U Utopia
by Barbara Könches
Radiant Images to Counter the Pervasive Feeling of Heavy as Lead, or the Question, What Is Utopia?
“The freedom of the imagination is not fixed.” Günther Uecker
Hardly anyone today knows him: Helmuth de Haas (1928–1970), poet, translator, and cultural correspondent of Die Welt newspaper for several years from 1955 onwards. At the end of the nineteen-sixties, he was tasked with saving the cult magazine Twen, but died during this time.[i] De Haas wrote essays that to this day convey brightness and liveliness in an era which in Germany is labeled “leaden,” and which receives scant attention from those born later. The years of the hippie/flower power/1968 generation movement, which spread from San Francisco to Berlin and Europe, are considered more exciting, revolutionary, colorful, dazzling, as well as more moral, honest, and sincere. But once the stirred-up dust has settled, roots are discovered where previously it was assumed there was only wasteland, and the nineteen-fifties also prove to have visions and dreams to offer.
[i] Alexander Rost, in his obituary for de Haas, writes: “A stomach ulcer was perforated. In addition, pneumonia developed.” See Alexander Rost, “Vier Feststellungen. Zum Tode des Journalisten Helmuth de Haas,” Die Zeit, no. 44, October 30, 1970, https://www.zeit.de/1970/44/vier-feststellungen (accessed February 29, 2024). A report about internal quarrels in the magazine Twen appeared in Der Spiegel, no. 48, November 22, 1970, http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-44302998.html (accessed February 29, 2024). De Haas also translated the text “Truth Becomes Reality” by Yves Klein for ZERO 3; see archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Otto Piene, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.2.VI.2. Another text by de Haas about Yves Klein was not printed in ZERO 3, as the editors had decided to allow only the participating artists to have their say; see archive of the ZERO foundation, estate of Heinz Mack, inv. no. mkp.ZERO.1.I.785.
Helmuth de Haas wrote a text[i] about the German version of the US film The War of the Worlds, based on H. G. Wells’s 1898 sci-fi novel, with the title Kampf (sic) der Welten,[ii] which was first screened in Germany in January 1954. Titled “Griff in die Stratosphäre” (“Reach for the Stratosphere”), in thirteen lines de Haas summarizes the film’s plot about a hostile attack by the inhabitants of Mars on planet earth. In the very first sentence, he characterizes the novel by Wells (1866–1946) as “utopian,” only to qualify this statement a little later by saying that, apart from the “pushbutton fingers and weak, photophobic eyes of the Martians,” the recounted events are “familiar to us”: “Attack from the air, destroyed cities, evacuation….”[iii]
[i] Helmuth de Haas, “Griff in die Stratosphäre,” in Das geteilte Atelier: Essays (Düsseldorf, 1955), pp. 163–69.
[ii] The War of the Worlds, directed by Byron Haskin (USA, 1953). The film and the novel are known in Germany under the title Krieg der Welten.
[iii] De Haas 1955 (see note 2), p. 163.
Very quickly, de Haas makes it clear that, contrary to the events portrayed in the dramatic feature film, in reality the Earth was not under attack—on the contrary, humanity was getting ready to explore and/or conquer space. You might almost be hearing Paul Virilio (1932–2018) avant la lettre[i] when de Haas states: “We are heading towards a velocity that will one day be identical to absolute rest.”[ii] In his article, de Haas soon comes to speak of the French pilot and poet Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944), whom he places in a context that has far-reaching implications:
[i] See Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (New York, 1991); War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London, 1989); Polar Inertia (London, 1999).
[ii] De Haas 1955 (see note 2), p. 165.
“With the stratospheric aviators and their clients, the hectic, pitfall-ridden, undependable spirit of the times seems to have taken possession of a group of people; people as they have always existed, beings and existences strained to the utmost, oriented on the unattainable, whose physical and intellectual existence can become a single stylus with which the epoch can write a new paragraph.”[i]
[i] Ibid., p. 168.
The deep impression that reading the literary works of the professional aviator made on de Haas[i] can be regarded as paradigmatic for the postwar period in Germany,[ii] whose commentators were well aware that something new had already begun.[iii]
Young artists such as Heinz Mack (b. 1931) and Otto Piene (1928–2014) wanted to be just such a “stylus,” to be those who in their physical and intellectual existence wanted to inscribe, make a mark, and insert themselves into a new era. The purely subjective psychogram of an isolated landscape of the soul, which hitherto had been the theme of Art Informel painters,[iv] seemed just as inappropriate to them as the superficial stroll through “the pictures of the old world … with heavy frames” that literally force the viewer into the picture, as Otto Piene put it in the legendary magazine ZERO 3 in 1961.[v]
[i] Saint-Exupéry continues to captivate artists from all over the world even today, like the Indonesian artist Tintin Wulia. See Tim Cresswell, “Art and Geography,” https://www.guggenheim.org/blogs/map/art-and-geography (accessed February 29, 2024).
[ii] Karl Rauch publishers, which moved from Leipzig to Düsseldorf after the war, acquired the German license for some of the pilot‘s works, including his most popular book to date, Der kleine Prinz (The Little Prince). In a 1952 survey conducted by Der Spiegel, both The Little Prince and Stadt in der Wüste (Citadelle; The Wisdom of the Sands) by Saint-Exupéry were named as bestsellers. See “Die Bestseller des Jahres,” Der Spiegel, no. 31, July 30, 1952, p. 32.
[iii] See, for example, “Wohnbirne unterm Himmel,” Der Spiege, no.l 1, January 5, 1950, pp. 35–36. The article begins: “What is happening in physics now will completely reshape our lives. Nuclear energy and large rockets are more significant than the Occupation Statute [of Germany] and peace treaties.”
[iv] This is how the ZERO artists saw Art Informel; see Sylvia Martin, “ZERO, Azimut und ihr Verhältnis zum Informel,” in Impulse—Informel und Zero in der Sammlung Ingrid und Willi Kemp, exh. cat., Museum der Stadt Ratingen (Bönen, 2006), pp. 19–24.
[v] Otto Piene, “Ways to Paradise,” reprinted in Dirk Pörschmann and Mattijs Visser, eds., ZERO 4321 (Düsseldorf, 2012), n.p.
Piene dreamed of “light[ing] up the sky with colorful signs and artificial and induced bursts of flame.”[i] And he emphasized two things in this programmatic text: first, the indissoluble unity of body and mind, and, second, the goal of his Sky Art, which was to serve the praise of freedom. The then thirty-three-year-old, who had studied philosophy at the University of Cologne from 1953 to 1957 after studying art at the State Academy in Düsseldorf—like Heinz Mack—emphasized at the end of his text on “Wege zum Paradies” (“Paths to Paradise”) that he had something real to offer in and with his art: namely, the expansion of space, the expansion of free art. Utopias, Piene argues, come from literature; one could also say that they equate to the written word.
[i] Ibid.
Similarly, in Heinz Mack’s 1959 version of his Sahara Project[i] (declared as “final”), one also encounters a clear commitment to reality, which must be expanded by an “unseen artistic reality” through bold projects.[ii]
[i] Shown as a facsimile in Wieland Schmied, ed., Utopie und Wirklichkeit im Werk von Heinz Mack (Cologne, 1988), p. 16.
[ii] Ibid., p. 21.
In ZERO 3, Günther Uecker (b. 1930) also underlines the priority of reality, where the important thing is to achieve freedom:
ZERO was the first art that left the museum in order to work with light, air, fire, and water instead of painting with brush and palette. The artists, who by way of exhibition projects and publications had formed a loose kind of network,[i] wanted and were able to explore space and make viewers more sensitive to nature’s elements so that the environment would be understood in the sense of Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) as surrounding the “blue planet.”[ii]
This artistic venture was not a utopian project,[iii] but one that was based on the ideals of an aviator poet à la Saint-Exupéry; indeed, many of the planned artworks were actually realized. Today, now that the importance of ecology has entered public awareness, ZERO’s art can be described as anticipating this development.
[i] See “Z is for ZERO: Minutes of a Workshop,” in this volume.
[ii] See Florian Hildebrand, “Blaue Kugel am Horizont,” Deutschlandfunk Kultur (website), July 15, 2009, https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/blaue-kugel-am-horizont-100.html (accessed March 3, 2024).
[iii] I disagree with Dirk Pörschmann‘s assertion that ZERO was a utopian project. See Dirk Pörschmann, “Ins Gelingen verliebt: Utopia ZERO,” 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. 225–33. Such formulations can also be found elsewhere, as in Jill Michelle Holaday, Die Gruppe ZERO: Working Through Wartime Trauma, Ph.D. diss. (University of Iowa, 2018), pp. 129, 239.
When, and why, was ZERO described in the specialist literature as utopian art? To find this out is a task for the coming years, as well as clearing up the mistaken notion that ZERO’s objectives “no longer corresponded to social reality shortly before the student unrest,” as a publication on contemporary culture put it.[i]
[i] Ralf Schnell, ed., Metzler Lexikon: Kultur der Gegenwart (Stuttgart and Weimar, 2000), p. 554.
What is meant by “utopia”?
Utopia, as one reads in every dictionary, designates a non-place, a not-yet-place, a place beyond, or a future place. If one considers that the term was coined in 1516 by Thomas More, in his satirical novel On the Best State of a Commonwealth and on the New Island of Utopia (in Latin), then it is clear that the connotation of place/space or non-place—that is, utopia—in 1950 must have been completely different to the original or to any future utopian space.
Around the middle of the twentieth century, television was regarded as a possible threshold between reality and utopia. TV sets had long been present in “American homes and snack bars, in hotel rooms and shop windows full of advertising,” as Helmuth de Haas[i] wrote. He went on to say that it was part of the “typology of the television joke” that the “events taking place on the screen” would spill over into the room, or that “the events on the screen” would lure the viewer “right into the apparatus.”[ii] None of this has happened, obviously, and in 2024, the once utopian medium appears to have been left far behind, and set up where its regular audience is: in an old folks’ home. De Haas’s “antidote,” however, remains relevant:
[i] Helmuth de Haas, “Utopie und Fernsehwitze,” in de Haas 1955 (see note 2), p. 171.
[ii] Ibid., p. 172.
The artistic ideas of a generation that deeply mistrusted[i] idealized spaces, which were too remote, came together in the poetics of reality.
In the 1970 interview “Die Einnagelung ins Bewusstsein” (“Nailing into the Mind”), Günther Uecker explained to his interviewer, Rolf-Gunter Dienst, that:
[i] This is typical of the ZERO generation, born between 1925 and 1935, who experienced the Second World War as children and adolescents, some of whom had to take part in the war as so-called Flakhelfer—anti-aircraft helpers.
“Just as situations in my reliefs are represented in a model-like way, similarly, in my opinion, something becomes more real through interventions in real space. The freedom of the imagination is not fixed. It is more open in the natural movements of each person and can be derived from their environmental experiences or vice versa. Here, the experiences of my objects and of the states that I mean are transferred to the environment via the mind; one sees the environment differently and more consciously.”[i]
[i] Quoted in Günther Uecker, Schriften: Gedichte, Projektbeschreibungen, Reflexionen, ed. Stephan von Wiese (St. Gallen, 1979), p. 127.
And Otto Piene was not sketching utopian dreams when he made the following statement to the magazine ArtsCanada in 1969:
“As the world expands so does art, it has to. If it doesn’t, it will go under, and when art goes under the world will cease to live, because art is the force that binds body, brains, and soul.… We, the artists with serious concerns, have to face reality, wake up, move out of the art world, and embrace the void.”[i]
[i] Otto Piene, “Sky Art: A Notebook for a Book,” ArtsCanada, June 1969, p. 14.
Heinz Mack’s dream of art within a vast desert landscape was not a chimera either. “Suddenly the director of photography, Hans Emmerling, said that since Mack had so much to report about his project in the Sahara, we should go there and finish the film,” recount Robert Fleck and Antonia Lehmann-Tolkmitt in their book Heinz Mack: Ein Künstler des 21. Jahrhunderts (An Artist of the 21st Century).[i] They come to the following conclusion:
[i] See Robert Fleck and Antonia Lehmann-Tolkmitt, Heinz Mack: Ein Künstler des 21. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 2019), p. 58. Fleck and Lehmann-Tolkmitt also stick to the concept of utopia.
“The fact that the various kinds of stele were only set up in the Tunisian desert for the duration of the filming points to another aspect of the Sahara Project. It is one of the first artworks conceived in terms of media in European avant-garde art of the 1960s and 1970s… In this case, in terms of media theory, on the other side of the camera was not the artist, but the audience of the early media society,”[i]
[i] Ibid., p. 61.
whose most convincing instrument was television.
This closes the circle of argumentation and it becomes clear that Düsseldorf ZERO art’s nest was not built on the programmatic pedestal of a philosophical utopia but on a media-theoretical foundation that was forward-looking for that time. The inspiration for this came from Yves Klein’s productions, like his Aerostatic Sculpture(1957) at the Parisian gallery of Iris Clert,[i] and the ZERO artists soon followed with their own actions, such as ZERO: Edition, Exposition, Demonstration (1961), in front of the Galerie Schmela, proving how masterfully they could engage with the public—both in reality and via the media.[ii] Last but not least, the publication of the magazines ZERO 1–3 clearly demonstrates that the artists were aware of the strengths, possibilities, and influence of media and the media, which they made use of together until 1966, and individually after ZERO came to an end.
Joe Ketner (1955–2018) examined this relationship in detail in his book Witness to Phenomenon, and concluded:
[i] See Yves Klein, “Aerostatic Sculpture,” https://www.yvesklein.com/en/ressources/index?s[]=6&sb=_created&sd=desc&p[]=1954-1957#/en/ressources/view/artwork/645/aerostatic-sculpture (accessed February 12, 2024).
[ii] See Klaus Gereon Beuckers and Christine Korte-Beuckers, For Any Instrument: Die Anfänge der Aktionskunst in den 1950/60er Jahren im Rheinland (Munich, 2021). See also the chapter “X = 0 x 0 = Art,” in this volume.
“The visual experience that they created manifest in a variety of forms and new media, including monochrome painting, kinetic art, assemblage, performance, technology, and environmental installations.… In the course of a long decade they introduced some fundamental changes to the visual arts, incorporating nontraditional materials and new technologies that divorced the artistic enterprise from that mark, the touch and individual expression.… ZERO and ‘new tendency’ artists introduced a host of new media and ideas into art.”[i]
[i] See Joseph D. Ketner II, Witness to Phenomenon: Group ZERO and the Development of New Media in Postwar European Art(London, 2018), pp. 261–62.
In summary, it can be said that it was less the idea of utopian images that shaped the ZERO artists than the idea of open spaces, both topographical and topical, social and political, which were not yet occupied by traditional art. Art in the sky, art made of fire, art in the light offered just such spaces to be discovered and used. These were the so-called utopias on a solid foundation, the defense of open spaces as a possibility for freedom and thus for democracy.
This text has been translated from German into English by Gloria Custance.
Utopia
