for instance, Armando and Jan Henderikse left the setting up of their installations to museum staff, and in 1965, at Peeters's request, Yayoi Kusama produced a work in his material, card sliver, a spun synthetic fibre. ‘The process of creation is . . . completely unimportant and uninteresting; a machine can do it,’ Peeters said. ‘The personal element lies in the idea and no longer in the manufacture.’ The identity of the Dutch Nul group navigated between a cheerful orientation toward the world of the everyday and the cool sobriety of the serial monochrome. Whereas the German Zero artists were still ‘painting’ with the elements, with the effects of fire, light, shadow, movement and reflection, the Nul artist preferred to let reality speak for itself by isolating it, usually in raw form. Among the Dutchmen, only Henk Peeters worked with the elements water and fire – although Peeters saw his ‘pyrographs’, soot and scorch marks on various surfaces, as a typically Nul solution to the elimination of any excessively personal element: to work with the fickleness of a flame is ‘. . . to let go of the work and to become the spectator of a self-directed performance.’ In terms of form, Peeters's tactile cotton balls, whether on a canvas or on a wall as a three-dimensional installation, are balanced on the cusp between Nul and the German Zero. 'It is not our job to educate, any more than it is our job to convey messages,’ said Piero Manzoni in 1960. This might as easily have been a statement by Henk Peeters, by Jan Henderikse and even by the German Zero group. And yet the sober-minded outlook of the Dutchmen distinguished itself from the German Zero. ‘Yes, I dream of a better world. Should I dream of a worse?’ wrote Otto Piene in ‘Paths to Paradise’ in 1961. With their clear-eyed view of reality, the members of Nul were not dreaming of the world, neither a better nor a worse, and certainly not of ‘paths to paradise’. During the Nul period, radicalism and a sincerely felt admiration for what was new and contemporary went hand in hand; nimble provocation is what Nul seemed to have a patent on. The Monochrome Jan Schoonhoven’s ‘objectively neutral expression of the generally applicable’ persisted throughout Nul, and in his work, monochrome – the reduction of all colour to white – was the chosen instrument.