The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1965?
COLLECTION OAS AMA | Fine art MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAS
This February marks the 50th anniversary of MoMA's 1965 show "The Responsive Center," the exhibition that formalized Op art as a movement, albeit a short-lived one. Curated past William Seitz, the show acquired a media frenzy—mainstream publications covered the show'south dizzying art extensively, while fine art critics remained suspicious. By today's standards, the show was also express in its scope—it looked mostly at European and American artists, many of whom were also men. In honor of El Museo del Barrio's "The Illusive Eye," which seeks to rectify that, past looking at the history of Op fine art in Latin America, below is Thomas B. Hess'south essay nearly "The Responsive Eye," originally published in the April 1965 issue of ARTnews. Hess's mixed review, in which he calls the show a victim of "astute Exhibitionemia" ("a chronic international affliction" in which shows lump together un-similar styles), follows in total below.—Alex Greenberger
"You can hang it in the hall"
By Thomas B. Hess
Op art, in the Museum of Modernistic Fine art'southward survey, looks friendly, cheerful, thrifty, reverent and clean in listen and trunk
In an exemplary display of what Harold Rosenberg called "the Premature Repeat," some forty or fifty-thousand Op-Art group shows in 1963-65 strewed flowers in front of the bandwagon of the Modernistic Museum's recently opened smash survey of the mode à la mode [to April 25].
To one of these gallery openings came a silky blond newscaster named Jean Parr, who works for the C.B.Due south.-T.V. late-newsviewers; her chat with a middle-aged, recent covert to Op went something like this:
Parr: The colors in Op-Art are very very strong?
Artist: Yes indeed there is a tremendous amount of involvement, integrity, insight and powerful strength behind the colors, which makes them await strong.
Parr (presses fingers to the bridge of her nose): They give me a terrible headache.
Creative person: Yep indeed when you pack that much involvement, integrity, insight and powerful strength behind colors they can, well, produce a headache.
Parr: Then how tin can I purchase one to hang over my mantelpiece if it gives me this horrible headache?
Artist: Well . . . Y'all tin hang it in the hall.
One striking matter most Op-Art: its return to modesty.
The Abstruse-Expressionists (like the Cubists or the Impressionists) aim at a One thousand Manner, masterpieces, the Jackpot. Once a collector had the nerve to hang a (borrowed) painting past an Abstract-Expressionist genius in his hall; the artist broke into the collector'south firm, knifed the sail from its frame and collection abroad, the picture clutched to his chest, shouting at the bemused collector (who had just arrived on the scene): "This will teach you who is leading the Parade!" The chestnut may be slightly apocryphal, just its moral is verbal, and I remember Barnett Newman complaining almost a conversation which had veered to German language Expressionism because he had "presumed that our dialogue is with Michelangelo."
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The dialogue of Op is with "The Responsive Eye" (the apt championship curator William Seitz gave to the Museum of Modernistic Fine art exhibition)—that is, with the audition and through the audience to a responsive, indeed glad-handing Order. Why the Establishment has reacted so warmly to these images, despite the twinges of vertigo and migraine such hospitality entails, is i of the more interesting sociological aspects of the fad—which will be considered afterwards.
The Museum show itself, despite Mr. Seitz's evident scholarship and good intentions, is a mishmash which suffers from acute Exhibitionemia (a chronic international disease). It lumps together at to the lowest degree six totally different kinds of painting and sculpture, including: the mystical; belated hedonist Geometries; various continuations of New York and Paris abstruse styles; revivals of Bauhaus and Constructivist ideas; purist paintings related to the works of Newman, Rothko and Gottlieb (none of whom, quite rightly, are in the exhibition); eccentric and/or hermetic deviations (one critic, a devout New Yorker, said, "Op is Out-of-Town Fine art"; he is correct; Op is pursued as fanatically in South Dakota as in the South of France); and, finally, the exhibition presents a big grouping of works which might be called Hard-Cadre Op—shapes that provoke stiff, oftentimes vehement, "retinal" illusions, such as afterward-images, sensations of motion, of blinking, pinging, popping, glowing.
Exhibitionemia comes from a glossing over of significant differences while emphasizing superficial resemblances, like the shared preoccupation with color and edge and the common absence of explicit figuration which are the chief characteristics isolated in Mr. Seitz'due south category. Such cosmetic relationships blur the esthetic distance between approaches by insisting on coincidences which distract from crucial plastic distinctions. For instance, many pictures employ equally a motif boxes-within-boxes or stripes or concentric circles (homage to Albers, Newman and, of all people, Jasper Johns). They resemble each other equally much as a series of portraits of the same model past different painters might look akin, only this species of "literary" kinship veils rather than clarifies what the artists have been up to.
Mixed in with Op at the Museum are rugged-individualist visionaries, similar Albers and Reinhardt, who, despite their massive (and valuable) theoretical dialectics, remain stubbornly dedicated to repeating one or two themes over and over once more until the repeated acts take on a different quality, warping the prototype into something new and strange. The shimmering in Albers' and Reinhardt'southward pictures is not illusion, it is existent fervor (like the flashes of light which Willem de Kooning recognized in Mondrian'due south interstices equally revelations of the intensity of Mondrian'south commitment).
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(It may exist that the only possibility for Op to become Art is through such solitary, dedicated disciplines. All that is needed is a sympathetic format—and about 20 years of selfless do to make perfect.)
Tied by the exhibition to the mystics, such belated Geometric-Abstractionists as Vasarely or Cunningham await tamely academic. They take hotted-up their chromas for a flake of gentle center-rocking or edge-glowing. Only this extension of Kandinsky-cum-Futurism does not drag their piece of work to much more than conscientious painting-past-numbers.
Ludwig Sander and Paul Brach are well-known New York painters in the cool purist direction, a thoughtful, introspective manner which is most involved with nuanced ideas virtually pigment stroked on to canvas. Their connection with Op's characteristic jabbing furnishings are equally slight as those of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, who also derive from New York painting (Pollock, Newman, Rothko), but who want their colors to act without the ambiguities of pigment, so they stain raw canvas with simple forms whose banality hints at some kind of pentecostal symbols.
Stella and Feeley, on the other hand, seem positively anti-Op, opposed to illusion and insisting on numb, edgeless qualities, as if they were erecting models for phenomenological speculations about Art vs. Object. All these, along with such established men equally Ellsworth Kelly and Leon Polk Smith, are mixed with Echt-Op artists, mostly born effectually 1930—men and women disengaged from the esthetic subtleties of a Sander, or from the tremulous psyche that vibrates through Louis' butterfly-wing stripes, or fifty-fifty from Albers, their sometime teacher at Black Mountain, Yale and in Bauhaus textbooks for "First-Year Pattern Laboratories"—Albers keeps talking near Perception as if information technology has something to do with sometime-fashioned quirks similar Observation of Nature and How to make a Painting—not with avant-garde, cool soul-stuff.
Op is the art that the public flocks to encounter, and critic Jack Kroll reports they "bob and wave" in front end of the exhibits, shake their heads back and forth, brand little jumps, similar penguins at a mating trip the light fantastic toe, to get the biggest retinal kicks. (Perhaps this peripateticism is due to one Op theorist—moiré variety—who was widely misquoted in the press every bit saying that certain optical illusions give a sensation of LSD, then hundreds of people innocently sway in front laminated black-and-white constructions, convinced that they are getting a cheap jag. This author admits to feeling queasy after a long await at Op, only William Seitz assures him that it is a passing reaction, "like your first cigarette.")
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At the printing-opening, information technology was noticed that 1 blackness-and-white Op panel by Bridget Riley had been dirtied in transit. The artist happened to drib by, and she volunteered to make repairs. I came across her cheerfully scouring the surface with Ajax, "The Foaming Cleanser," while a staff carpenter stood nearby with the expression of an old businesswoman's retainer watching the new tenants install hi-fi in the clavichord. (Just a whiff of Ajax, he hinted, would melt a dozen of the Bonnards that had hung on these walls merely a few weeks before.) Plainly this is all for the best; the Museum should install exhibitions now and then which shake the personnel. Only the quick association from the episode is pure T.V.: Ajax's commercial is an armored knight on a equus caballus, both of them white-washed, galloping through playgrounds or oil-fields aiming a lance at fellows wearing dirty tee-shirts which, in an explosion of calorie-free, became snowy-white and beautifully laundered. The background music is a stirring Gaucho-Gothic chorus. The hectic rhythm, the white flash on the T.V. screen, the pinch of Dada common salt, are, in a sense, the content of Op.
Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media, suggests that the content of every new medium is another, usually older course. Thus the content of the movies is the novel. The content of tv is the movies. Etc. The content of both Pop and Op-Art is advertizing, particularly display advertising. Popular used printed commercial art—magazine illustrations, billboards, packaging. Op uses T.V.—its image made upwardly of hundreds of tiny dots which the eye reads by filling in the gaps; in times of distress the screen is covered with highly-seasoned moiré patterns. There is the same quivering glare to the calorie-free, the aforementioned ping furnishings, the radar blips. And in that location is the same immediacy. Similar the T.V. viewer, the Op audience passively participates, conditioned into giving up critical faculties, or at to the lowest degree suspending disbelief. Peripatetic zombies. The threshold of involvement is very low; virtually anything can be agreeable. And the image acts on and for the placid viewer. It lures him to watch. He easily joins.
Painting, on the other manus, is very hard to join; it is a hard, serious, remote, aristocratic art. A painting keeps its distance from the spectator. In that location is an invisible but crystal-hard wall between the viewer and a Franz Hals or a Franz Kline, which causes many people to become impatient with art, especially when its style is new and it has non however been assimilated in a body of accustomed ideas. This may explain some of the disquisitional success Op enjoys amid the art-reporters for the mass-mediums, who always have felt the function of Art is to teach, or at to the lowest degree to divert, the People. They are exasperated by the aloofness of Abstract-Expressionism (which they interpret as snobbism and slyly diagnose equally paranoia). In Op they sense that art, at long terminal, is not only meeting the audition half-way, every bit it did in the Socialist-Realist 1930s; Op will actually come up down off the walls and shake your paw.
But perhaps this is to infer also much theory from an fine art-reportage whose dialectics are apt to exist hopelessly visceral. And Op has a congenital-in entreatment to conservatives because information technology is the first big footstep backwards to Naturalism since Andrew Wyeth'southward in 1912—and Op has none of Wyeth's uneasy pessimism.
Op techniques are like perspective, similar painting which relies on planes receding to a unmarried vanishing betoken for an illusion of iii-dimensional depth, in that Op furnishings only function every bit they mesh with the physiology of the eye-encephalon system. In other words, Op works with what is already there, in your fretfulness. And simply as perspective quickly adult out of art into complicated crafts that produced marvelous anamorphic and isometric trompe 50'oeils, Op plays with increasingly complicated at present-you lot-see-it, now-you-see-something-else illusions. One of the more refreshing things about the mode is its naïve sense of wonder in front end of its own tableaux. Op is not conceited, rather it has the craftsman'south awe of craft secrets and the technicians relish of a skillful job neatly done.
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Its intimate relationship to perspective also suggests something near the scientific aura which surrounds Op. Both are mechanistic, Newtonian disciplines. The content of Op may be T.V., but information technology is the amateur's look at T.V., not its electronics. The ideas about colour, later on-images, moirés, etc. which attract certain Popular Mechanics coteries to the mode, are rooted in tardily eighteenth-century experiments which were exploited in the early nineteenth century past Central Europeans (especially in Austria), and reached France but before the mid-century in fourth dimension for Chevreul and the experiences of Impressionism.
If Op is an alliance of Science and Art—Lord Snow's Third Culture—Science is conceding but its obsolete apparatus (like the C.I.A. procures antique, propeller aircraft for our Congolese guerrillas).
Actually Op is non involved with science, merely with pseudo-scientific crafts of display—testify-window designs, textile patterns, centre-communicable wrapping-papers—which in plough accept salvaged a few techniques from the commercial labs. Op artists apply the all-time and newest plastic emulsions, industrial drinking glass, acetate flick; they accept efficient spray guns; their razorblades are secured in non-slip handles.
This is gadgetry, bitten by art, dreaming about science.
Some other hitting thing about Op-Art: it is very clean.
Walking into a show of Op abstractions, subsequently having looked at Cézanne or Picasso or de Kooning, is a relief. Everything has been tidied up. No chunks of personality are exposed, no blood, no tears, the gallons of sweat are deodorized. Even the seamy side of Pop-Art has been cleared abroad: no sobs or giggles. It is relaxing–for a few minutes. But then the simplemindedness of nigh Op enterprises drives you back to painting. Anuskiewicz' bright emblems are, after all, zippo more than the old Showtime-Year Pattern Laboratory projects. Brighter of course, bigger, neater–just the discourse is stuck (how-always cleverly) at an 18-year-onetime-level. And virtuous xviii-year-old at that: Eagle Scouts.
But the decorous violence, which gave Miss Parr a headache, is new. It may be a little simple-minded to play with optical illusions, but it takes a certain appetite to desire to drive the illusion like a needle through the encephalon. In this concept, Op artists seem to proceed the tradition of American Abstract-Expressionism, trying for the big, positive impact that will stop the spectator in his tracks and proclaim the hegemony of a new art and its destructive values.
The Op sensation jangles through your nervous system, simply information technology is, after all your nervous system. In guild to brand its point, the picture or sculpture must never revert to an associates-line objectivity. Any Ego in Op would blur edges, ready upward unpredictable modulations, dirty the illusion. Thus Op must be disassociated from Fine art. The middle may be reeling, merely the exhibit is absurd as a cucumber.
A third striking thing about Op: it is programmed to the indicate of anonymity.
It is not irrelevant to note how many of the Op artists take been successful commercial designers–heads of advert agencies, art directors, etc. This, of grade, is no reflection on the men, only is does indicate a good deal about the limited aims, conscientious crafts and social orientation of the style.
It is a relatively new intrusion. Art has been the domain of anarchists, rebels, Quixotes and forceful non-conformists ever since the centre class got control of patronage. The ideologies of every modernist motion in painting and sculpture since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution has been violently against the condition quo.
The centre class has not ignored the artists' hostility, just has tried to change art to make it conform, to accept the situation that prevails, with two major tactics: success and failure, coin and poverty.
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When a subversive style imposes itself on Guild, the center form counters past attempting to encyst it in honors. But in the years before he tin strength his epitome on fourth dimension, the destructive artist lives as an outcast.
The sociological phenomenon of the speedy official credence of Op, despite its unpleasant retinal effects, is a directly result of Society's recognition that in the Op artist it has plant a true conformist: a human who puts his technology in the service of the People.The sensations from Op are non the new frissons which Baudelaire defined as a trait of modernity. They are feelings in the spectator which he tin can ascribe comfortably to his own nervous organisation–just every bit when he drinks a martini or smells gasoline. Op becomes a commodity which can exist used at will to produce predictable (and when habituated, probably enjoyable) feeling. Not only can you "hang it in the hall," but I also run across no reason why collectors should not go on Op in racks, like vino in cellars.
Good artists, of class, will make something out of it. Op has brought a heightened sensitivity to color and to edge into the scene, and Larry Poons, for one, works with after-images in something similar the ways Rothko and Newman made big color areas expand into radiance. And Poons, unlike most Op artists, does not contrivance his own personality or submerge his handwriting; the pictures have identity. Larry Bong of Los Angeles makes objects whose perfect finish adds instead of detracts from their intensity.
And the epigones, of grade will continue their anxious search for way, like Greek farmers who turn fields after a rain with an eye peeled for gold coins–who knows where Alexander is buried?
Society will keep to pressure all artists to conform, to supply a absurd, easily bachelor entertainment. This year Op. Next year Ob-Art–constructions drained of the human presence: grey plywood boxes, lucite polyhedrons, foam-rubber that is non only every bit comfortable equally a good armchair (Matisse'southward Freudian-slip definition of painting), merely you tin can actually sleep in it. Then the "artists" volition be free to do something else instead of art. Already a number of them have turned to movie-making and modern trip the light fantastic toe.
Left will exist a few crazy geniuses who insist on painting, every bit the cavemen painted, or on making things out of clay and laboriously casting them in bronze (information technology is obvious that ancient Egypt had improve foundries for sculpture than modern America). All of the residue volition be… fashion. Eugenia Sheppartd, Women's Feature Editor of the New York Herald Tribune, went to the "contributing members preview of 'The Retrospective Eye' at the Museum the other night" where she saw "… Geoffrey Beene's skinny sheath and matching babushka, made of Luksus print–scattered blackness and grey circles on white silk organdy. Each of the Luksus prints is really a slice of optical art that'south adept enough to frame."
And if it causes a headache, yous tin hang it in the Pentagon.
P.S.: The term "Op," I am informed by the fine art critic of Time magazine coined by Jon Borgzinner, art critic of Time (Oct. 23, 1964).
"The Responsive Eye" has an illustrated catalogue with a useful essay past William Seitz. The show will travel to: St Louis, Seattle, Pasadena and Baltimore.
Source: https://www.artnews.com/art-news/retrospective/op-is-out-of-town-art-thomas-b-hess-on-momas-show-the-responsive-eye-in-1965-5742/
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