All You Have to Do Is Stare at the Sky

Ewa Borysiewicz

“The thing about it in retrospect, kind of, in all you see, all you have to do, is stare at the sky. Um, that’s what you do if you’re a flak soldier. You try to see the tiny points approaching, where they are, and try to identify them, so on, so forth.”^[1] This is how the artist Otto Piene (1928−2014) described his time as a German child soldier serving in the air defense unit during World War II in a series of interviews for the Smithsonian Institution at the turn of 1980s. Piene continued: “(…) the irony was that in those days, the clear sky and the most beautiful sky was the most dangerous sky, because it was well suited for large-scale aerial attacks.” ^[2] The artist repeatedly recounted this experience, bringing up the image of the sky in his interviews and writings – referencing it as a turning point in his life. It seems that for Piene, war had not only changed his view of humanity, but also of the sun and the sky as otherwise serene companions of history unfolding beneath them. Observing the heavens, on a lookout for signals of aerial assault, this young man came to see the sky and the sun as source of hope, energy, and life, as well as peril, violence, and death.

For Piene, a teenager in 1944 when he was drafted into the German air defense, the act of gazing upward has been irreversibly stripped of innocence and curiosity. Still, the sun and the sky – as motifs, media, and tools for art making – are a constant presence throughout his art practice. One might be tempted to interpret this recurrence as the artist’s attempt to erase war trauma, a futile effort to rewrite his past. And yet, in Paths to Paradise, a manifesto published in 1961, Piene contradicts this intuition and reveals a very different intention behind his artmaking: “Yes, I dream of a better world. / Should I dream of a worse? / Yes, I desire a wider world. / Should I desire a narrower?”.^[3]

The manifesto lends its title to a monographic presentation of Piene’s work in Basel’s Museum Tinguely, which delivers a nuanced, yet disciplined reading of the artist’s work. Curated by Dr. Sandra Beate Reimann and Dr. Lauren Elizabeth Hanson, the exhibition casts Piene’s oeuvre as one driven by hope for a better future for the world and humanity. This focus marks a shift away from what could be termed as narratives of pessimism in the current practice of exhibition-making that oftentimes takes the themes of dystopia, trauma, and catastrophe as points of departure. Reimann and Hanson’s angle is firmly rooted in Piene’s own perspective, expressed in artworks and writing: the exhibition is exceptionally researched and, alongside presenting an exhaustive selection of Piene’s art, offers a new reading of his work.^[4]

This meticulous analysis paves the way for a broader topic: the relationship between the individual and the universal. As expressed by Piene: “One glance at the sky, at the sun, at the sea, is enough to show that the world outside man is bigger than that inside him (…). that it is so immense that man needs a medium to transform the power of the sun into an illumination that is suitable to him, into a stream whose waves are like the beating of his heart.”^[5] Piene sees the individual as carrying a part of the universal, and as a result, it is also in the universal that we can see the reflection of the individual. Accordingly, in the exhibition, both art – a broader phenomenon – and the art maker – a singular one – play an equal role in informing one another. The story unfolding in Paths to Paradise resembles a musical composition, a fugue – where the lead melody is developed and repeated throughout the course of the composition – being its closest analogy. Accordingly, the show begins with a motif, developed and unfolding throughout the show’s duration. The exhibition concludes with a coda – the initial theme reiterated – and so, both first and last works one encounters following the song of Paths of Paradise, are the earliest works Piene realized.

Leaving the exhibition, viewers encounter portraits of Piene’s family, in pencil or coal on paper, done during or shortly after the end of the war. By the entrance to the exhibition stands a vitrine with two sketchbooks (Wartime, 1944-1946; Childhood and Wartime Sketches, 1938-1944) completed in the midst of World War II. Next to them sits a small-format watercolor (Untitled (Airplane), 1943), depicting an aircraft ready to depart. A powerful light pierces the darkness surrounding the machine, extracting its contours from the background, flickering across the whirling propellers. The white ray cuts the composition into prism-like fragments and exposes a variety of colors constituting the murk. The blackness, dissected, explodes into brown, ochre, blue, and green-colored parts.

Piene’s sketchbooks were the most intimate and faithful witnesses to the artist’s creative development, accompanying him throughout the entirety of his artistic development and career. Reimann and Hanson’s selection of his notes are shown next to the correspondent set of preparatory sketches and concept drawings. This allows a glimpse of how the artist translated the immaterial and abstract – light, vibration, energy – into tangible and visible components and then integrated them into the artworks. Oftentimes the process of translation stops midway and the border between the abstract and figurative is blurred. This is the case in Sequence (views of Taroudant, Morocco), a series of marker drawings of a city landscape found in one of Piene’s sketchbooks (France/ Anchorage/ Rosenthal Designs, 1987). Here, the initial depiction of an identifiable city landscape, pictured as a structured composition of blue, green, orange, and black lines gradually pales into seemingly erratic patches of yellow. The last frame in the sequence shows a hardly recognizable view of the city of Taroudant, here more an afterimage than a direct representation. Above the landscape hovers a golden sun, resembling an eye looking down at the city engulfed by its rays: not only darkness, but light as well, are forces to be reckoned with.

The sun rises in its full might towards the end of the show, as the main protagonist of one of the exhibition’s most dramatic pieces. The restaging of the performance The Proliferation of the Sun (1966/2013), contained in a dimly lit chamber, greets its guests with a recording of Piene’s instructions addressed to five carousel projector operators. On the mark of the artist, the operators activate the machines; a sequence of abstract forms, hand-painted of the slide celluloid, starts to appear on the museum walls. Suddenly the voice commands the work of the devices to speed up and the images begin to alternate at a rapid, overwhelming pace. The initially disciplined format of the slides, fitting squarely within the wall space, expands uncontrollably; the brightly colored, formless shapes – reminiscent of microscopic photographs of biological cells and telescopic records of the cosmos – begin to spill out of their frames, flooding  the floor and ceiling of the space with color. In the final stages of the performance chaos ensues: the intensity of the projection’s colors, the sudden toggling between darkness and light, the loud and erratic noise of the slide projectors shutters, all feel overwhelming. The sun closes in:^[6] the viewer is subjected to its unrestrained, terrifying expansion. Then, through this pandemonium, the voice of the artist is heard once more. “The sun, the sun, the sun, the sun…” repeats Piene, in a calm, yet firm tone. The matter-of-fact utterance re-anchors the witnesses of The Proliferation of the Sun, aiding them to endure the influence of a force far greater than their own. The sun is a dangerous entity, governed by a logic and purpose beyond human understanding and yet, Piene seeks to tame and harness its power through art, which he deems a necessary mediator between the sun’s primal power and the human realm. For Piene, art is a tool to better the world and to illuminate the paths to paradise for himself and others who might be courageous enough to walk it: “And my pictures must be brighter than the world around them (…). But to praise brightness alone seems to me to be insufficient. I go to darkness itself, I pierce it with light, I make it transparent, I take its terror from it (…).”^[7]

The show’s structure may be navigated by two intertwined sets of coordinates: one connected to the individual, the other, to the universal. The latter refers to transcendent phenomena: the ever-present dualities of order and chaos, light and darkness, stillness and movement, presence and absence. Piene, well-aware of these dynamics, turned them into key media of the ZERO group, which he founded in 1958 in Düsseldorf together with Heinz Mack, and later joined by Günther Uecker, Jean Tinguely and Yves Klein among others. His Light Room with Mönchengladbach Wall (1963-2013), commissioned by Galerie Löhrl in Mönchengladbach, Germany, demonstrates the creative imperatives of the group: the effacing of the influence of the author in the creative process and the radical homogenization of the artworks’ observable layer. Light Room…, restaged in Museum Tinguely, welcomes its guests into a dimly lit space filled with three-dimensional objects: spheres, cylinders, and cubes, assembled from perforated metal sheets. Each of the items – some stationary, others slowly rotating – emits a soft, conspicuous glow, its source hidden inside, punctuating the darkness engulfing the room. Circular and tubular patches of light appear and disappear, sliding along the walls, forming star constellation-like patterns on the walls, floor, and ceiling, transforming the white cube into an astronomical observatory. There, the viewer as well, may witness the fluctuations of the sky.

The exhibition goes beyond the portrayal of Piene as a lone, self-contained genius – a perspective too often applied in monographs of male and female artists alike. To complement and balance the focus on the individual practice of the artist, Reimann and Hudson introduced his collaborative practice, which flourished during his time as an academic at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In the late 1960s, Piene left Germany for the United States, invited by the artist György Kepes – who had first been a teacher at the New Bauhaus, then became the founder of CAVS – and became the Centre’s first international fellow. Piene succeeded Kepes as the Center’s director in 1974, working as a mentor to numerous students and developing what could be considered his most ambitious idea, Sky Art.

Its origins may be traced to Piene’s manifesto, where he pondered: “Why is there no art in space, why do we have no exhibitions in the sky? (…) In the sky there are such enormous possibilities (…)!”.^[8] On the surface, the concept behind Sky Art may be considered a series of projects where the artist uses the sky as material and air as medium for numerous performances, public sculptures, and participatory events. Yet the driving force behind Sky Art is not to add visibility, or to leave a trace in its onlookers’ memory, but “the desire to communicate”.^[9] Sky Art projects were ambitious in terms of scale and execution, and this communication seems to occur not only between the audience and the work, but also, between the artist and his collaborators. Piene was well aware of the credit he owed to the CAVS academic community: “(…) at the center, I can do—I can do things that I couldn’t do without it. I could—I can encourage discovery, I can encourage exploration, I can encourage the, the actualization of people’s dreams and expectations and instincts that I couldn’t do as a private citizen, (…) as a personal individual artist.” [10]

Piene realized his Sky Art pieces with large groups of collaborators and volunteers, and the context-rich presentation of these projects in the exhibition bears proof of this collaborative effort. In Museum Tinguely, both the video and photo documentation of the final project and the evidence of collective preparatory work: attempts at solving technical challenges, trying out different installation systems, and the setting up of large-scale sky art works, are equally important. The section dedicated to the Olympic Rainbow (1972), launched into the sky during the Summer Olympics in Munich is a case in point, the spotlight being the result of a group effort. The mounting of Olympic Rainbow involved the artist and a team of 230 collaborators. In addition to presenting concept sketches by Piene, the curators reveal the complicated process behind the construction of the piece which culminated in a colossal arch assembled of five colorful, helium-filled 460-meter tubes that adorned the sky. The work was lifted above the lake in the Olympic Park during the closing ceremony taking place days after the terrorist attack on the Israeli national sports team resulting in the deaths of eleven sportsmen, a police officer, and five of the assailants. According to Piene, the hopeful symbolism of Olympic Rainbow – which floated through out the day and the night above countless people – resonated strongly: “People really got the feeling that there was a reason to hope, that not everything from now on would be disaster, death and destruction.”^[11]   

Towards the end of a long interview for the Smithsonian Institution, conducted several years after the Munich Olympics, Piene said: “(…) if people don’t go together (…) — in the war and past the war, after the war –  if they don’t develop and apply and practice and act out sense together, then the consequences are just plain chaos and destruction. And I, I still hold that belief. “^[12] A series of performances, realized with a group of volunteers and experimental cellist Charlotte Moorman, is the best demonstration of Piene’s belief in the positive impact of human cooperation and the ameliorating potential of art. Sky Kiss, iterations of which were materialized in Linz (1982), Munich (1983), and a desert in California (1986), involved the musician being strapped into a harness and lifted into the sky. Carried upwards by a garland of elongated helium-filled balloons, Moorman, dressed in a festive white cape, floated several meters above the ground, holding her instrument close. Her silhouette, set against the blue background, resembled a comet; the movement of which was halted, causing the woman’s body to impersonate a nucleus, with the thin transparent tubes acting as its tail. In the video documenting the performance, one notices how the musician – after being raised up to the appropriate height, gazes down and waves to Piene and the audience, smiling joyously. She then puts her fingers to the cello strings, raises her bow, and starts to play. The clear and blue sky, “the most dangerous sky”, fills with music and is more beautiful than ever before. 

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^[1] Robert F. Brown, “Oral history interview with Otto Piene, 1988 Aug. 4-1990 Feb. 22. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.”, source: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-otto-piene-12872, last accessed: 03.06.2024.

^[2] Robert F. Brown, “Oral history interview with Otto Piene, 1988 Aug. 4-1990 Feb. 22. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.”, source: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-otto-piene-12872, last accessed: 03.06.2024.

^[3] Otto Piene, “Paths to Paradise”, in: “Otto Piene. Paths to Paradise”, Museum Tinguely Basel, Hirmer Verlag GmbH Munich, 2024, p. 11.

^[4] The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive catalog published by Hirmer. The publisher describes the book as presenting “new scholarship on the development of his [Piene’s] imaginative approaches to interlace art, science, and nature and uncover strategies of coping in an increasingly uncertain world”. Source: https://www.hirmerverlag.de/eu/titel-1-1/otto_piene-2513/, last accessed: 04.06.2024.

^[5] Otto Piene, “Paths to Paradise”, op. cit., p. 11.

^[6] The German title of the work reads: “Die Sonne kommt näher”, which may translate to “The Sun Comes Nearer”.

^[7] Otto Piene, “Paths to Paradise”, op. cit., p. 12.

^[8] Otto Piene, “Paths to Paradise”, op. cit., p. 13.

^[9] Barbara Koenches, “Rainbow in the Sky”, in: “Otto Piene. Paths to Paradise”, Museum Tinguely Basel, Hirmer Verlag GmbH Munich, 2024, p. 92.

[10]  Robert F. Brown, “Oral history interview with Otto Piene, 1988 Aug. 4-1990 Feb. 22. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.”, source: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-otto-piene-12872, last accessed: 03.06.2024.

^[11] “German artist Otto Piene dies aged 86”, BBC News, 18th July 2014, source: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-28364515, last accessed: 12.06.2024.

^[12] Robert F. Brown, “Oral history interview with Otto Piene, 1988 Aug. 4-1990 Feb. 22. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.”, source: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-otto-piene-12872, last accessed: 03.06.2024.