X X = 0 x 0 = Art

A painter without paint and brushes—how on earth is that supposed to work? the audience wondered on June 27, 1962, when the thirty-three-minute television film was first broadcast on the ARD, Germany’s nationwide public broadcasting corporation.[i] Viewing figures were high for this TV program on the ZERO artists Günther Uecker (b. 1930), Heinz Mack (b. 1931), Otto Piene (1928–2014), Piero Manzoni (1933–1963), Bernard Aubertin (1934–2015), Daniel Spoerri (b. 1930), and others, which was broadcast during prime time at 9 pm. This happened at a time when television sets were still “packaged” in cabinet-like furniture and TV was considered the most up-to-date medium.

Winkler and his camera team traveled to three cities to meet the new artistic avant-garde: to Paris, to the artists’ studios; to Amsterdam, to the exhibition Nul (Null 62) at the Stedelijk Museum; and to the Rhine meadows on the riverbank in Düsseldorf, where Winkler filmed an art event that would open his documentary, and which had been organized especially for the television team of the Hessischer Rundfunk regional public broadcaster.  Similar to the 1961 Demonstration in front of Galerie Schmela, this was an open-air art event initiated by the Düsseldorf ZERO core group of Piene, Uecker, and Mack to coincide with the presentation of their publication ZERO 3; strollers going for a walk on the banks of the Rhine were not a little surprised to see girls dressed in black cardboard boxes with a large zero painted on them. Colorful balloons rose into a night sky that was illuminated by strong spotlights, and cameras flashed. Uecker painted a large white circle on the dark green grass of the riverbank. Taking art into the open air, and using light, movement, and actions to inspire an audience unprepared for ZERO were certainly not the only motives for the event, which was of course attended by prominent figures from the Düsseldorf art scene. Gotthard Graubner (1930–2013), Konrad Fischer (1939–1996), Alfred (1918–1980) and Monika Schmela[ii] (1919–2003) are visible in the crowd.

[i] ARD is the abbreviation for Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland—a joint organization of Germany‘s public service broadcasters, including six regional services. It was founded in 1950 in West Germany and is still financed today by the mandatory license fee paid by every household, company, and public institution.

[ii] Monika Schmela, born Wilhelmine Magdalena Even, called herself “Monika” as of 1955. See Lena Brüning, Die Galerie Schmela: Amerikanisch-deutscher Kunsttransfer und die Entwicklung des internationalen Kunstmarktes in den 1960er Jahren (Berlin, 2022), pp. 81, 91.

The film then takes the viewer to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where Hermann de Vries is explaining his sculptures to astonished visitors, and Piero Manzoni presents stacked cans of “artist’s shit.” While the Düsseldorf artists take art outdoors, Manzoni upsets the tranquility of the museum and paints a 1,335-meter-long “contact zone”—“also known as a line,” as the commentator mischievously notes. Bernard Aubertin sets fire to a relief studded with matches in the venerable exhibition hall—a “typical ZERO situation” (and anything but a common practice in art museums)—in order to “set fire to all the dusty museums in the world.”[i] In a ZERO exhibition, the commentator explains, the focus is on the visitor, and this is expressed by the fact that you can touch objects or—as in the Light Room[ii]—immerse yourself in them. This art of the future can also be found in galleries such as Galerie Dato in Frankfurt am Main, the commentator continues, which represents the artist Hermann Goepfert (1926–1982), who transforms light into sound with his Optophonium.[iii]

Düsseldorf, “this very modern city”—explains the narrator as the camera travels along the rainy Königsallee—“is first and foremost an art metropolis and only secondly the writing desk of the Ruhr region.”

Scene change: in the backyard of a brick building, Günther Uecker, dressed in white painter’s work clothes, is shooting with a bow and arrow at a white canvas. Whether this is a Zen practice or an art performance is not known, the viewer is told, but the result will certainly be a uniformly monochrome artwork. The film then shows the artist creating a Nail Picture, which when illuminated in a specific way becomes a vehicle for structural phenomena. “The Nail Pictures sprayed white refer to the anti-Fascist stance that is common to almost all artists at Location Zero,” explains the off-screen voice.

[i] Quotation from the film 0 x 0 = Kunst (see note 1).

[ii] The Salon de lumière was a joint light installation by Mack, Piene, and Uecker in the exhibition Nul (Nul 62) at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

[iii] Hermann Goepfert, Optophonium I (1961–62), cat. no. 220. See Beate Kemfert, Hermann Goepfert (1926–1982), Studien zur Frankfurter Geschichte 43: Nachkriegskunst in Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt am Main, 1999), p. 288.

Winkler skillfully arranges succinct sounds, such as Morse code or minimalistic adaptations of bright sounds, to accompany the images, which underline movement and the play of light in a multimedia fashion.

The commentator continues to inform his audience: “ZERO is a language of seeing and feeling. An undercooled visual language of black-and-white effects. In Heinz Mack’s works, light becomes the medium.” To match the words, the artist is seen shaping aluminum disks in forms that will create vibrations and movements. No mention is made, however, of Mack’s large-scale Sahara Project,[i] which he had already embarked on by this time.

We then move on to Otto Piene’s studio. The television viewers do not immediately get to meet the artist, but his children, Claudia and Herbert, are filmed making holes in paper and, with a flashlight held behind the sheet, they create light effects. The children’s inventive talents, the narrator explains, were the inspiration for Piene’s “mechanical Light Ballet.” “The results are unpainted pictures.” The artist himself then presents the creation of a Smoke Drawing in front of the television camera. “I make the dark a volume of power. Moved by breath like my body, I utilize smoke so that the darkness can fly,” comments the painter without a brush.

To conclude, the viewers accompany the television team to Paris, where, as the commentator notes, the ZERO artists do not work together as they do in Germany, but rather they exhibit together.

[i] See Sophia Sotke, Mack-Sahara: From ZERO to Land Art. Heinz Mack‘s “Sahara Project” (1959–1997) (Munich, 2022).

The first stop on the visit to the French metropolis takes them to the studio of Jesús Rafael Soto (1923–2005), who “loves his guitar more than all the treasures in the Louvre,” and “listens” to the sound of the instrument in his paintings.[i]

François Dufrêne (1930–1982), who today is much more associated with the Nouveau Réalisme artistic movement,[ii] is regarded by Gerhard Winkler as “classic ZERO,” which is why he portrays him in the act of pilfering posters that he needs for his décollages. A middle-class living room serves as the artist’s studio, where he achieves the most beautiful color effects by collaging parts of posters, Winkler explains.

The next film sequence introduces Daniel Spoerri, “an accomplice of chance,” who we watch making one of his “Snare-Pictures.” “The vertical becomes horizontal,” we hear from a playback device in the background; “for example, the remains of breakfast are fixed to the table and hung on the wall along with the table.”[iii]While gales of laughter are ringing out from the tape recorder, Robert Filliou (1926–1987) walks into Spoerri’s studio in the documentary film. He is the most fortunate artist and gallery owner in Paris, says the commentator, because he always carries a good two dozen works of art around with him in his cap, which can be bought for around eleven Deutschmarks each. Spoerri, on the other hand, gets between 1,000 and 2,000 Deutschmarks per work, but he doesn’t actually see that much money because the management and sale of his works are handled by a renowned gallery in Milan.[iv]

Next stop is the studio of Jean Tinguely (1925–1991), which is full of boxes and crates, bric-a-brac and junk; his motorized objects are an important influence on the ZERO artists. Tinguely travels a lot, from Copenhagen to America, because his art is very popular, and people pay up to 3,000 Deutschmarks for his sounding sculptures. Clearly, Tinguely was not in Paris during Winkler’s visit, as he does not appear in the documentary in person. Instead, the artist Harry Kramer (1925–1997) is found dancing around his fragile wire sculptures of a “world theater” to the jazzy sound of a saxophone at his studio.

Although Kramer[v] and Dufrêne are rarely counted as belonging to the ZERO circle, Gerd Winkler’s report confirms that the definition of this art movement has always been an open one that is also dependent on the viewer’s perception.

[i] Quotation from the film 0 x 0 = Kunst (see note 1).

[ii] See Dirk Pörschmann, ed., ZERO und Nouveau Réalisme: Die Befragung der Wirklichkeit, exh. cat. Stiftung Ahlers Pro Arte (Hannover, 2016); Dirk Pörschmann, ed., ZERO and Nouveau Réalisme: Questioning Reality, exh. cat. Stiftung Ahlers Pro Arte (Hannover, 2016).

[iii] Quotation from the film 0 x 0 = Kunst (see note 1).

[iv] This refers to the gallery of Arturo Schwarz (1924–2021).

[v] Harry Kramer exhibited together with ZERO artists in the following exhibitions: Bewogen Beweging, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 1961; Europäische Avantgarde, Galerie D in der Schwanenhalle des Römers, Frankfurt am Main, 1963; Documenta III (section on light and movement), Fridericianum, Kassel, 1964; Licht und Bewegung/Kinetische Kunst, Kunsthalle Bern, 1965 (subsequently on view at the Staatlichen Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, 1965, and as an exhibition of the Kunstvereins für die Rheinlande und Westfalen at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 1966); and Lumiere, Mouvement et Optique, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, 1965.

the television audience sees and hears the missile take off. Hectic images from the mass media are then combined with the closing words, which admonish us not to forget art in a “world in decline.” Thus ends the art report.

For the title of his film, Gerd Winkler combined two zeros with the mathematical symbol “x,” for multiplication, and the result is a remarkable film contribution about the artistic avant-garde of the same name, a film that can also be regarded as exemplary for art education today.

After the film’s first broadcast, the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper wrote:

And an eloquent television critic from the Neu-Ulmer newspaper expressed the strengths of the film as follows:

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