|
HOME PAGE |
LUXURY NOW |
WINDOW SHOPPING |
BRAND GALLERY |
CITY GUIDE |
LUXURY TRAVELER |
ARTS PORTFOLIO |
Four decades after the op art movement, some of today's artists are subtly incorporating op art elements into their work
From electric stripes to optical perspectives, contemporary art takes a bow in the direction of op art.
Jim Lambie's vibrant environments use optical elements to dazzling effect. His latest installation, "RSVP: Jim Lambie" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is no exception. Lambie, who was short-listed for the 2005 Turner Prize, has covered the walls opposite the restaurant with curvilinear stripes formed from black and white duct tape, which often feature strongly in his artworks. Seven sculptures, incorporating brightly colored chairs with junkshop handbags covered with hanging pieces of broken mirrors, emerge directly out of the wall, enhancing the visual backdrop. The site-specific piece echoes the curves of the restaurant's tables while alluding to Lambie's passion for music and DJ'ing.
"The whole piece is like a fragmented, graphic version of a vinyl record, and the sculptures are almost like how a needle on a record would gather and pick up dust in the groove," the Glaswegian artist explains. "I'd like to think that those interlocking curves create movement in the architectural space. So there are sweeps, curves and waves going through it."
Lambie's work is known for its kaleidoscopic energy and seductive glamour along with its formalist concerns. As Louisa Buck, a judge for the 2005 Turner Prize, says, "In a way, he's taking the op art of someone like Bridget Riley and just exploding it into a whole environment. It's a bit like walking onto a dance floor where you have this sense of an optical fizz all around you but then being kind of choreographed and counterpointed by the sculptural pieces that he puts into this environment."
Lambie is one of numerous contemporary artists to integrate aspects of optical art, either intentionally or unconsciously, into their artistic language. "I think the op art artists definitely informed my art education, and I have a definite admiration for them. But I think we're coming from different places," says Lambie. "Still, I think there's a point in the road they took and on the road that I would be taking where the conversation could cross over."
The name "op art" was coined in an article in Time magazine in 1964, which described the movement as an "attack on the eye." It was characterized by its use of dizzying optical effects, trompe l'oeil deceptions, visual experiments, perceptual research, and for challenging the viewer's perception and causing feelings of instability. Indeed, Riley described her black-and-white paintings, in which geometric shapes seem to shift and flicker, as being "about states of composure and disturbance," while Richard Anuszkiewicz and Victor Vasarely would juxtapose contrasting colors in their paintings to give the impression of three-dimensionality.
The movement's roots lie in the early avant-garde of the 20th century and the serial techniques of repeating identical units, such as in Mondrian's painting "The Victory Boogie-Woogie" (1944). Interactive works by Marcel Duchamp and László Moholy-Nagy also laid the foundations, as did the Bauhaus and its representatives, such as Josef Albers.
Op art was a social, engaging, non-elitist movement that involved artists in Western and Eastern Europe, Russia, the US and Latin America. "There was a utopian project behind it: whereas Pop artists appropriated elements of popular culture and introduced that into museums and galleries, Op artists took ideas out of the laboratory of art and into common, public space," says Xavier Douroux, artistic director of the Victor Vasarely Foundation and co-director of Le Consortium art center in Dijon.
The movement was at its height when "The Responsive Eye" exhibition was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965, dubbed by one critic as "optical hysteria." Op art had virtually become a brand name, and had quickly inspired interior and graphic design and fashion, thereby filtering into mainstream culture. Even Albers disliked the catchy categorization. "When 'The Responsive Eye' was held at the MoMA, Josef Albers said to Bridget Riley, 'Saying "op art" is like saying "water swimming,"'" says Nicholas Fox Weber, executive director of the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation.
Forty years on, the legacy and impact of op art are being given wider berth, and retrospectives have been held in the US, France and Germany. While some artists in the 1980s began appropriating op art in a theoretical, ideological way, today's artists are more likely to subtly evoke aspects of op as an ingredient in a melting-pot of ideas.
"It's a part of my paintings, a tool, but I'm not using it in a traditional sense," says John Tremblay, who started introducing optical effects into his work 15 years ago after seeing Michael Scott's paintings of "relentless" black and white stripes. "I like it when there's a flat, flip-flop feeling, but the optical thing should usually be secondary."
By contrast, Mark Grotjahn seeks a sense of neutrality in his visually mesmerizing and contemplative "Butterfly" paintings and his drawings of three-tiered perspectives. "I'm not going for an op effect; I'm going for a literal optical experience," says the American artist. "When I was a kid in high school, I thought that abstraction – like Klee and Kandinsky – was the only way to communicate. Even during my senior year of high school, when I was 18, I showed paintings of black-and-white triangles around the pool of our house in northern California. The artists that really drew me were the abstract conceptualists."
A lack of intentionality to evoke anything op is also true of the New York-based artist Sarah Morris, whose series of "Rings" paintings is informed by Beijing's ring-roads. "When I look at a map of Beijing, it looks like one of my paintings. I'll look at the colors, cigarette packs, restaurants, subway stations, and the architecture being planned, and that will become the palette in terms of color, and also the light. The geometry in my work is derived from synthesizing a place, a retinal after-effect of space."
Aspects of optical art also find their way into the richly diverse multimedia universes of the likes of John Armleder, Ugo Rondinone, Olafur Eliasson, Xavier Veilhan and Kader Attia. Armleder's disco balls take the dancing, orb-like feel of Vasarely's paintings and the effect of Otto Piene's "Lightballet" onto a fresh, contemporary level. Last October, Armleder's monumental disco balls were temporarily installed on the floor of the Orangerie at the Château de Versailles, casting gorgeous, pulsating shadows of rhythmic light all over the walls and the ceiling, invigorating the space.
Meanwhile, Attia's mirrored corridor, titled "Infinities," which was shown at Art Basel in 2006, recalls the mirror rooms of op artists Davide Boriani and Christian Megert, yet plunges the visitor into a deeper state of disorientation, instability and claustrophobia. The reflections from the glass mask the exit and the entrance, and give the impression that the rotating aluminum drills are turning menacingly, twisting endlessly.
Veilhan's work suggests a fascination with op art in the form of his pixelated black-and-white "Ghost Landscapes" and flickering "Light Machines," which were exhibited at the Fondation Victor Vasarely in 2004. The "Light Machines," appearing abstract up close but figurative from afar, engineer a physical relationship between the spectator and the artwork, requiring visitors to move forward and backward, just as they would before a Vasarely painting.
Yet, as with so many contemporary artists, op art only inspires a small dimension of Veilhan's multifaceted work, which also includes paintings, sculpture and installations. "The 1960s generation was considered in terms of formal, vertical categories – optical, conceptual, abstract," affirms Veilhan. "What interests me is establishing more horizontal relationships, passing from one thing to another, between different media and techniques, and finding new ways to make connections."
This is how a movement some 40 years old continues to resonate, as if it had been handed down through the generations.
''RSVP: Jim Lambie" is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through May 25, 2008. www.mfa.org
"Jim Lambie - Forever Changes" is at Gallery of Modern Art, Royal Exchange Square, Glasgow, from April 11 through September 29, 2008. T. +44 (0)141 229 1996. www.glasgowmuseums.com
John Tremblay's new work is at Paula Cooper Gallery, 521 West 21st Street, New York, from March 28 through April 24, 2008. T. +1 212 255 1105. www.paulacoopergallery.com
Mark Grotjahn's Untitled (Three-Tiered Perspective), 1997, colored pencil on paper, was included in the contemporary art sale "Under the Influence" on March 31, 2008, at Phillips de Pury & Company in New York. www.phillipsdepury.com