A blast.
I had never heard of most of these people. The big discovery for me was Henk Peeters. His plastic sheet with columns of burn marks was stunningly beautiful (Pyrography 60-06, 1960).
This is “zero” in the sense of a turning away from everything superfluous, everything flattering and comforting. The inhumanity is suffused with melancholy and pride—the defiance of staring reality down.
In a completely different mood, his Trembling Feathers 8-14 (1961-7) seemed to be just a tidy assemblage, but eventually the feathers started jerking—not “trembling”. Hilarious, weird, and actually “moving” in all senses of the word.
Hermann Goepfert’s Optophonium (1961–2) consisted of 18 white rectangular panels, from which protruded some metal slats. Eight attached lights cast shadows and flares of glare, plus an audio track of electronic music. The music was surprisingly engaging. It reminded me that the Group Zero moment coincided with similarly supersophisticated yet also naïve Darmstadt music scene.
I had also never heard of Dadamaino (three black rectangles with oval forms cut out of them) …
… or Oskar Holweck (a sheet of white paper with delicately accordion-folded tears).
Heinz Mack is perhaps not ready for revival, but Otto Piene is obviously an important artist who has been neglected (e.g. Proliferation of the Moon, 1957)
Lucio Fontana provided exhibit’s stunning moment of pure luxury and visual extravagance with a massive plate of copper with five vertical slashes.
The critics are panning the show but I thought it was a treat. A lot of the work—maybe even most of it—was exactly the gimmicky mechanisms that Sixties filmmakers featured when they wanted to poke fun at contemporary art. And, as always, a lot of the mechanisms weren’t actually working. Even if it wasn’t the apex of artistic achievement, the show was a refreshing rebuke to the present day art world. Here were people making art for the fun of it.
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