OTTO PIENE

Particularly fascinated by the medium of light, Piene spent his entire career experimentingwith it. The Proliferation of the Sun was originally conceived as a multi-slide projection andperformance in 1966–67 for the opening of Piene and Aldo Tambolini’s Black Gate Theatrein New York. Five projectionists operated Kodak carousel slide projectors, followingPiene’s scripted narration, which began by telling the performers to ‘turn your projectorson now.’ Against the backdrop of the era’s spread of nuclear weapons, the workcountered the destructive powers of war with an abstract, peaceful visual world.

The current restaging at the gallery accords with the final iteration of The Proliferation ofthe Sun, devised by Piene as the centerpiece of his 2014 retrospective at the NeueNationalgalerie Berlin. Completed only shortly before his death, the installation isreminiscent of the original performances of the 1960s and updated with automatedprojectors showing digital copies of the original glass slides. Piene completed the work byadding 160 new slides painted especially for the Berlin staging. These were also digitizedand projected onto a large inflatable sphere, inspired by the work’s 1967 presentation atArt Intermedia gallery in Cologne. The integration of new technologies reflected Piene’skeen interest in innovation and made possible his initial imagining of the work as a largescale somatic experience. Later in 2014, during the first major survey of ZERO in a USmuseum, the reinterpretation of The Proliferation of the Sun was projected onto a balloon and suspended in the rotunda of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as a tribute to thelate artist.

The slides display vividly coloured organic forms, recalling fractals, planets, and cellsreproducing under a microscope, evoking the sun’s vibrance and life-giving energy. Inbetween, perfectly round black dots resembling eclipses materialize. With increasingspeed, the images change to the droning soundtrack of the artist’s voice uttering ‘Thesun, the sun, the sun, the sun’—a sort of ritualistic chant that vibrates through the spaceand anchors audiences in the present moment. Simultaneously, we are transported backto the time of the original performances as younger Piene’s voice rings out.

As the slides end, the space becomes bathed in pure white light while Piene intones ‘white-out, white-out, white-out.’ Possibly playing on its counterpart, the blackout, whichplunged cities into darkness during wartime as lights were turned off to make targets lessvisible to the enemy, or the fade of theatre lights to mark a play’s end, Piene surprisesviewers with a bright glaring light. Making the colour white tangible, this section of theprojection taps into Western ideas of purity and emptiness and the new beginningsassociated with them, referencing ZERO’s symbolic indication of beginning at nothing.Uniting art, life, nature and technology, The Proliferation of the Sun functions as a meansof expansion, breaking down spatial boundaries and opening up space for contemplationand new forms of perception.