely’s work takes place exclusively via the medium of film. But unlike Mack, whose aim was to achieve an ephemeral, spectacular light event, Tinguely saw his Study for an End of the World as a sociopolitical commentary on a world replete with superfluous and discarded consumer goods.[iii]

[i] See Tiziana Caianiello, “Between Media: Connections between Performance and Installation Art, and Their Implications for Conservation,” Beiträge zur Erhaltung von Kunst- und Kulturgut 1 (2018), pp. 102–110.

[ii] The first Study for an End of the World was presented in 1961 at the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, Denmark; see Emily Eliza Scott, “Desert Ends,” in Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon, eds., Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 (Munich, 2012), pp. 67–91.

[iii] See ibid., p. 76.

While Tinguely and Saint Phalle celebrated the explosion, Yves Klein (1928–1962) used fire to produce paintings, sculptures, and architecture. His first experiment with fire, in 1957, was the Tableau de Feu bleu d’une minute (One-Minute Blue Light Table), a wooden panel painted blue on which he positioned and lit sixteen Bengal lights. When Klein presented the work at the Colette Allendy Gallery in Paris, it created a virtual IKB (International Klein Blue)[i] as an afterimage in the eyes of the spectators, as the fire combined with the blue hue to form an immaterial monochrome. From 1961 onwards, Klein created his Peintures de Feu, which he produced with flamethrowers.[ii] In 1961, the exhibition Yves Klein: Monochrome und Feuer (Monochromes and Fire) took place at the Haus Lange Museum in Krefeld, where a Feuermauer (Fire Wall) consisting of one hundred flames, and Feuerfontänen (Fire Fountains), were presented in the museum’s garden.[iii] Klein regarded fire, like each of the four elements, as a central and constituent part of architecture, and he expressed this in his Projekt für eine Luftarchitektur (Project for Aerial Architecture), together with the architect Werner Ruhnau (1922–2015), in ZERO 3.[iv]

[i] International Klein Blue (IKB) is a shade of deep blue that was first mixed by Yves Klein; see Robert Fleck, Yves Klein: L’aventure allemande (Paris, 2018), pp. 24–25.

[ii] Colette Angeli, “Peindre avec le feu: Aubertin, Burri, Klein, Peeters, Piene,” in Claire Bonnevie, ed., Le Ciel Comme Atelier: Yves Klein et ses Contemporains (Metz, 2020), pp. 82–83.

[iii] See Antje Kramer-Mallordy and Rotraut Klein-Moquay, Yves Klein: Germany (Paris, 2017), p. 193.

[iv] Yves Klein and Werner Ruhnau, “Projekt für eine Luftarchitektur,” in Mack and Piene 1961 (see note 10), n.p.

The works of the ZERO artists that integrate fire are poised between creation and destruction. While Tinguely and Saint Phalle created their works through destructive acts,[i] the light and color of the element of fire were celebrated by Mack with his Fire Ship, by Piene with his Fire Paintings, and by Klein with his Fire Fountains. The light shed by the flames of candles can be found in Bernard Aubertin’s Tableau—feu de poche[ii] and Mack’s Hommage à Georges de La Tour. Other ZERO artists, whose works and projects are not discussed here, also explored the power of fire—for example, Henk Peeters, with his Pyrographien (Pyrographs), and Günther Uecker (b. 1930), with his Beschiessung des Meeres mit Feuerpfeilen (Shooting Flaming Arrows at the Sea), of 1970.[iii] What all these artists have in common is that they utilized fire in an endeavor to immaterialize their works. With regard to the forces and energies acting upon them, the materials of these artworks themselves evoke independent constellations that change over time; therefore, the works can be understood as things that temporarily transcend the boundaries of the objects, and, when viewed, appear to exist in the present.[iv] In ephemeral, destructive works such as the Fire Ship and Study for an End of the World No. 2, the existence of the artwork, therefore, shifts from real object to media reproduction.

[i] Restany in Pörschmann 2016 (see note 26), p. 64.

[ii] The Tableau—feu de poche by Bernard Aubertin was created solely in order to be subsequently burned. This was how the match became Aubertin’s hallmark. See Angeli 2020 (see note 32), pp. 82–83. Mack’s work Der Engel des Bösen (The Angel of Evil), ca. 1968, with its subtitle Gruss an Aubertin (Greetings to Aubertin), was a project for a ten-meter-tall matchstick. See Mack: Lichtkunst1994 (see note 19), pp. 182–83.

[iii] On Peeters, see Angeli 2020 (see note 32); on Uecker, see Katrin Salwig and Klaus Gereon Beuckers, “Verzeichnis der Aktionen von Günther Uecker, 1958–1975,” in Klaus Gereon Beuckers, ed., Günther Uecker: Die Aktionen (Petersberg, 2004), pp. 219–28.

[iv] Schmitt-Voigts 2013 (see note 8), p. 12.

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