Zero & Friends

By Stephen Maine 6/16/09

The past season in New York was a particularly rich time for devotees of the movement Zero, whose reputation in Europe has been secure for decades. A motor of avant-garde activity centered in Düsseldorf from 1957 to 1966, Zero made important innovations in performance, kinetic, environmental, reductivist and light-and-space art—pursuits that were then nascent globally. At the nucleus of this loose affiliation were the artists Otto Piene and Heinz Mack, who had met in May 1950 as students at the city’s Academy of Fine Arts. A recent, altogether absorbing exhibition at Sperone Westwater Gallery, “Zero in New York,” assembled works by these two and by later Zero member Günther Uecker, as well as by 18 other artists from across Europe, both familiar and obscure, who were involved with Zero. It was curated by gallery director David Leiber and Mattijs Visser, founding director of the recently established Zero Foundation.1 Among the artists included were Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani, co-founders of the short-lived Milanese gallery Azimuth (and its spin-off publication, Azimut); both have since been given retrospective surveys in New York (at Gagosian and Haunch of Venison galleries, respectively), fleshing out the portrait of this dynamic juncture in European art. 

View Slideshow Otto Piene: Light Ballet on Wheels, 1965, aluminum drum, 4 wheels, glass, paint, 161⁄2 inches high by 30 inches in diameter. All photos this article, unless otherwise noted, courtesy Sperone Westwater Gallery, New York.; Installation view of “ZERO in New York,” 2008, showing Günther Uecker’s The White Mill (left), 1964, nails on wood with electric motor, and Moved Field (right), 1965, nails, paint, canvas and wood; at Sperone Westwater Gallery.;

Zero began with a series of one-evening protests/exhibitions held monthly, starting in April 1957, at Mack’s and Piene’s adjoining studios and elsewhere around town. Guest artists from Düsseldorf and beyond were invited to participate in these proto-Happenings; the roster of collaborators includes key figures of postwar European art, among them Yves Klein, Daniel Spoerri and Jean Tinguely. Enamored of the metaphorical possibilities of natural elements, and excited by the potential of advances in technology to suggest new forms and provide new materials, Zero championed no particular esthetic strategy but strongly opposed the celebration of subjectivity and ego—of existential anxiety—embodied in the gestural abstraction of Tachism and Art Informel, then dominant across Europe. A constructivist bent led Zero artists to look to precursors from the Bauhaus (difficult to do at the time, since the institution’s achievements had been suppressed by the Nazis), including László Moholy-Nagy, whose Light-Space Modulator (1922-30) was a groundbreaking instance of the machine esthetic brought to a fine art context.

Above all, Zero was about light. Piene had been producing “raster” paintings and drawings by forcing various materials (pigment, soot) through patterned sieves of perforated cardboard when, one day in 1958, he idly aimed an electric lamp through one of the sieves and was captivated by the resulting play of light on the wall. Beginning soon thereafter, much of his work had to be plugged in. Light Ballet on Wheels (1965), included in the Sperone Westwater exhibition, features incandescent bulbs shining upward through small, precisely placed holes in a slowly rotating black-painted glass disk atop a black aluminum drum, producing squiggling, ever-changing configurations across the walls and ceiling.

Mack’s development followed a similar course, from his heavily impastoed monochrome canvases of choppy grids to the sparkling steles and rotating, coruscating “dynamos” in aluminum, stainless steel and Plexiglas seen in his first New York solo show, held in in 1966 at Howard Wise Gallery.2 Barely hinting at the snazzy grandeur of those works was the Sperone Westwater show’s Folium Argentum (1968), an aluminum sheet etched with competing diamond patterns. (Mostly smallish, the works in the exhibition belied the transformational ambitions of Zero.)

Uecker, who was invited to join Zero’s inner circle in 1961, was known for swirling fields of nails partly driven into wood-backed canvas, usually painted white, which create undulating patterns of light and shadow that are both atmospheric and concrete. The works’ optical sizzle depends on raking light, which the installation at Sperone Westwater provided. The White Mill (1964) is a pair of disks covered with twin thickets of nails and joined by an axlelike rod; as they rotated around the top of a cylindrical pedestal, the bristling disks caught the spotlight.

Düsseldorf had been nearly demolished by Allied bombs in World War II, and an oppressive, conservative attitude marked Germany’s rebuilding and social retrenchment. In the 1950s it was, Mack says, “a gray emptiness . . . a cultural cemetery and a knowledge vacuum.”3 By 1967, Time magazine could call the Düsseldorf art scene “Paris on the Rhine.”4 Joseph Beuys’s appointment to the Academy in 1961 contributed mightily to the city’s growing avant-garde fervor. But before that, Piene told me,5 progressive artists coalesced in the city primarily for three reasons: cheap studio space, the Academy and dealer Albert Schmela.6

Schmela opened his eponymous gallery in May 1957 with an exhibition by Yves Klein reprising the mercurial Frenchman’s “Propositions Monochromes,” seen earlier that year at Iris Clert’s gallery in Paris. The Zero group, while taken with Klein’s self-confidence and charisma, and similarly invested in the creative potential of such natural elements as fire and light, didn’t have much use for his conceptual, spiritual orientation. They were also opposed to the idea of the artist as a messianic personality.

Nevertheless, Klein was included in Zero’s seventh evening exhibition, held in April 1958 and called “The Red Painting,” its manifest theme; Klein was represented in “Zero in New York” by a trio of diminutive, radiant monochromes (gold, rose, International Klein Blue) and a pair of small “Fire Paintings,” all 1960.

The participation of Lucio Fontana and Manzoni in Zero’s eighth evening exhibition, in May 1958, linked the group to Italy’s leading vanguard artists and two important precursors of Arte Povera. Fontana, some 30 years older than Zero’s initiators, shared their interest in the role of the artist in society, and in the interchange between art and science. At Documenta 3 in 1964, Piene, Mack and Uecker took the unusual step of collaborating on several pieces for their “Homage to Fontana.” Of the three Fontanas in the Sperone Westwater show (each titled Concetto spaziale), the earliest, dated 1958, in which a whitish surface is punctured by a lyrical tracery of knife cuts, seems the most at home among the ashen and silver tonalities favored by the Düsseldorf trio. The peripatetic Manzoni brought to Düsseldorf the radical procedural and material ideas percolating in Milan within the Azimuth group, which included his companion Nanda Vigo and Castellani. The Sperone Westwater show featured two beautiful, ghostly Manzoni “Achromes” from around 1960, one a kaolin-soaked canvas ribbed with horizontal pleats, the other a slab of polyester striated by cobalt chloride.