![\""Fire](\"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/picOttoPieneFitchburgMuseum190209_0624w.jpg\")
<\/a>Shaped by his wartime experiences, Piene (1928-2014) would come to make art with smoke and flame, with machines that produced cosmic light shows, with giant inflated balloons. He became a Cold War counterculture artist, a utopian \u201cWhole Earth Catalog\u201d DIY futurist. He employed technology and machines to create psychedelic art to spread peace.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy endeavor is twofold: to demonstrate that light is a source of life which has to be constantly rediscovered, and to show expansion as a phenomenal event. Everything is striving for larger space,\u201d Piene wrote for a New York exhibition in 1965. \u201cWe want to reach the sky. We want to exhibit in the sky, not in order to establish there a new art world, but rather to enter new space peacefully\u2014that is, freely, playfully, and actively, not as slaves of war technology.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cFire and Light: Otto Piene in Groton, 1983\u20132014,\u201d at the Fitchburg Art Museum<\/a> from Feb. 9 to June 2, 2019, explores the artist\u2019s late work, when he was director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology\u2019s Center for Advanced Visual Studies in Cambridge. Settled in Groton, on a rural property northwest of Boston, he continued to expand upon projects and ideas he first explored in the 1950s and \u201860s.<\/p>\n The Fitchburg museum has scheduled a \u201cSky Art\u201d event for on Sunday, June 2, from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. at Lowe Park, on Elm Street across from the museum. (The event was rescheduled after poor weather earlier this year.) Curator Lisa Crossman will lead a closing discussion in the museum galleries 1:30 p.m. that day.<\/p>\n But before all that was Piene\u2019s war. He served in antiaircraft units in Minden, just east of his hometown, and then a ways south, at an airbase at G\u00fctersloh that was home to some of the first fighter jets. He became head gunner of a flak gun.<\/p>\n During downtimes, he drew and painted watercolors in his sketchbook of dogs, of surrounding farms, of a child\u2019s eyes just peeking above the collar of a man-sized Wehrmacht coat, of the yellow and green four-barreled flak gun pointed up at a blue sky, of an open field and the moon glowing above in a blue-black night sky.<\/p>\n \u201cAll you have to do is stare at the sky. 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,\u201d Piene told the Smithsonian interviewer in 1988. \u201c\u2026In 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. What we did like was the crummiest weather, that was the safest, the rain, mist, low clouds, everything.\u201d<\/p>\n They spent days fighting low-diving fighter planes. They spent nights battling under skies lit up by searchlights and tracer fire and explosions.<\/p>\n \u201cAs gunner at a four-barrel flak, surrounded by detonations, at night I used to see tracers draw their lines, hectically beautiful,\u201d Piene wrote for his 1965 exhibition \u201cPiene: Light Ballet\u201d at New York\u2019s Howard Wise Gallery. \u201cBut fear came before beauty; seeing was aiming.\u201d<\/p>\n Piene turned 17 in April 1945, was reassigned to an adult Labor Corps Infantry in northern Germany, and was discharged a couple of days before the official capitulation in May 1945. \u201cI had only two things left in my uniform jacket: a sketchbook made of sheets of war-mail paper and a watercolor set,\u201d Piene recalled in 2011 (as quoted in the catalogue for the Harvard Art Museums\u2019 2018 exhibition \u201cInventur: Art in Germany, 1943-55\u201d). He wandered toward home, with a detour to Gluckstadt at the mouth of the Elbe River.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was the smoothest, the largest, and the most incredibly glistening and reflecting waterplane mirror that you’ve ever seen. It’s entirely a huge expanse of glistening quicksilver under a flawless sky,\u201d Piene told the Smithsonian interviewer in 1988. \u201cI became very suddenly aware of how the war was over and how this was not a great threat, but this was just the greatest beauty that didn’t mean an invitation to death or disaster.\u201d<\/p>\n If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>
\n
\n