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Abstract
It may seem that the time of op art, that flashy movement often deemed to feature visual experiments designed to “trick” the human perceptual apparatus, has passed. The movement burned brightly for a few years, but most writers and critics stopped paying much attention to it, only occasionally dropping in for a withering review of an exhibition. Yet there are reasons, beyond simply an increase in auction prices and a seeming upswing in interest, to return to the movement at this point in time. This article analyzes, in particular through the lens of Siegfried Kracauer, a stylistic tendency, termed here the “ophthalmological,” within op art, typified by Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely, in conjunction with broader social trends, including the financialization of capital, rationalism, and capitalist metaphysics to argue for the ongoing relevance of op as a harbinger of the present.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 2005), 15.
2 Joe Houston, Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s (London: Merrell, 2007), 57. Stanczak, whose works I do not identify with the ophthalmological tendency for reasons I hope to explore in future research, did not have a say in the titling of this show.
3 Robert Morris, a close colleague of Judd’s, avowedly used the logic of Gestalt forms (which are based around the figure–ground dialectic), a strong similarity with op, as we will see.
4 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum (1967). A sampling of other criticisms and sources can be found in Houston, Optic Nerve.
5 Quoted in Mark Harris,“Intoxicating Painting,” Journal of Contemporary Painting 2, no. 2 (2016): 195–218; p. 199.
6 Quoted in Houston, Optic Nerve, 66.
7 John Lancaster, Introducing Op Art (London: B. T. Batsford, 1973), 9.
8 Edward Barry, “Vasarely’s Show Teases or Teaches,” Chicago Tribune, February 19, F5.
9 Johannes Halder, “Victor Vasarely: Badisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe [Review],” Kunstwerk 35 (1982): 74. Here and subsequently, the translations are mine.
10 Josef Albers, “Op Art and/or Perceptual Effects,” Yale Scientific Magazine, 40, no. 2 (1965): 7–13; p. 8. Albers may be referring to works of Bridget Riley, such as “Blaze 1” (1962), “Untitled (Circular Movement)” (1962), and, especially, “Uneasy Center” (1963).
11 Spencer L. Smith and Ikuko T. Smith, “Life Imitates Op Art,” Nature Neuroscience 14, no. 7 (June 2011): 803--4; Zoï Kapoula, Alexandre Lang, Marine Vernet, and Paul Locher, “Eye Movement Instructions Modulate Motion Illusion and Body Sway with Op Art,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 9 (March 2015): 1--8; Frouke Hermens and Johannes Zanker, “Looking at Op Art: Gaze Stability and Motion Illusions,” i-Perception 3, no. 5 (May 2012): 282--304.
12 Harris, “Intoxicating Painting,” 200.
13 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, transl. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 246–47.
14 Houston, Optic Nerve, 55.
15 Paul Moorhouse, “Bridget Riley [Review],” Burlington Magazine, September 2008, 634–35.
16 Maurice De Sausmarez, Bridget Riley (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1970), 18.
17 Bridget Riley, The Eye’s Mind: Collected Writings 1965–2019 (London: The Bridget Riley Art Foundation, 2019), 90.
18 Paul Moorhouse, Bridget Riley: A Very Very Person (London: Ridinghouse, 2019), 193. Understanding Riley’s works as studies may explain why the actual studies she created prior to the pieces are so compelling. Instead of being a “finished” work, they show exactly the processes that Riley was working through at the time. The works shimmer above the graph paper that was used as a base, showing precisely the limits of a rationalistic worldview. It is almost like viewing an improvization that gradually coheres into a melody – only the melody itself is less interesting than the interplay that led to it. The juxtaposition of more formal artistic explorations with material that is normally more associated with engineering or architecture (arrows, diagrams, etc.) is quite similar to the paintings and drawings of Gordon Matta-Clark. An example of this sort of work by Riley, “Structural and Tonal Movements in Opposition,” can be found in Riley A Very Very Person, 58.
19 Riley, A Very Very Person, 83. Emphasis mine.
20 See, for example, Riley, A Very Very Person, 305.
21 Riley, A Very Very Person, 91.
22 Simon Rycroft, “The Nature of Op Art: Bridget Riley and the Art of Nonrepresentation,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23 (2005): 351–71; p. 361.
23 Robert C. Morgan, Vasarely (New York: George Braziller Inc, 2004).
24 Morgan, Vasarely, 18.
25 For a historical summary of this transition, see Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), especially the first two chapters.
26 Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism, 48.
27 Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism, 58.
28 Quoted in Houston, Optic Nerve, 165–168.
29 Associations with Soviet forms of social life persist in other manifestations of op as well. The Anonima group, somewhat delightfully, outlined a “four-year plan” (Houston, Optic Nerve, 168).
30 Morgan, Vasarely, 15.
31 Anna Bokov, Avant-Garde as Method: Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920–1930 (New York: Park Books, 2021).
32 Houston, Optic Nerve, 166.
33 Houston, Optic Nerve, 166.
34 Morgan, Vasarely, 12.
35 Houston, Optic Nerve, 166.
36 Houston, Optic Nerve, 166. Emphasis mine.
37 Morgan, Vasarely, 15.
38 Rene Parola, Optical Art: Theory and Practice (New York: Dover, 1996), 9.
39 Lancaster, Introducing Op Art, 77–81.
40 Parola, Optical Art, 11.
41 Parola, Optical Art, 13.
42 Lancaster, Introducing Op Art, 81.
43 Quoted in Morgan, Vasarely, 9; Houston, Optic Nerve, 166.
44 Lancaster, Introducing Op Art, 14.
45 Houston, Optic Nerve, 29.
46 Houston, Optic Nerve, 35.
47 Morgan, Vasarely, 2004, 28; Riley A Very Very Person, 305.
48 Morgan, Vasarely, 2004, 208.
49 Riley, A Very Very Person, 305.
50 Quoted in Houston, Optic Nerve, 44. Bill’s quote is contextualized within a larger essay that is quite even-handed in its approach of the idea of laws, which are contingent, and style, not prizing hard formality over, for example, surrealist methods, but it is nevertheless indicative of the relationship between formality and the quest for “objective,” empirically verifiable laws.
51 Quoted in Houston, Optic Nerve, 167.
52 For reference to Fukuyama, see, for example, Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?”, National Interest no. 16 (1989): 3–18. The influence of Kojeve would not be surprising given the time and place of the group’s founding, which, despite the Spanish nationality of many of the artists, was Paris 1957, when many thinkers who studied under Kojeve, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Jean Hyppolite, Jean-Paul Satre, and André Breton, were still alive and influential. For further information on Kojeve, see, for example, Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980).
53 Quoted in Houston, Optic Nerve, 167.
54 Quoted in Houston, Optic Nerve, 167.
55 Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism, 43.
56 Parola, Optical Art, 9.
57 Houston, Optic Nerve, 101.
58 Rycroft, “The Nature of Op Art,” 365.
59 Houston, Optic Nerve, 166.
60 I use “properly understood” here to mean optics in all of its “professional” meaning. Lancaster (Introducing Op Art, 87), of all the theorists of op art, grasps this best when he acknowledges the effect of topology on the experiencing of visual phenomena by noting that “it is a simple fact from geometrical optics that the image of an object halves in size with each doubling of the distance of that object and likewise it doubles in size whenever its distance is halved.”
61 Houston, Optic Nerve, 157.
62 Halder, “Victor Vasarely.”
63 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 70.
64 Alison Shonkwiler, “Don DeLillo’s Financial Sublime,” Contemporary Literature 51, no. 2 (2010): 246–82; p. 249.
65 Shonkwiler, “Don DeLillo’s Financial Sublime,”, 249.
66 Morgan (Vasarely, 32–33) seems to suggest that Vasarely presaged the algorithmic revolution as well. Regarding some of his works of the 1960s, which used strong “programs” to create them: “Theoretically, one could say that even if the material object [the painting itself] were lost or destroyed, the algorithmic program could rebuild the painting. The alphabet of shapes, the conjugations between these shapes, and their individual hues would provide, and their individual hues would provide all the information necessary for the painting’s restoration, even its translation into another dematerialised or three-dimensional form.” For Vasarely, this was the natural extension of his interest in copies and prints. Ceric similarly places Vasarely within the continuum of algorithmic art; Vlatko Ceric, “Algorithmic Art: Technology, Mathematics, and Art,” ITI 2008: 30th International Conference on Information Technology Interfaces (2008), 75–82.
67 The relationship of op to financialization has recently been identified parodied by the artist Mark Wagner, most famous for his portrait of Ben Bernanke constructed out of bills of US currency, who takes op aesthetics, especially those associated with the ophthalmological tendency, particularly Vasarely, and constructs pieces within that paradigm out of dollar bills. Wagner, directly echoing what became of much op, refers to these pieces as “lobby art.”
68 Lancaster, Introducing Op Art, 9.
69 Shonkwiler, “Don DeLillo’s Financial Sublime,” 251.
70 Pamela M. Lee, “Bridget Riley's Eye/Body Problem,” October 98 (2001): 27--46.
71 Shonkwiler “Don DeLillo’s Financial Sublime,” 261.
72 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 69.
73 Lee, “Bridget Riley's Eye/Body Problem,” 36–7.
74 Lee, “Bridget Riley's Eye/Body Problem,” 26.
75 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 16.
76 Michael Ford, “Victor Vasarely [exhibition review],” Arts Review 28, no. 14 (1976): 354. Emphasis mine.
77 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 71.
78 Houston, Optic Nerve, 7.
79 Houston, Optic Nerve, 149.
80 Marcus Verhagen, “Art in a Narrow Present,” New Left Review 135 (2022).
81 Parola, Optical Art, 10.
82 Halder, “Victor Vasarely.“
83 Verhagen, “Art in a Narrow Present.”
84 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 15.
85 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 72.
86 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 43.
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Notes on contributors
James M. Kopf
JAMES M. KOPF is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of German at Lehigh University. He received his PhD in German from Pennsylvania State University, where he remained for a year as the Max Kade postdoctoral fellow. His work has been published in Resonance, the Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, and elsewhere, and his first book, Phenomenology, Music, Soundscape: A Fragmentary System of Resonance and Echoes, is under contract with de Gruyter. James’s research is principally engaged with the intersections of aesthetics, critical theory, phenomenology, and deconstruction. He is also interested in literature, environmental philosophy/ecocriticism, experimental music, and radical politics.