2 Implementation

Against this background of a psychogram of “homo miserabilis,”[i] paintings and sculptures emerged whose attitude avant-garde artists wanted to break away from; an avant-garde whose biographical recollections were not absorbed, dominated, or blocked by their war experiences—although these certainly affected them. With ambition and a considerable amount of self-confidence, they demanded and dared to set in motion a departure for a new age. The artistic as well as intellectual protagonists of this were Heinz Mack (b. 1931) and Otto Piene (1928–2014), who were later joined by Günther Uecker (b. 1930). After some initial meetings, they decided to name their hitherto informal group “ZERO.”[ii] Already in the first period of their activities, they opened up to like-minded people with their “Evening Exhibitions,” which came easily to them because they did not call into question the individual nature of artistic creation and did not prescribe any one “style.” These exhibitions, which took place in a very small art space and lasted for just one evening, were born out of necessity, because there were no galleries that were willing to take on something new. In the nineteen-fifties, the miasma of a conservative understanding of art was all-pervasive, and only a few courageous people opposed it. Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s (1881–1919) sculptures, Ernst Wilhelm Nay’s (1902–1968) disk paintings, and a few other artistic approaches, were exceptions; they began to assert themselves cautiously and only gradually, for the Expressionism of the prewar period had been condemned as “degenerate art” during the Nazi era and its proponents sanctioned. Even Surrealism did not receive much attention in Germany until the late nineteen-fifties, after Max Ernst (1891–1976), Hans Arp (1886–1966), and Joan Miró (1893–1983) had won prizes for sculpture and painting at the 1954 Biennale di Venezia. But the avant-gardes of international art did not live and work in Germany anyway; they were in New York and Paris.

In addition, the circle of collectors of artworks was still very small, since most Germans had to concentrate on the reconstruction of their country and on making a living. Had it not been for Alfred Schmela (1918–1980), an open-minded Düsseldorf gallery owner who was interested in the unorthodox and who dared to make a start with Yves Klein (1928–1962), before featuring the work of ZERO extensively, there would not have been any press coverage of or interest in ZERO’s activities. Such coverage as there was, however, was for the most part remarkably conservative.[iii]

Thus, ZERO broke with the past and communicated a completely new sense of free-spiritedness, optimism, and the hope for allies in an international context. Courageously, they shook off the ballast of the past and shattered the numbness—the cramping, protective cloak of art that implemented a point of view from the history of the Nazi era. In his “poetically formulated manifesto,” Heinz Mack summarized the inspirational feeling during the first years of ZERO:

[i] Wieland Schmied, “Notizen zu ‘ZERO,’” in Mack, Piene, Uecker, exh. cat. Kestner Gesellschaft (Hannover, 1965), p. 8.

[ii] How the name actually came about in connection with the 7th Evening Exhibition is evidenced by remarks by Otto Piene and Heinz Mack, even though there are different nuances in the remembered details. 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. 102.

[iii] See, for example, the articles in Frankfurter Rundschau, July 20, 1959, and in Die Welt, July 25, 1961, reprinted 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), pp. 41, 63.

In terms of art history, ZERO not only conveyed a new image of the forces of nature and the potential of technology, which at that time still seemed to promise a hopeful future that would not come up against ecological limits, but kinetics also played a prominent role. The heading of the 8th Evening Exhibition in 1958, with the publication of ZERO 2, was Vibration, a thoroughly baffling title for an art exhibition at that time. The terms “Light Ballet” and “Structure,” which Piene and Mack used there, changed the perception of contemporary art after the dominance of Expressionism, Informalism, and Surrealism. Asked about his reason for using nails, Günther Uecker replied: “I finally wrote a Transgression Manifesto on the occasion of an exhibition … and I nailed texts to the floor.… ‘Art floods the world’ is the name of the game.”[i]

Earth, materials, and war were not the points of reference that Heinz Mack and Otto Piene wanted to invoke with their art at the end of the nineteen-fifties. With the turn away from paintings on walls, and thus the necessity of having walls at all in exhibition spaces (museums, galleries, et cetera); with the radical concentration on light, fire, air, the infinity of outer space, and the barely comprehensible emptiness of a desert; and with Günther Uecker, who understood and used the nail as a new “linguistic device,”[ii] a new horizon opened up, which quickly established itself internationally through lively and mutually beneficial exchanges with other artists. In particular, the encounters with Arman (1928–2005), Lucio Fontana (1899–1968), Klein, Piero Manzoni (1933–1963), Jean Tinguely (1925–1991), Jef Verheyen (1932–1984), as well as others, helped quickly to establish the Evening Exhibitions that were initially focused on the German (Düsseldorf) art scene, and to expand ZERO’s theoretical and artistic approach. Rarely was a historical image corrected so fast;[iii] rarely did a young generation from Paris to Düsseldorf and from Milan to Amsterdam take such a vehement and sustained stand against the art establishment. This was due not least to the friendly and open collaboration between many of the protagonists who had found their way to a radical form of art (for example, Mack met Fontana through Manzoni in Milan as early as 1959), and to Klein, who possessed almost boundless energy and was forever seeking new paths without compromise, and Tinguely, who introduced kinetics into art. Gradually, museums and international galleries opened up to the new tendencies, from Paris to New York and Amsterdam, and—time and again—in Düsseldorf, with Schmela to the fore.

[i] Günther Uecker, in Günther Uecker and Heinz-Norbert Jocks, “Die Chiffren des Seins,” in Bleicker-Honisch and Lenz 2009 (see note 3), p. 119.

[ii] Ibid., p. 118.

[iii] Manfred Schneckenburger, “ZERO oder der Aufbruch zur immateriellen Struktur,” in Gruppe Zero, exh. cat. Galerie Schoeller (Düsseldorf, 1988), p. 8.

Yet even if it is successful in the end, the road to international recognition is far from an easy one. New developments always run up against well-guarded walls at first. And new developments that are understood as progress always require the breaking of established taboos. The lean period until recognition is achieved, which then allows an artist to live adequately from their art, is usually long. And, last but not least, many artists despair on the stony road to independence and give up. Not so the three decisive protagonists of ZERO.

Many things contributed to this. In addition to the compelling artworks themselves, with their abundance of new materials (fire, light, metal, kinetics, nails) and the actions that blew away the dust of the nineteen-fifties, from the very beginning the ideas that tied Mack, Piene, and later Uecker to ZERO were transported preeminently by its theoretical dimension. This dimension should not be underestimated. The ZERO textual works, published by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene (ZERO 1, 2, and 3), represent the first publicity offensive of a European art avant-garde to emanate from Germany since the publications of the Bauhaus, unshakably postulating its work in sociopolitical and art-historical terms.

Even after the end of ZERO, Mack, Piene, and Uecker documented, varied, and reaffirmed this basic understanding—albeit with different emphases in individual cases—in many conversations, interviews, catalog contributions, and so on. To this day, there is probably nobody in postwar art who has given more comprehensive and well-founded statements about the classification of their artworks and their underlying self-image than Mack, Piene, and Uecker. In the catalog of the exhibition at the Galerie Hubertus Schoeller (Schoeller Gallery) in 1988 alone—that is, over twenty years after the end of ZERO—they contributed considerably to understanding and situating the art-historical classification of their work with a “manifesto” (Uecker) and further explanatory statements.[i] This is another reason why ZERO is of enduring significance that goes far beyond German art history. The intellectual resources that contributed fundamentally to the inner stance of ZERO find their intellectual counterpart in the twentieth century with Surrealism, which—beginning initially with poetry and prose texts and their interpretation, primarily by André Breton (1896–1966)—found its way into the creation of visual art through Max Ernst and others. Other art trends have little that can compare with this; their interpretations stem largely from art-historical or art-critical write-ups.

Further, one should not underestimate the role that the inspirational team spirit of the three protagonists played, which existed and was conspicuous for some years. It was only in the community of ZERO that the artists came to life, and in part found themselves, becoming unique.[ii] Moreover, because of its theoretical foundations, ZERO evoked a sense of community among artists in many European countries; the exhibitions and the performances that often accompanied them radiated an enthusiasm not previously associated with Germany. It is hard to imagine this in the twenty-first century, but the regaining of internationality and the opportunity to travel and to build up contacts with people in the art scene were not things that could be taken for granted. Above all, it was necessary to reestablish trust and regain acceptance, which had been forfeited due to the atrocities committed in the Nazi era: contacts with the art world and any reciprocal intellectual cross-fertilization had been largely destroyed.

The emotional and partly spiritual side of ZERO was emphasized and brought to the fore from the outset, whereupon the ZERO artists had the gratifying realization that comparable aspirations existed among artists in many European countries, who enthusiastically welcomed contact with the initiative coming from Germany, and often cooperated. Without taking any direct political or social stance by making a public statement, the ZERO artists saw in their actions a force that could influence society. The references in their art to technology (Piene) and to materials used in industry (Mack), and the radical change of view through nailing (Uecker), testified to their search for a point of view that at the beginning was not yet entirely assured, nor was their own starting point confirmed. Yet their self-imposed aspiration was definitely to understand art as a means of knowing the world through making visible fundamental phenomena of the times and raising people’s awareness of them.[iii] Although the beginnings of ZERO can be interpreted as a turning away from the conventional understanding of art and its social reception, in ZERO 2 the role of the artist is described by Otto Piene soberly and without illusions:

[i] See Jürgen Wilhelm, ed., Mack im Gespräch (Munich, 2015); Jürgen Wilhelm, ed., Piene im Gespräch (Munich, 2015).

[ii] Wieland Schmied, “Etwas über ZERO,” in Pörschmann and Visser 2012 (see note 5), p. 16.

[iii] See Anette Kuhn, ZERO: Eine Avantgarde der sechziger Jahre (Frankfurt am Main and Berlin, 1991), pp. 179–80.

The question posed in ZERO 1 in 1958, “Does contemporary painting shape the world to a considerable degree?”—the question as to whether painting leads to noticeable changes in human behavior and activities—must remain open today, as it did then, despite many attempts to answer it.[1]

[1] See the compilation of highly individual responses in Pörschmann and Visser 2012 (see note 5), pp. 527–49.

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