The Zeroists’ transgressions of their medium and
of tradition took place not only in the production of
their images, but in the exhibition of the work as
well. The artists often showed their photographs as
part of installations. In one case they hung photo-
graphs alongside real objects that either appeared in
or corresponded with the images. A heap of sand
was placed before a photograph of a bulldozer, a
picture of a fence was hung on an actual fence, and
so forth. For another exhibition, the group invented
an imaginary artist named Jo ́zef Korbiela and
showed work under his name. Such projects and
exhibitions anticipated subsequent artists’ explora-
tion of conceptualism and institutional critique.
The group held its final exhibition in Torun in
- The artists appropriated an abandoned fac-
tory as their gallery space, and included some of the
found objects left over in the building as part of the
installation. By the time of this exhibition, it was
clear that the artists were exploring divergent aes-
thetic directions. Unable to maintain a coherent
unity, the Zero-61 collective dissolved. They proved
to be an important but still understudied influence
on the Polish avant-garde of the following decades.
ShannonWearing
Seealso: Conceptual Photography; Photographic
‘‘Truth’’; Photography in Russia and Eastern Eu-
rope; PostmodernismFurther Reading
Jurecki, Krzysztof. ‘‘Towards Avant-Garde Photography:
Zero-61 Group.’’Projektno. 1 (1988).
Lechowicz, Lech. ‘‘Zero-61 Group: Forgotten Tradition of
the 60s.’’Exitno. 2 (1999).PIET ZWART
Dutch
Known primarily for design work executed during
and immediately following his brief and tenuous
association with the modern movement De Stijl,
Piet Zwart remains one of the most important mod-
ernist innovators of graphic design and typography
and, as such, critical to the development of photo-
graphy over the twentieth century. Not strictly a
photographer per se, his long and varied career led
him to work in the disparate fields of architecture;
architectural criticism; woodworking; education; in-
terior, furniture, graphic, and exhibition design;
typography; and, finally, photography. Before meet-
ing Vilmos Husza ́r and Jans Wils, early members of
De Stijl, Zwart’s aesthetic concerns, expressed most
concretely in his interior designs, more closely par-
alleled the conservative arts and crafts tradition
favored by practitioners of the Amsterdam School.
However, Zwart was seduced by Wils and Husza ́r’s
emphasis on the universality of pure form and in
their utopian aspiration to generate a new social
order based on the complete fusion of art and life.
Intrigued as he was by their ideas, Zwart never offi-
cially joined the De Stijl group or published in its
eponymous journal. He mistrusted what he per-
ceived to be De Stijl’s limiting tendency towards the
restrictive and dogmatic. He also felt that the group
was not sufficiently committed to embracing new
technologies in their pursuit of a new modern art.
While still loosely associated with De Stijl, Zwart
was commissioned to design the exhibition stall for a
cellulose manufacturer planning to exhibit at the
1921 Utrecht Industrial Fair. Zwart reasoned that
any successful exhibition design must: 1) acknowl-
edge the condition of being temporary; 2) serve as a
background for the product; 3) correspond to the
surrounding interior architecture; and, 4) be compli-
cit with a modern consciousness. While seemingly
simple and straightforward, these four principles led
Zwart to an exhibition design that would radically
affect avant-gardeexhibition strategy throughoutthe
rest of the century. Zwart’s first proposal for the
space depicted the room in the style used by most
De Stijl colorists to prevent the distortion of perspec-
tive from entering their compositions: a single, flat
plane wherein the walls were rendered as if peeled
open. His second sketch, from 1 August 1921,
marked a definitive break with the first and, not
coincidentally, with his strongest De Stijl allegiances.
Instead of the two-dimensional format, he chose to
render the proposed space from an oblique perspec-ZERO-61 GROUP