Otto Piene: Light Ballet and Fire Paintings, 1957-1967

By Jonathan T.D. Neil

Otto Piene’s Light Ballet works pick up from Moholy-Nagy’s Light Space Modulator (1930) and Fernand Leger’s Ballet Mécanique (1924), but they have something to say about the ‘black box’ phenomenon which arose in the mid-twentieth century around the issue of radar. This was a new kind of imaging technology, one whose inner workings were no longer visible (à la the mechanics of film). For Moholy-Nagy’s open and transparent structure, Piene substituted the perforated drums and chrome globes of Lichtballett (1961) and Hängende Lichtkugel (1972) with their abstract magic lantern plays. One can still ‘get’ how they work, but the mechanism is no longer the point; ‘output’ is. The low violet glow of Electric Anaconda’s timed argon lights (the piece dates to 1965) attests to the presence of forces working behind the scenes, below the threshold of our senses and beyond our control.

Otto Piene, Hängende Lichtkugel, 1972, mixed media, 227 x 70 cm. Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York

Otto Piene, Rasterbild, 1957–8, oil on canvas, 98 x 70 cm, private collection. Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York and ZERO foundation, Düsseldorf

The raster in Piene’s titles for his late-1950s paintings – Rasterbild, Untitled (Raster-Rauchzeichnung) – means ‘grid’, but it opens the door to the raster of television’s cathode-ray tube. ZERO, the group Piene cofounded with Heinz Mack in Düsseldorf, was billed as a reaction to Germany’s expressionist heritage, but it was more forward-thinking than that, and less purely formalist. With fire, soot and pigment, Piene generated hazy screens and coronas of static, forging haunting material analogues for the new technology’s largely invisible vocabulary of form. His work offers a key to that troublesome lock between art and technology, and it’s only just beginning to turn.

Otto Piene: Light Ballet and Fire Paintings, 1957-1967 is on view at Sperone Westwater, New York, through 22 May