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Text j. Op Art and Further Developments

Op Art is a style of abstract painting that made use of optical illusions and other striking visual effects. Emerging in the United States in the mid-1960s, op art generally took the form of brightly colored, tightly patterned geometric abstractions that greatly influenced fashion, commercial design, and other aspects of the popular culture of the era.

A chief inspiration for op art was German American artist Josef Albers, in particular his Homage to the Square. In this series, produced over 25 years, Albers painted squares nested inside one another to study the effects of variations in color, size, and placement. But Albers, a veteran of the avant-garde Bauhaus school of art and design in Germany that operated from 1919 to 1933, stood for the artistic values of an older generation. The younger painters who pioneered op art promoted livelier, more eye-catching uses of color and pattern. Many early works of British artist Bridget Riley, for instance, involved curving parallel lines that seemed to undulate in waves across the painting’s surface. Hungarian-born artist Victor Vasarély, considered one of the founders of op art, used warped geometric forms to create powerful spatial illusions, including dizzying descents into the “depths” of the painting.

A 1965 exhibition called The Responsive Eye, which was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, helped consolidate the op art movement. But because of these artists’ allegiances to other movements with widely divergent philosophies, op art flourished only briefly; also, many artists resisted op art because they saw it as overly commercial and dependent on visual gimmicks. Its advocates, however, emphasized op art’s pioneering exploration of the mechanisms of perception and how these mechanisms can influence – and distort – our picture of the world. “We know how hard it is to distinguish between seeing, thinking, feeling, and remembering,” curator William Seitz wrote in the exhibition’s catalogue essay. It was the intent of The Responsive Eye, he explained, “to dramatize the power of static forms and colors to stimulate dynamic psychological responses.”

After a long absence, the techniques of op art were revived in the 1980s by a small circle of abstract painters who were sometimes labeled NeoGeo for their new take on geometric abstraction. Among the best-known painters of the group were Americans Peter Halley, Peter Schuyff, and Philip Taaffe.

In the wake of the Neo-Dada movement with its happenings and performances, many artists had left their studios to produce either transitory ‘Land Art’ in the countryside, or to pursue ‘individual mythologies’ with different materials. Photography or the new media of video and computers stimulated artists to innovative, experimental art forms.

Another group, the ‘Minimalists’, dissociating themselves from the shrillness of Pop Art, constructed sober spatial installations with geometrical bodies. Even more sparse than these expressive forms, which were already reduced to a minimum, was the work of the ‘Conceptual Artists’, who just gave the audience their ideas for an art work in writing. In many instances the work itself was not even made. The mere idea was held to be art. “This is a portrait if I say so”, Rauschenberg once proclaimed. In the attempt to involve the viewer as far as possible in the production process, art became increasingly intellectualized. This process had accompanied the artistic development of the 20th century as a whole. Now ‘viewer participation’ had progressed to the point where the second link of the chain ‘artist-artwork-viewer’ was removed: the artwork that was perceptible to the senses had served its purpose. From now on it existed only in the viewer’s imagination. Art dissolved, so to speak, in the extended concept of art. Integrated within reality in this way, it necessarily lost any chance of having any effect on it. Thus it had also lost its function as a bearer of utopias, alternative designs for a better world.

In the early 80s, this sobering experience aroused a real hunger for the great illusion, the appearance of pictures. Painting returned. Freed from any social and political ambitions, freed from the attempt to harmonize art and life, art could now be unburdened art once again: the beautiful illusion, the ‘fiction’ which the viewer can consider with disinterested pleasure, was resurrected.

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