L Light

But before examining ZERO’s light activities in detail, it might be helpful to summarize all the clues, the warning signs that preceded an almost simultaneous explosion across Europe of works, actions, and productions that took light as their subject.

It is well known that the twentieth century was a radically innovative period for art, thanks to the shared desire to minimize the boundary between art and life. This was the goal of all the avant-gardes, and the concept that paid the price was “representation”: all the traditional codes used by artistic languages (except for architecture, which stands apart) were based on this ideal pillar, which was eroded and finally demolished during the first three decades of the century. Artists realized that the whole “building of art” could stand alone, indeed the elimination of that central column left a more spacious environment. To be truthful, the concept was not deleted, outright, but rather transformed, turning the traditional language of representation into just one part of a broad pool of images, objects, and ideas that artists could draw on in their work. The minuscule but important difference between the “before” and “after” of this revolution is apparent when one compares the words “to represent” and “to stage,” which are both synonyms and antonyms. The dramatic, lit lightbulb on the canvas of Guernica (1937) can be compared with the neon in Fontana’s giant Spatial Concept that filled the entire staircase at the 1951 Milan Triennale.[i] The former “represents,” the latter “stages.” Between them lies the linguistic revolution of the century in which every real “object” can become an art object (while not “being” an art object in itself). Duchamp, Schwitters, Moholy-Nagy, but also the mirror fragment in a Cubist painting, or the glued newspaper in Futurist works, have all enabled reality to coincide with art through the artist’s conscious action.

[i] After a series of luminous “environments,” lit using a wide variety of light sources—like Wood’s light bulbs—Lucio Fontana created the aerial decoration for the grand staircase at the 9th Milan Triennale exhibition in 1951, in the building designed by the architect Giovanni Muzio in the nineteen-thirties, which has since then been the main venue for the event. This took the form of a series of very long neon tubes, curved to create spirals on the ceiling, as if the neon was the artist’s sign/mark translated into the new material. An authorized reconstruction of this Spatial Concept is permanently displayed at the Museo del Novecento in Milan.

In this situation, the first hurdle was to establish a philosophical justification for the extension and possible overlap of life and art, between reality and artistic “staging,” embracing the whole context of art, in the background until then, which would motivate that expressive possibility—and include it under the heading “art”—simply because it was inserted into a precise disciplinary context. Marcel Duchamp led the way. The second conceptual shift, derived from the first and in some ways—at least ideally—“easier,” concerned the objects, the instruments, and the concepts of reality that were displaced and incorporated into the language of art: the “readymades,” or Kurt Schwitters’s fragments of reality, and above all the works of László Moholy-Nagy. It was none other than this Hungarian artist who became the forerunner, the noble father, of the proliferation of light in the fifties and sixties: his Light Space Modulator of 1930 shows the revolution in progress, both plastically and synthetically, thanks to a complex “machine” of engines and transmission belts, illuminated by myriad lightbulbs, and built with the help of a specialized industry, looking like a “clockwork” object.[i] By doing so, he succeeded in focusing the latest concepts into a single work, revealing the narrow limits of tradition and the possible openings for the future of art: light and movement

[i] An accurate and autograph description by the artist is given in the useful book by Dieter Daniels and Rudolf Frieling, eds., Media Art Net 2 / Key Topics (Vienna and New York, 2005). See http://www. medienkunstnetz.de/works/licht-raum-modulator/ (accessed October 26, 2023).

The chronology of this difficult breakthrough of reality—and especially light—into artistic languages shows, among other things, how little individual linguistic territories and individual disciplines were open to other languages, which, perhaps, at certain junctures, had already worked out solutions to precisely the problems that similar languages were struggling to solve. In the theatre, for example, the question of light had already moved from being a technical problem to being a scenic resource, if not the scenography itself. Both the Futurists and the Bauhaus artists—notably Moholy-Nagy again, more so than Oskar Schlemmer—had put forward the idea of light scenography without meeting any major conceptual objections, quite the opposite to the situation of the language of art.[i]

Light and movement, therefore. It is no coincidence that half the titles of the exhibitions of ZERO, and most of the reviews of ZERO or of other members and groups of Kinetic Art, make explicit reference to these two concepts. Simply with regard to the early years, it is worth remembering exhibitions like the 8th Abendausstellung (Evening Exhibition), entitled Vibration; the 1959 exhibition in Antwerp on Motion in Vision, Vision in Motion—a clear reference to Moholy-Nagy, who wrote a text with a very similar title;[ii] the exhibition of Heinz Mack’s Light Reliefs at the Galerie Iris Clert in Paris, also in 1959; Otto Piene’s contemporary exhibition in Düsseldorf, where, alongside oil paintings, he created Lichtballet and exhibited Lichtmodelle; and, not least, the last of the nine “Abendausstellung”, in 1960, entitled Ein Fest für das Licht. However, because our ABCs of ZERO is assembled around single words, our focus will be on light, although we are well aware that light and motion are virtually inseparable and were treated as such by the artists. What’s more, if light is a vibration, we instinctively associate it with the idea of movement, one of the few things that art and science still have in common.

The first question to ask is: What sort of “light” are we talking about? What is its essential quality? In fact, the dual nature of the question already implies the initial responses. This essay starts by distinguishing between “Light” and “light,” emphasizing that there is nothing transcendental—for which “Light” is often the symbol—about this branch of art and these artists. That is, it has nothing—or little—in common with what the “Light” has always represented for all religions or simply for humanity’s contemplative and mystical side. The entire history of this Light, which was the subject of doctrinal disputes and paved the way for medieval “optics”—incidentally a major first step for all future science—is not affiliated to the light used by ZERO and all those who experimented with its expressive possibilities around 1960 (except perhaps to the extent that they later claimed some sort of “kinship” with a transcendent conception of the light element). On the other hand, if we have agreed to talk naturally and instinctively about the “essential quality” of the light, it means we have also demoted the scientific aspect of the problem into second place. “Quality” and “essence” are definitions that are not accepted by science, or at best they are again relegated to an ancillary position compared to more measurable elements that are much less open to interpretation. So, the light of ZERO contains neither God nor science.

[i] The theater hypothesized by Moholy-Nagy during the German Bauhaus went as far as to place the person/actor in the background in relation to space, color, light, form, movement, and action: this is what he termed the “theater of totality.”

[ii] The exhibition was not officially known by this title, since it retained the title “ZERO,” but it is informally called this in an essay by Marc Callewaert, one of the critics sent to write about the event, which was organized by the Belgian group G58 in Antwerp, in the historic Hessenhuis, from March 21 to May 3, 1959. The title of Moholy-Nagy’s text, which was published posthumously in Chicago in 1947, is an expanded version of one that he wrote in 1938.

Although, on paper, it would seem that these exclusions leave no room for artistic creativity, on the contrary, there is the whole world, that vast space of action that concerns human life, and more precisely daily life, including the banal gestures we carry out every day. For the artist—unlike the scientist—the starting point is always the individual, and ZERO is no exception. Indeed, with its anarchic approach, it accentuates this aspect, which could be listed among the key traits of the so-called “artist’s legend” (even the description of the studio at number 69, Gladbacher Strasse, in Düsseldorf, as a Ruinenatelier confirms this essentially romantic view). Consubstantial to this choice and to this attitude to life is the assertion of the artist’s fundamental role, subordinate to neither science nor philosophy. The scope of art is freedom, and even contradiction (indeed self-contradiction), and it therefore operates in an entirely separate territory whose linguistic rules may not even be logically consequential. This is something that all artists have in common, but in the specific context of those years and the choice of its particular tools, ZERO’s actions were fundamental in stressing the concept. On the subject of Kinetic Art, although ZERO was only on the fringes, the linguistic doubts multiplied precisely because of the lack of clarity on this point, namely the relationship between art and science. In this context, light represents the original element, even when it is not the main feature of the work: indeed, the works that concentrate on visual perception, on “the way of seeing,” verge on scientific demonstration and justify certain philosophical theories. It is no coincidence that ZERO was also interested in the concept of “measurability,” expressed in those years by the philosopher Max Bense in his “microaesthetics”,[i] to the extent that he was invited to give the introductory speech at the exhibition Exposition Dato 1961—or Dato ZERO—held in Frankfurt in December 1961. The misconception that the artists of this generation, those who belonged or had drawn close to Kinetic Art—and above all the “Concrete” artists—were a sort of “executive arm” of visual science can be attributed more to the critics and to art historians than to their own works and what they said. But the idea of an art “for all,” an art that belonged “to all,” seemed to coincide with the death of art itself, dissolved in the “higher” realms of philosophy and science, as many critics—and also some Conceptual artists—asserted. As if the consensus of initial perception could only generate a consensus regarding the final elaboration, using scientific and philosophical “givens” that relegated the work to “datum” or, at most, “demonstration.”[ii] Fortunately, not only did ZERO always sidestep this danger, thanks to its anarchical spirit, but it also gave an example of how things were not evolving in this direction, while at the same time investigating the basic elements of this worldview. To be sure, talking of “investigation” immediately conjures up a consequential, and therefore logical-deductive, path, which has little to do with the libertarian idea of having no rules, and above all of affirming the complete freedom of human beings, even the freedom to contradict oneself; perhaps it would therefore be better to talk of “intuition” of the basic elements of this worldview. The ZERO artists and their European partners in fact seem to have given themselves just one rule: not to have any rules, even in their own affairs, and the fact of proceeding by intuition rather than by deduction is infinitely closer to this concept than any other. The other fundamental component of the “mobile” group—which instantly brings us closer to the question of light—is the “dematerialization” of art, also in the wake of the vitalistic, behavioral, and performative aspect of ZERO, as highlighted in the so-called “Abendausstellungen” (Evening Exhibitions).

[i] The writings of the German philosopher Max Bense (1910–1990) were extremely well received by the Kinetic neo-avant-gardes in around 1960. It was through his works—above all, Aesthetica II: Aesthetische Information (1956) and Aesthethica IV: Programmierung des Schönen: Allgemeine Texttheorie und Textästhetik (1960)—and their later circulation that the concept of “microaesthetics,” reduced to the possibility of mixing technology and philosophy, and the hypothesis of “measuring” the basic combinations of signs scientifically, seemed to represent indisputable keys to interpreting the art of optical, Concrete, and Kinetic groups.

[ii] This is a sort of understandable extremization, borrowed from an excessive simplification of the concepts and resulting syllogisms: if the motion of individual feelings is attributed to art, producing works that are perceived physiologically in the same way by everyone becomes a scientific demonstration and no longer a product to be interpreted by the viewer. This means that it can also no longer be “enriched” by personal experience. This form of reasoning does not take account of the fact that the common perception is only the start, and not the end point, of the gaze and the mind behind it.

In our case, “dematerialization” does not simply mean the dismantling of all the traditional means of making art, but it also means conquering “immateriality,” namely substituting the material aspect that until then had represented the immaterial, after its appearance on the scene, and replacing it with minimal material intervention to capture it. In this way, the work becomes a sort of “trap” for immateriality, the true player of this artistic gesture. The Polaris missile rising into the sky of ZERO—one of the group’s most iconic images[i]—is certainly not about the technology that built it, or the fuel and metallic capsule; rather, it is the movement, the dynamism, the upward tension, the speed, the extreme gesture. The same is true of almost all the works by ZERO and partners. As was said between the lines at the beginning, light is the prime element of immateriality that permits the unfolding of a new attitude to reality—and consequently a new way of seeing, and therefore thinking. But light is also the most difficult element to handle, once it is no longer simply brushstrokes of luminous color standing out against other darker ones. Moreover, “making the light visible” is like “making the air visible.” It is very difficult, and, what’s more, at the beginning it almost always seems pointless given the de facto evidence (light, like air, is everywhere). Yet, immediately after the slight smile that hovers on our lips, we realize that it is an extremely important matter, the start of a revolutionary project that aims to rebuild the language of art from zero—and from ZERO.

This brings us to two facets that are inseparable in the reality of the work but can be analyzed by critics: the linguistic aspect and the existential one. The major contribution by ZERO—like that of the Italian group Azimuth, part of Gruppo T, and some in Gruppo N (enne), while the French artists of GRAV appear to be more “Cartesian”[ii]—is precisely their having known how to combine the two otherwise distant components of art and the artist. This is exactly what divides ZERO from masters like Moholy-Nagy. The light-filled works of the Hungarian artist feel like a linguistic provocation compared to the traditional codes of art and the artist (something that is even more evident in the famous action of ordering the realization of an artwork by telephone[iii]), at a moment when expanding the possibilities of art to encompass the whole of reality was still debated conceptually. What is more, the realization of an “exemplum”—the Light Space Modulator—constituted a plastic demonstration of the new possibilities of language, which from then on could no longer be contested. Moholy-Nagy’s work was seen as a victory in a doctrinal disputation, in which the logic of the argument, together with the evidence of a physically existing work, without a shadow of doubt sanctioned the legitimacy of this new field of artistic action. It was a carefully thought-out, rational, coldly unsentimental strategy designed to win a decisive battle. Moreover, the Hungarian’s work—and more generally that of the artists of his generation who worked on “real” movement and light in art—is still seen as a “mechanism,” and as the heir to the heroic age of the “machine,” barely influenced by the playful character of the Dadaists’ Bachelor Machines. In other words, it was once again almost a “positivist” attitude, one of possible control over the immaterial. So, what were the conditions and the attitude with which ZERO operated? If, on the one hand, the conceptual approach had become well established in the fifties, and reality coincided with art, on the other hand the same concept, thirty years after Moholy-Nagy’s “provocation,” still struggled to be taken in by people, and was not a common sentiment, a natural attitude. This is where ZERO’s intervention was important, with its very special “exemplum,” which, before being expressed in artworks, was embodied in the lives of individual members of the group. So, knowing and—even more so—“feeling that they lived in light,” and in movement, was part of every moment of an existence that, as artists, they wished to share with the rest of the world. It is this existential aspect that brings the research started in the nineteen-twenties to a harmonious conclusion: every aspect, every instant of the life of ZERO’s members is inspired by the vitalistic surprise of the new reality, and this called for new languages to be expressed and experienced.

This accounts for ZERO’s lasting reverence for Lucio Fontana: the Italian artist had anticipated this aspect and had translated it naturally into simple, absolute work. Here were no longer mechanisms and motors, but rather gestures and signs, made just with the materials of the future, a future that was (almost) immaterial. Fontana had suggested to the art of the neo-avant-gardes an even more dematerialized element than neon: “lightness.” Lightness as an attitude to the world, lightness as a formal outcome. The photographic proof and memories of the evenings at the Ruinenatelier almost unconsciously confirm this attitude. There everything spoke of lightness, starting with the free aggregation and free participation and moving to the use of objects and images whose main feature was “extending upwards,” as happens with a child’s balloon or a missile that overcomes the pull of gravity. For humans, taking flight originally meant “being light.” In this sense the events and happenings at the Abendausstellungen are the explicit realization of a “new world’s” awareness of living, and of seeking a new alphabet and a new syntax to describe and live it. These did not preclude either the romantic spirit glimpsed in all German art, or the existential aspects—in a philosophical sense—of the recent Informel period, but without the drama, without the tragedy of living. Even Piene’s %%%Light Ballet%%%s (Lichtballette), which closely resembled Moholy-Nagy’s Modulator, brought with them that immersive sense which is a metaphor for the total involvement of the senses and sentiments, not merely the intellectual contemplation of a new language.

[i] The image first appeared in ZERO 3, the last volume in the historic series of 1961.

[ii] The French artists belonging to GRAV—Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel—are known for the greater “scientific” rigor of their visual studies, and they show no trace of those Dadaist legacies that are instead present in ZERO and in the Italian groups T and N (enne).

[iii] The EM 2 (Telephone Picture) of 1923.

But the artist is called on at all times to put himself or herself to the test through work, and therefore the light “must” become work, must become the “A” of the new alphabet (a position, it is worth remembering, that had always been undermined by “movement” …) that would be used to “stage” the world. The problem was how.

Quite differently to what happens in science, light in its “human” version is highly changeable. It is not a wavelength that crosses the universe, but instead it illuminates our days, and this is how it is considered by art, and especially by ZERO art. This is why the “trap” for light looks more like a shamanic object than a spectroscope, more like a mysterious shape than a technological instrument.[i] Besides, in whatever way one acts in the field of art, formal appearance is still very important. It is not a question of “giving form” to light, but rather evoking its presence through an “attractor” whose features or function are identical to light, although, at the same time, it retains its own identity, exactly as a magical instrument does for the tribe that recognizes its powers.

Yet it is the realization—much more than the idea—that is difficult, in the same way that it is much more difficult to build a rocket capable of going to the moon than to wish and hope to go there. At moment ZERO, which was almost larval, underground, off-center, militant, aggressive, but at the same time productive, full of energy, innovative—and corresponded to roughly the first three years of activity—all these ideas about light were already present, but they had not yet found the most suitable means of expression. It was not until 1960–61 that these ideas took shape, confirming the relatively slow pace of language when following an idea. The same happened in the early years of the century, in all the avant-gardes, and in all the neo-avant-gardes, whose poetics were initially expressed using the existing language, while waiting for a new language to replace it, one that would adhere more closely to the new ideas. Also, in reaction to the most demanding declarations, the evolution of artistic language into new forms would not be immediate, and it would transition from known codes to new ones without a break, step by step. This was the experience of even the most radical artists of ZERO, as they moved from painting to an “objectivity” that at first seemed to be a sort of halfway house between painting and sculpture and was only later transformed into installation.

[i] In ZERO’s works relating to light, as in others, there are no particular technological aids, and there are hardly ever motors or mechanisms except for the few required to inflate shapes, for example, or to rotate objects. Overall, the evocation is left to the characteristics of the material used and to random external factors, like a gust of wind.

Almost all the artists who gravitated around ZERO and who took light as their subject-matter worked with the concepts of transparency, vibration, and shadow: the first two drawing on the most characteristic traits of light, the third providing an inverse example, namely, using the absence of light—shade—to show its existence. These concepts took tangible form in objects whose constructive elements are almost always glass, mirror, darkness, smoke, and of course lighting devices that served as a light source (often present, although not always). These became individual “trademarks” for those artists who chose to use them as unique or essential elements of their work, in the same way that Yves Klein had done in the same years by “patenting” his own blue as IKB (International Klein Blue). While many of these component elements were being developed by almost all the ZERO artists, only some made them the central motif of their work, explicitly referring to the light and creating a “cipher” that was recognizable thanks to the materials used. While the following are a few significant examples, they are not exhaustive and it is important to see as part of a broader artistic panorama those who experimented with the subject-matter, which was fundamental in this brief historical period. For instance, in ZERO, vibration was the prerogative and innovation of Heinz Mack. Starting from the surfaces being examined, he used thin metal strips rising up from the surface to capture the light that rests on them and to produce slight variations in chromatic brightness, dependent on changes in the ambient light and the almost imperceptible vibration of the strips. In the same period, artists close to ZERO, and sometimes part of their exhibitions, like Francesco Lo Savio, Enrico Castellani, Agostino Bonalumi, Jan Schoonhoven, used the same method of rippled, expanded surfaces, free or modular, to produce constantly changing effects thanks to the light. The other early founder of ZERO, Otto Piene, interacted with the immateriality of light to an even greater extent than his friend Mack, not only in his series of Light Ballets (Lichtballette) but also in his Rauchbilder (Smoke Paintings). Both the former and the latter use the concept of “shadow” to reveal light vibrations, but while this is clear for the Light Ballets, despite the variety of installations, the ultimate sensation of light is less evident in the Rauchbilder. The latter are often interpreted—quite rightly, it seems—merely as “painting without paint,” as an almost alchemical, certainly linguistic experiment along the lines of the contemporary experiences of Yves Klein’s Peintures de feu, albeit more spectacular and performative. But fire was also man’s first artificial light, and that light produces the carbon black with which Piene drew on the surfaces. This means that the “grids” of the Light Ballets and the marks of the Rauchbilder are interrelated: the grids show shapes in negative, thanks to the light shining through them and the shadows created, while the carbon black is also the memory of fire, the luminous element par excellence. Shadow is also a corollary of vibration (and vice versa), and it was used in this way by all the artists mentioned earlier: Lo Savio, Castellani, Bonalumi, and Schoonhoven all capture the light thanks to the shadow created (although Bernard Aubertin’s use of fire[i] can be viewed as genuine pencil-free drawing).

[i] Contrary to Piene, and one might say in a more mechanical way that is similar to Klein, Aubertin stages the violent action of fire and its result, the perfect result of the initial act of lighting the fire. Klein, too, creates spectacle out of fire’s action, as pointed out above: we need only recall the photo of him with a flamethrower trained on the painting’s surface and a firefighter in the background, ready to avert any possible—or evoked—danger.

But it is with Christian Megert and Nanda Vigo that the discourse on light acquires its traits of radical simplicity. Megert’s proximity to ZERO can be dated from May 1960 (the time of the Monochrome Malereiexhibition in Leverkusen) and he became a fully fledged member from 1962.[i] His preferred instrument was the mirror, often shattered into pieces that fragment and recompose the space reflected in them, but the space is only broken up and made into new shapes thanks to the light that strikes it. If the mirror triggers a new spatial reality—just one of an infinite series of possibilities—the light that shines on it and is reflected is the “big bang” of these potential realities. If, to this, you add movement—as the artist does, usually by letting the reflective fragments oscillate in the air so the light hits them from constantly changing angles—then you can understand how the two elements once again become inseparable, and how space is after all a consequence of light. On the other hand, Nanda Vigo’s ZERO period began late, in 1964, because of the “macho” opposition of her fiancé Piero Manzoni,[ii] but then evolved more fully leading to two exhibitions, featuring just the Italian artist and the three founders, as well as her curatorship of ZERO’s major exhibition in Milan, Venice, and Turin in 1965. In all, Vigo seems even more radical than Megert, if that is possible. In her Cronotopi she limited herself to framing industrial glass with various kinds of knurling or checkering—which was also used by Grazia Varisco, but for different reasons—and hanging them like a painting or standing them on a base. Light alone, nothing else, shines through them or strikes them (light sources would only be added a few years later). The effect is almost imperceptible, and the object seems mysterious until the mind starts to question its motives, which are expressed at the lowest level of physical perception. Light in Vigo’s ZERO works meets virtually no resistance, and so it does not manifest itself forcefully or clearly. Instead, it simply is; it is the absolute protagonist, while the glass is merely the relic of a slow epiphany.

[i] Megert’s presence is recorded at the exhibitions Nul=Zero in Arnhem, Nieuwe Tendenzen in The Hague (January 18 to February 16, 1962), Forum in Ghent (May 5 to June 3, 1962), Zero in Bern, Galerie Schindler (June 9–30, 1962), ZERO at the Galerie Diogenes in Berlin (March 30 to April 30, 1963), Mikro-Nul/Zero, an itinerant exhibition in Holland in 1963, and then broadly in all the later collectives.

[ii] As the artist confirmed in several interviews, Manzoni—to whom she was engaged from 1962 until his death—did not want her to present herself as an independent artist (“we are not Mr and Mrs Curie,” he is said to have repeated), although she followed him on journeys throughout Europe. Only after his death in February 1963 did Nanda Vigo show her works. She debuted at an exhibition with the founders of ZERO in Klagenfurt, at the gallery at Wulfengasse 14 (September 1–30, 1964), which was repeated from January to February 1966 at Il Salotto Gallery in Como. She also exhibited at Group Zero at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (November 30 to December 11, 1964), which then traveled to the Washington Gallery of Modern Art from January 9 to February 14, 1965; with Mack in January 1965 at Galleria L’Elefante in Mestre; and she was the animator and sole curator of the exhibition Zero Avantgarde 1965 in Lucio Fontana’s studio in Milan, at Galleria Il Cavallino, Venice, and at Galleria Il Punto in Turin between March and June 1965.

The “official” end of ZERO in 1966 coincided with the end of attempts to create a new alphabet for a new world. On the one hand, the experiences of Pop Art were satisfied with the present, and, on the other, social and political activism preferred to adopt a more popular and therefore less radical imagery, but the seed had been sown. ZERO’s research into light—and other basic elements of our perception of the world—is completely lacking any specific purpose, but instead it shows an awareness of what is: in this case, the light does not represent the future sun, nor does it illuminate our everyday objects; it just exists. Precisely because of this, these studies last longer and are made available to anyone wanting to use them, irrespective of their reasons and purposes. All they must do is use that new way of “showing,” which from that moment will become customary, recognized, accepted. The new alphabet of contemporary life also started here.*

*I would like to express my warmest thanks to Massimo Ganzerla for his invaluable help with catalogs, dates, and participating artists.

This text has been translated from Italian into English by Lucinda Byatt.