March 9 – April 16, 2011
45 East 78th Street
New York City, (212) 861-0020

Günther Uecker is a significant and complex artist who has built a career out of interweaving nails and light in ways that often require the active participation of the viewer.  His art is not, in terms of Matisse’s famous aphorism, “art for a tired businessman”.  Indeed, one of the major targets of Uecker’s aesthetic mission is not to allow our hypothetical tired businessman even a chair to sit on.  Instead, we are presented with a chair (Chair II, 1963) that has its sitability undermined by an infestation of nails.  This chair represents Uecker’s attempt to create an art that “invades the everyday world in which we live” (to quote the exhibition catalogue) in order to subvert the slick consumerism of his day. In this work and others, nails appear to function simultaneously as a source of protection and as an icon of suffering.

Indeed, Uecker’s moral complexity undermines the very movement that he was initially associated with—the Zero Group—as its third founding member with Otto Piene and Heinz Mack.  While Uecker shares with this group an interest in kinetic art and the use of machines to play with light and shadow, he is not merely reacting against the subjectivity of the dominant aesthetic legacy of his time, Abstract Expressionism.  Aspects of Uecker’s work are a reaction against the “zero hour” in Post-war Germany that allowed people to begin anew without coming to terms with their complicit role in the Holocaust.  Like other children of the perpetrator generation, including Anselm Kiefer, he acknowledges the past but seeks to do better—to transcend “the silence of the elders” as Uecker indicated in the sensitive catalogue interview with Hans Obrist.

What has emerged is an art in which time plays a significant role.  This dynamic strategy is well illustrated in Sand Mill (1970), a ten-foot round “earthwork” taken indoors that celebrates the work of the farmer laboring with a plow.  Installed by the artist, using an electric motor, wood and a cord to drag stones around a low mound of rocky earth, Sand Mill cyclically creates and erases concentric furrows, powerfully depicting destruction and renewal. The circular format of this work is anticipated by a wall work like Spiral, 1958, in which Uecker used a nail to laboriously create a target-like structure.

Another major kinetic work is Five Light Disks, Cosmic Vision, 1961-1981, a configuration of five disks with nailed surfaces that expose us to Uecker’s rough beauty.  Like Sand Mill, there is a concern with time, but here time slows down, producing a new reality for these nailed surfaces, which both reflect light and partition it.  They are Uecker’s Impressionist paintings of the cosmos.  Varying the colors of the five disks and their rates of movement serve to counteract the aggressive aura that some of his nail structures create.  Further, they require the observer to participate in completing the work by moving up to and across the disks that span more than 23 feet.  In so doing, one can notice that two of the disks move almost imperceptibly, one has a red floor pedal that requires the observer to power the pulley, and one does not move all but appears to do so because it is the only one in which the black nails are of different diameters and lengths.  This work demonstrates that what we see affects what we do and what we do affects what we see – a basic tenet of J.J. Gibson’s model of perception.

Other works border on the figural but ultimately focus less on the object and more on our encounter with it.  Perhaps the most powerful example is New York Dancer I, 1965, which is a human-scaled vertical cloth structure covered with nails that stands on the floor and rotates feverishly and noisily when you press a foot pedal.  While it was in motion, we backed away, afraid that a nail might escape.   This piece has the visual impact of many African fetish figures that are invested with powers ranging from protection to revenge.  But Uecker is an artist of many moods.  There is a more lyrical five-foot square wall piece that is composed of white nails and uses multiple shadows to create the sensation that a spectral bird-like figure is levitating off the canvas (White Bird, 1964).

Taken together, this exhibition is like Benjamin’s “angel of history” where we are driven simultaneously to look backward and forward.  The blend of geometry and expressionism is Post-Minimal at a time when Minimalism itself was largely nascent.  Moreover, it appears that Uecker’s generativity has opened up options for several artists over the past forty-five years, as seen in Eva Hesse’s breast-like wall pieces and cubes with black rubber protuberances, Tara Donovan’s recent pin ensembles at PACE last month that created fields of movement, and Mona Hatoum’s, Plus and Minus sand installation at MOMA in 2007 that created cycles of creation and destruction.

Kudos to L & M Arts for mounting this show with loans from museums and private collections.  Whereas Uecker’s work has been well known and appreciated in Europe for more than five decades, it has received little attention in New York.   This eye- and mind-stretching exhibition of his early paintings, sculptures, and installations should have gone some way toward rectifying this omission.

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Zero, an Italian group started by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene and active between 1957 and 1966, included artists from France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland. These people worked in deliberate contrast to the prevailing post-war expressionism with its claim to individuality and personal discovery by using modest, minimal, and often non-traditional art materials to artists from their artwork. Working outside the gallery system, these artists made single-evening exhibitions, often in their own studios, issuing manifestos with these events. While some artists involved with Zero, like Lucio Fontana, are well recognized in America, this is the first survey of the lesser-known group in the States.

The gallery visitor is greeted with silence. Many of the works recede, rather than thrust forward. One reason for this is a marked lack of color, with a predominance of dreary grays, deep blacks, ashen browns. Now and again, a saturated red or yellow will flash and spark. Some of the rooms here are hung salon-style, creating a smart rhythm echoing that of the works. In place of labels, artist’s names are lightly handwritten in graphite on the walls next to their art, a choice that reflects the group’s lack of preciousness.

Throughout this exhibition there is an emphasis on materials. From Arman’s piling up of ready-made objects in Accumulation Lampes Fiat Lux (1960) to Yves Klein’s burnt paper on wood in Fire Painting (1961), attention seems focused on distinct formal textures. Weathered and soiled surfaces tend to look damaged,burned, scarred, trampled. As the Cubists and Dadaists before them, the Zero artists wanted to incorporate materials from everyday life in an attempt to collapse the boundaries between art and life. Rather than present themselves as alienated from society as many of the American Abstract Expressionists tended to, through stubborn avoidance of technology and escape into interiority, Zero artists embraced technology and nature alike.

The exhibition mostly consists of two-dimensional wall works that take on the appearance of paintings, but are often not paintings in a conventional sense. Piero Manzoni’s Achrome (1958-59), for instance, is a white horizontal surface of polyester soaked in cobalt chloride, while Hienz Mack’s Folium Argentum (1968) is an etched aluminum panel. Other Zero artists used materials such assand, plastic, mirror, fire, electric light, and smoke. Otto Piene’s Light Ballet on Wheels (1965) is a small, black drum on wheels that projects various shapes of moving light onto the walls and ceiling. It is an investigation of the ephemeral, of the fleeting glimpse. The neutral, plain-looking drum can adapt to any situation, ready to affect a new space with it’s outpour of light, yet also ready to submit to it’s own lack of control. If a space isn’t dark enough, Light Ballet on Wheels surrenders itself to the role of static sculpture.

Another way the Zero artists were counter-expressionist was in their adoption of delicate, minimal forms, often focusing on that staple of modernism, the grid. A 1964 work by Jan Schoonhoven of a grid made with wood, cardboard, and papier maché more closely resembles a metal street grate than a Mondrian painting. However, touch does remain vital to these artists. Throughout the exhibition there is a clear need for a physical engagement with the work. An example being Lucio Fontana’s torn paper on canvas, Concetto Spaziale (1958). Here, the jagged holes cut into the paper aren’t to be seen as violent, but as another mode of mark marking, as the ultimate disturbance of the picture plane. The Zero group was interested in basics, which can be seen in the logical and fundamental way they organized space. As well as the grid, these artists often used circles, triangles, and diamond forms to order compositions. There is an elegant simplicity and economy that ties all the work together.

It is not difficult to locate affinities between the Zero group and the proceeding Italian movement Arte Povera and, also, current artists such as Sergej Jensen and Stefan Muller. Beginning in the late sixties, Arte Povera, which Fontana and Manzoni were also part of, shared Zero’s interest in using inexpensive and often found materials, in hope of establishing a more democratic form of art making. Sergej Jensen and Stefan Muller incorporate into their paintings different types of fabrics that are stained with chemicals or in other ways weather-worn. Particularly, Jensen’s “money paintings” find their precedent in Jan Henderiske’s Centenrelief (1966) and Common Cents (1967). Both “paintings” feature coins attached to stretched fabric that acknowledge their commodity status from the get-go. These are ways to make “freak paintings”, or paintings without paint, that curiously come across as mundane.

This is where the strength of the Zero artists lies, in their ability to expand the parameters of art, particularily painting, in a subtle way. This is not the drawing of a moustache on the Mona Lisa, this is the shift that occurs behind your back, in silence, without you even noticing.

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