BWW Reviews: A Final Frontier for Art in ZERO: COUNTDOWN TO TOMORROW

What exactly was ZERO? To call it a full-fledged artistic movement could be a mistake; although ZERO did organize events and did have a Germany-based leadership, the artists it brought together were miscellaneous, far-flung, and in some cases deeply incompatible. To deny the impulses that unified it, though, would be just as mistaken; a purposeful questioning of traditional art--how relevant, how appropriate, how anything it could be after World War II--and a purposeful utilization of non-traditional media and processes allied all the ZERO adherents, or just about. Whatever ZERO was, it claimed the loyalty of Yves Klein and Lucio Fontana and other big-name 1950s provocateurs, but its hold always appeared rather tenuous. Everything was just about over by November of 1967, when originators Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker gathered for one last extravaganza--a night of music and dancing and tongue-in-cheek publicity moves, and then that was all.

In presenting ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow at the Guggenheim Museum, curator Valerie Hillings has accepted challenges that go well beyond classifying this broad mass of late modernists and early post-modernists. There is the task of pulling Mack, Piene, and Uecker out of the orbit of the bigger names, of making them--not off-and-on ZERO members like Klein and Fontana and Piero Manzoni--the real stars of the show. There is the even bigger task of freeing ZERO from the gravity of better-known tendencies such as Dada, with its similar non-art and anti-imitation leanings. There is the fundamental task of giving an assortment of burned canvases, moving sculptures, light projectors, and other unruly entries a meaningful form and arrangement.

Fortunately, Hillings has the entire Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda at her disposal. As shows such as Gutai: Splendid Playground and Italian Futurism: Reconstructing the Universe have confirmed, the ramps and curves of the Guggenheim's signature architecture can do wonders for the right ensemble show. ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow almost seems to evolve upward, branch outward, and concentrate back inward in tandem with Wright's organic architecture. Such movement is enough to lend momentum to a show that can hold you in place piece-by-piece--at the very least, pique your attention with metal fibers and hanging objects and other such weirdnesses; at the very most, deliver later-modernistic formal feats that are heartrending in their opulence. You may not walk out of the Guggenheim with perfect comprehension of what, precisely, ZERO was: the fact that an all-caps "ZERO" was used to refer to the entire international network, while a less obtrusive "Zero" indicated the German nucleus, is almost zero assistance. Yet it is possible to walk through ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow and be impressed by what the ZERO artists, regardless of designation, achieved.

Pay attention, and you will quickly catch on that Hillings is a high-order ZERO devotee--knowledgeable about the movement's nuances but also capable of communicating its broadest effects. She does just that in the first gallery, which re-creates the 1959 exhibition Vision in Motion--Motion in Vision. The presentation is succinct, but it registers: selections that might seem precious in isolation, such as Jean Tinguely's vibrating metal Butterfly and Jesús Rafael Soto's wirework-on-board Homage to Yves Klein, thrive side-by-side within the dark-tinted walls of the Guggenheim reconstruction. From there, it's textured monochromes by Uecker, sand pictures and light pictures by Mack, and other gestures that build to bigger flourishes--burnished metal, rotating cylinders, and a wall of bottles set out as a single entity, courtesy of Jan Henderikse.

For a variety of reasons, the middle stretches of a show can be a slog: lots of moving parts and little that is genuinely new in the way of motifs. (Mixed results for the big names, too: the Klein entries are much too spread out for my taste and the Fontana contributions include the mature, perfect Concetto spaziale, Attese and the flashy, tired 62 ME 42 Concetto spaziale.) Taking all of this in context, though, is a mind-opening exercise. While Uecker's primary media were canvases, frames, and nails (lots and lots of nails), he also created a tiny installation called Sand Mill; in its own way, this one prefigures the Land Art of the 1970s. Some similar ideas, but smaller scale and more motion. And in their own way, the burn and smoke paintings of Otto Piene and Yves Klein establish similarities with other, seemingly incompatible art. Simple in their shapes, devoid of spatial depth--these works call to mind the contemporaneous works of Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, and other American Color Field painters. But the burnt-on circles and blotches of ZERO possess an air of the brutal, the elemental, that was alien to the better-behaved Color Fields.

After a time, tactics this out-of-the-ordinary begin to make abundant sense. As you enter the upper reaches of Countdown to Tomorrow, you will be faced once again with Fontana's jabs and pokes and slashes, along with yet more of Uecker and his nails. It all harmonizes here: Fontana's bronze sculptures in the Concetto spaziale, Natura series are perhaps his best entries, and Uecker's choices of material--which can seem both stolid and gimmicky at first--finally reveal their versatility in kinetic works such as the cacti-like New York Dancers. Elsewhere, video footage shows an array of Uecker nails spinning, creating new shadows and new networks of form and angle from second to second: imagine the tender white lines of a Mark Tobey painting sprung to revolving life. Instead of rejecting the canvas, the ZERO artists took the best on-canvas effects places that no canvas could go. This, it seems, is the lesson of the concluding gallery of Hillings's exhibition, a memorable reconstruction of yet another display from ZERO history--this time, the "Light Room" that Mack, Piene, and Uecker contributed to the Documenta 3 art show in 1964. As Piene declared in the 1958 essay "On the Purity of Light, "light is the life-substance both of men and of painting," the force that "creates the magic and power of a painting, its richness, eloquence, sensuality, and beauty." In the strange, shadowy, miraculous Light Room, his pronouncements are validated, and his play of light becomes indelible.

To come this far, to witness this much experimentation, and to finally see something this standardly and traditionally appealing--it should be an anticlimax, but it isn't. With the Light Room, the leaders of ZERO did for moving light what Jackson Pollock did for acrylic paint: they subjected it to a swirling dynamism that is at once impossibly grand and infinitely delicate. On your way back down, you may realize that this is where ZERO has been trending all along, toward a formal sensibility that was always quite fine, but never quite as new as the members of ZERO had hoped. Classify them as you will, Mack and Piene and Uecker left us with forms, sights, spectacles that can be classified as art of the most affecting kind--art that ultimately failed Ezra Pound's command to "make it new," but fulfilled a more important imperative. Make it beautiful.

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