Op Art

Perceptual art, Op Art, Kinetic Art are all names that describe the visual art that relies on mainly black and white optical illusions as well as colour juxtaposition and contrast to create moiré, three dimensional and movement effects in paint. 

It could be argued that earlier artists such as Delauney, Kandinsky and Picabia were influential in this style.  Certainly Kandinsky's connection with the Bauhaus would be relevant here. Both he and Joseph Albers were teachers at that art institution, along with Paul Klee.  Joseph  Albers keenly investigated colour effects, minimal artists explored the effects of close colour assimilations, for example Mark Rothko, who was influenced by the German Expressionists.  Joseph Albers, along with many other artists left Germany before the start of the second world war and eventually started a school in the Black Mountains College in North Carolina where he developed his ideas of contrasted and related colours and their visual effects, and painted his Homage to the Square.  In 1963 he wrote Interaction of Colour.  "Practical exercises demonstrate through colour deception (illusion) the relativity and instability of colour" (p. 2 Interaction of Colour, Josef Albers, Published by Yale University Press in 1963).

So too Cubism, Italian Futurism, Russian Constructivism and Dadaism were the defining roots of Op Art.

Cubism had broken planes down into cubes or squares to enable the viewer to observe more than just the front face of an object. Italian Futurism endeavoured to create movement with the help of chrono-photograpers, namely Etienne-Jules Marey who in 1882 produced sequential stills to represents the gait of animals and humans.  Constructivism, also influenced by Bauhaus and De Stijl sought to develop sculpture and ultimately architecture based on the angular/geometric styles of Suprematism as practiced by Malevich. The Dadaists brought many of these controversial styles to the awareness of the public through their exhibitions, particularly Duchamp's work, which rejected capitalist ideologies in favour of irrationality. It was this that effectively enabled  platform for a "new art" to become established after the horrors of the First World War.

Vorticism also played its part as it had during the war when Edward Wadsworth designed Dazzle camouflage for allied ships, thereby confusing the enemy as to the ship's speed an direction.

Artists like Victor Vasarely, Georges Vantongerloo, Julio le Parc and Francois Morellet, went on to develop ideas which lead to the Op Art style of painting which was one of the signifiers of the "new art" previously mentioned.   To a certain extent, in my view, it was also a means of turning away from the visual horrors of two World Wars and the political  turmoil which lay behind them.  The need to intellectualize and comprehend the difficult elements of the optical process effectively anaesthetized emotional responses to the still raw feelings relating to the war.

For the second time  many artists who departed Europe in the face of War decided to choose the USA as their new homes.  The openness of the American way of life meant that they felt liberated emotionally and this enabled new artistic ideas to ferment and flourish.

Artists like Bridget Riley, Michael Kidner, Aleksandar Srnec, and  Richard Anuszkiewicz have continued to expand Op Art, however its raison d'être, rejection of emotional resonances, may well be its downfall, as it projects itself as a cold intellectual visual art.

Diorama/Tableaux

My diorama has many influences and could be regarded as a piece of conceptual art, as it involves text, image and object to reveal the concept.  

I have drawn upon the mid 20th century scope of Feminine art, which depicts the female artist as precluded from the art scene in many ways and also emphasizes the so called 'accepted role' of women in society.  I do not regard myself as a feminist but I think it is true to say that things have changed very little since then.  Women predominately still play the role of housewife except it is now combined with career woman or wage earner.  I think she still prepares the evening meal and is prime operator of kitchen gadgets.

My Diorama is based in the home, the kitchen to be precise.  The reference to work in progress is threefold: the artwork is not finished; the changing role of women in society is ongoing; the use of the objects for a supposed recipe is incomplete. Hence the kitchen worktop is the appropriate place to display my object and forms part of the diorama. It is influenced by Robin Weltch's Womanhouse.

The cores themselves are also symbolic of the core of the home; the core design of the artwork,  i.e. its conceptual/process nature relating  to the 4 core processor; the female, who tempted Adam with an apple, and the artist, who effectively is the core processor.

In fact the piece does not relate to a recipe in terms of the artwork, but to a spurious machine called a Logic Busting Image Decoder and Visualizer.  It is a take on Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass and is supported by an image and text  explaining its purpose.  (Purpose, philosophy tells us, gives meaning to life!).  The illustration is influenced by Surrealism.

The sculptural quality of the apple cores is influenced by Claes Oldenburg and the overall idea to various conceptual artists including Martha Rosler, Cindy Sherman and Jeff Koons

LOGIC BUSTING IMAGE DECODER AND VISUALIZER (Small Paper)

(Influenced by Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass)

The known nutritional properties of beans are incomparable to their mind enhancing capabilities and it is the latter which are exploited in this revolutionary process.  The beans provide the “wind of change” which in turn has a astonishing affect, bringing about a mind altering state after being filtered through white coral (now dead) representing the cerebral four core processor running at 10,000 Mhz with a capacity of approximately 500 Terrabites.

The mollusc (of Divine Proportions) which lies beneath is sited next to the unseen “Pits” or Pituitary Gland (to give it is correct term), which like many glands occasionally “weeps” or “swells” depending on the ambient air temperature.  The position of the mollusc is therefore somewhat unstable as a consequence but due to its delicate nature cannot be affixed to the Cerebellem (white coral) due to the metallic third harmonic thrige resonances  and resistances of the crown wheel and pinion appended to it.

A fly wheel mechanism obviates any major dislocations but no device has yet been introduced to prevent shells from dropping.  Passers by are therefore recommended to wear protective clothing as the blast capabilities may well surpass the design parameters specified for the “wind of change” for which the mollusc was intended.

This briefly outlines the initial Logic Busting Mechanism, which, as can be seen ensures that any prevaricating logic or skeptisim about obscure and difficult images is easily irradicated by its employment. The viewer is immediately transported by the fly wheel into a different world of engagement.

The process is not without hazard, as already mentioned above, and one can see that the fly wheel itself is a precarious travel process who’s only recovery modes (in the event of accident) are the’ Identified Floating Saucers’ and’ Box Under the Sea’ (IFs and BUTs) which shadow its progress. By their very nature these are not secure Thought Recovery Vehicles, so caution is advised before reading the above.

PS The fly wheel is occasionally “honeyed” by a bee to keep it sweet (as seen in the eye of the beholder).

Further details of the Image Decoder and Visualizer will appear later, this resumé merely outlines the Logic Buster. 

Combining Objects and Images

Bridgit Riley developed a style of painting that explored the visual image for its qualities affecting sight, the visual disorientation of movement and dynamic interference and shimmer achieved by her black and white as well as her coloured paintings exemplifies this style.

My piece of artwork draws on the idea of "interference."  The context of my work relates to the social context of the television screen and how it invades our personal space; growing ever larger until we become viewers in a cinema space, no longer 'loungers' on a sofa. This "interference" therefore alters the social dynamic space of the home.

The dual meaning of "interference" in the visual sense, as perceived on old black and white transmissions, is also indicated.  The idea of a wider space, that of the universe, is hinted at through this interference which is the sound of the hiss of the Big Bang 4.8 billion years ago, and would be played as part of a sound art with the object.

I have represented the screen with a Bridget Riley type print to give an indication of the visual distortion and the hiss, and crackle is represented by the metalic swarf which comes out of the screen and down on to the floor, interposing itself on the surrounding space.

It is therefore a visual and sculptural object combine but alludes to a pedestal in the form of a tv base support, which was the traditional way of presenting a sculpture.

I gave a great deal of thought to this object/combine and have tried to give a context to my work.  It is also influenced by Jean Tinguely's "Turning of Friendship of American and France." as well as Robert Rauschenburg and to a limited extend Cornelia Parker.

I am aware that my work sometimes becomes rather cluttered, so I am making a conscious effort not to include too much, i.e. less is more.

  

Combining Objects and Images

Marcel Duchamp was probably the first artist to introduce the found object with his urinal signed R Mutt.  He went on to develop his 'Large Glass' which was a combination of semi-sculptural objects on or within a flat surface, thereby combining sculpture and the visual image. However, it was Rauschenburg who developed an individual style  through his painted works which used objects, collage and various materials to bring art to the viewer. By opening up the artistic space into the gallery and off of the wall, art became more accessible.  "Off the wall" became a phrase absorbed into our language it was quite literally  a term meaning avant garde, quirky, unusual.  Everyday object could be regarded as sculptures in themselves without being formed in the traditional way. It was no longer necessary for sculpture to be presented on a pedestal but could be displayed on the floor on the wall, outside in the environment rather than in, say,  a park or communal space.  It is a way of bringing art to the people, rather than people visiting the art.

One of the earliest exponents of the object being represented almost as a wall sculpture is El Lissitzky, a constructionist in his Proun Room in 1923, and various kinetic sculptures, including, Proun 3A, 1920, responding to specific paintings held in LACMA's permanenet collection.  Machine Project Field Guide to LACMA, Los Angeles, 2008.  Lissitzky, I feel, was under the shadow of Malevich and possibly has not received the recognition he deserves.  He was different in that his work is inevitably geometric and is literally a construction.

Joseph Beuys, who, in his Pack of 1969, uses a Volkswagen with 20 sledges carrying fat, felt and a flashlight.  The sledges as seen tumbling out of the back of the volkswagen like a cascade on to the ground.

Robert Smithson used the image and sculpture one echoing the other, in a piece entitled Nonsite: Franklin, New Jersey, 1968.


Sol le Witt is an example of an artist who uses sculpture and image as a combine in his Variations of incomplete Open cubes, where these objects are expressed as small sculptures on a dais and also illustrated in images, photographs and drawings on the wall.

Later artists considered the process and materials to develop a more minimalist style of art. Robert Morris in his Untitled of 1967 uses the gravity of felt display from the wall cascading on to the floor. Here the material itself takes centre stage.   Similarly Lynda Benglis in Quartered Meteor uses lead to look like a glutinous excrescence coming out of the corner of the room.  So that the material and its qualities start to become more important than the object itself, and does not hide the underlying process.

Allan Kaprow through his performances was inspired by Pollock's process in producing drip paintings combined with Willoughby Sharp's vision in looking at different kinds of organic matter. In this way it was possible to use things from the real world to evoke responses.  It was no longer necessary for things to be represented visually in paint.  Things could be taken out of context and placed in new ones, so that art is no longer segregated from people and real life, but becomes part of it.  These conceptual ideas required the viewer to interpret the work to give it meaning.

Cornelia Parker, a sculptor and installation artists uses found objects in innovative ways.  She is particularly interested in the material of metal and hangs items on invisible line to display them so that the metal object becomes intrinsic to the display.  These objects are often squashed so that its original purpose and decorative nature becomes unrecognisable, thus emphasizing the materiality of the object.

Jessica Stockholder uses plastic in a similar way to that of Parker, except that she uses plastic as her preferred material and creates sculptures involving colour and form.  The objects are recognizable but their environment is different.  They are combined in a way that creates a new kind of image a combination that is both appealing and "off the wall".  She also uses waste materials as well as mixed commodities as in Your Skin in this Weather Bourne Eye-Threads and Swollen Perfume, 1985.

Material starts to take over from commodity as in Mike Kelley's "The Wages of Sin and More Lover House Than Can Ever be Repaid, 1987.  It uses waste fabric and wool to create the wall image and incorporates a table with  wool on the floor, the latter being, in my view, more prosaic than the actual wall piece.

The exploration of the space itself is referenced by Katharina Grosse, who, by  using spray paint is not limited to a particular area, so that the pigment itself becomes important.  In this way of working adjacent areas of archtecture need to be considered in terms of relationships, not only to structure but to colour.  There is a temporal feel to her work that questions the balance of time and space. She says: ..."the process of art making must lead to an image independent enough, not only from the process of its manufacture but also from the initial idea and the theory that surrounds it."

Magic Door

I started off with high hopes with this picture.  I wanted originally to include a door that would close on to the picture  on the right then when opened close on to the picture on the left.  I don't have the skills to make such a door and without it the picture is unsuccessful.  Also I tried to create the ball on the left as a 3D image but it just doesn't work.  I was inspired by Anselm Keifer's work and wanted to include that heavy texture and some rhinestones, but the whole effect is clumsy.

The painting is meant to illustrate the following poem:

When life's horizon was hidden in haze
And no limits had been defined,
I lived in a haven I thought was a maze,
So I searched until I did find.

When an exit I saw,
With exuberance of youth
I ran through that magic door;
Only to find when I turned around
The door wasn't there anymore.

 

 

I envisaged using Picasso's Dove painting to illustrate innocent youth with the dove of peace, except that the background was hinting at a maze, to illustrate the poem.  The handle on the door has the look of an LED, therefore something slightly magical. The future of the person on the right is unknown, but there is an horizon, so she is aware of mortality and life's limited span.  Her path is picked out in rhinestones indicating hope of better things to come.

Jean Debuffet (1901-1985) and Daniel Buren (1938 - )

Jean Debuffet (1901-1985)

The general public in France soon after World War II sought beauty and redemption in art after the horrors that had just been confronted by many.  However Jean Debuffet was a contradiction and provided paintings that he regarded as honest and without pretense.  He used mediums which included gravel, straw and texture paintings that were primitive and opposed to the ideas of high traditional art.  This emphasis on “materiality” was a way of starting from scratch by ignoring the past, much as the Dadaist movement had done in its time, so the gritty texture and earth colours in his paintings was like the very soil itself a new beginning from the bottom up, as it were.

The “Hourloupe” style he developed from black lined doodles encouraged him to create sculpture using a similar technique as he felt these represented the way we perceive objects in the mind.  He was the pioneer of Art Brut, a way of seeing art at it’s most uncontrolled and primitive.  He promoted the work of children and mental patients, and influenced his own approach to art.  He says: “For me, insanity is super sanity.  The normal is psychotic.  Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity”.

Art Brut (Raw Art) coincided with the Italian Art Povera which in turn was a reaction against Abstract art in the 1950s.  The movement also refers to the “poor” materials used, i.e. burlap sacking, earth, rope, rocks, paper and clothing. Art Informel (mainly in Germany)  was similar in the sense of rejecting traditional art in favour of non-geometric Abstraction.  From these three art movements it is possible to see that post war European art had gone through a major change in its progression from “High” academic art to ground-breaking beginnings which are fuelled by a primitive base.  This echoes the desire of the Dadaist movement that wanted to reject previous art and start from the beginning.

It took a while before Debuffet overcame his doubt in art, twice he reverted to his father’s wine business.  But in 1942 he made his choice to pursue an artistic career, painting child-like images, and work influenced by the insane.  He also made assemblages of polyester sculptures.  There is an unsettling violence to his work that can often be attributed to similar paintings, for example using children’s dolls.

Daniel Buren (1938 -     )

Buren uses stripes as a neutral symbol in his sculpture, installing his art in and around Paris during the 60s.  He was commissioned to use striped columns at the 2012 Monumenta festival in Paris.  The latest installation at the Grand Palais has disks of plastic colours that fill the space and are mirrored from below.  I personally don’t find his work rewarding because I don’t get any message, and like others think it is repetitive, but he is regarded as France’s most important living artist.  His use of coloured plastic in the BALTIC Centre Contemporary Art exhibition reminds me of Matisse’s church windows that he produced at the end of his life.  The reflected light is joyful but for me is closer to interior design techniques than to art. It is interesting that his concern is mainly the “scene of production”, i.e. the process of making, rather than representing anything but the work itself, so a conceptual artist.  In terms of stripes, I think Bridgette Riley produces far more interesting work.

I am not sure what all this says about the late 20^th Century, I suppose that people aren’t interested in ideas only material things and particularly processes that might relate to Information Technology;  people glued to machines and appended to their devices.  I am convinced the ‘computer’ will prove to be the womb of future art, but the gestation period seems a bit protracted. However we are starting from the beginning, which is of course the end, and the end is indeed the beginning”

Anselm Kiefer Exhibition at Royal Academy

I really "get" this artist.  Some of his ideas about the cosmos and nature, life, death and renewal, chime with my own.  The scale of his work is breath-taking, quite literally.  One of the features of his work is its unpretentious honesty.  It is always seeking to explore elemental truths about the basic "stuff" of life and how it resonates within a vast spectrum of human history, legend, experience, yearnings and tragedies.  It somehow opens up the core of things to the spectator, and that is his strength.  Technically, the work is quite beautiful particularly some of his later work produced for the exhibition.  The texture helps to explore depth of meaning, and the choice of the materials  and mediums is exciting and tactile.

I left the gallery having gained an insight into full reach of his ideas, an infinite questioning of what is.  There is mention of a couple of things in the catalogue of Kiefer's work that touched me, in particular a quote about the child being able to put her hand over the viper's den, which was a quote from Revelations after the new heaven and earth had been formed, following the destruction of the old heaven and earth.  It echoes the optimism that is sought in Kiefer's work and alludes to the tragedy of his own time and country after the terrible events of the last war.  The cleansing that he pursues not just for himself but for his country is linked to this idea.   On the infinite scale of the universe the other quote was the one that says that "in the beginning is the end and in the end is the beginning"¹. There is something remarkably optimistic and profound about this statement too. It is symbolic of the Ouroboros, which is a symbol of the Alchemist, one of Kiefer's main pre-occupations.
The symbol denotes wholeness and infinity, as well as the idea of something constantly recreating itself, in a cyclical way. Carl Jung apparently interpreted the Ouroboros as an archetypal significance to the human psyche, representing the "dawn state" of mankind as well as the individual child. All of these ideas are reflected in Kiefer's work.

Kiefer himself says "When I use objects and substances such as straw and lead I distil from their spirit...I discover the spirit that is within these substances.  I upheave it and display it"².
I think this is exactly what Kiefer does, and for this reason it is possible to re-visit his work and sense different things because his paintings work on so many different levels to reveal that "spirit".  It is interestingthat he uses the word "spirit" because his work echoes earlier Successionist painters who fell into the Symbolist style.  His subject matter is dark and esoteric, and he paints woodlands invoking ancient myth and legend.

I feel inspired to grapple with some of the techniques that Kiefer uses to express my own work, but realize I could never achieve the same poignant resolve.







Reference: Ansem Kiefer  by Kathleen Soriano, Christian Weikop and Richard Davey,  published by Royal Academy of Arts on the occasion of the exhibition Anselm Keifer, 27 September - 14 December 2014
¹ p49, Chapter Title of the above catalogue
² p. 21 of the above catalogue.