Curatorial Project

Eyes Are Not Windows

“Man’s eyes are not windows, although he as long regarded them as such. They can be baffled, boggled, and balked. They often see things that are not there and fail to see things that are. In the eyes resides man's first sense, and it is fallible.” — John Borgzinner, TIME Magazine, October 23, 1964, “Op Art: Pictures That Attack the Eye”

In 1965, the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened an exhibition entitled The Responsive Eye. The show was the peak of the Op Art movement, and was featured in national magazines, a Mike Wallace special on television, and a short documentary by Brian de Palma.

“If there's one thing more than any other that we like to assume about a work of art, it's that it will sit still and behave itself while we take a look at what the artist has created. But now, a whole movement in Modern Art is coming into focus but will not stay in focus, and responds to every minute change in the way you look at it. It hops around in varying dimensions that variously puzzle, annoy, or confound,” Mike Wallace said in the introduction to his half-hour television program.

Op Art brought Modern Art to new audiences in a way that was unprecedented; the patterns of light and dark that epitomized much of the more familiar pieces became a part of a broader visual vocabulary, becoming a fad in fashion, graphic design, and popular culture almost overnight. For the first time, a broad audience was fascinated by art that wasn’t a representation of anything; it was a pure abstraction, and the message was in the act of seeing, rather than the content.

However, like most fads, Op Art faded as quickly as it appeared, at least in the public consciousness. For the artists creating it, however, it was never a fad; it was an exploration of the way we see, the way the eye and the brain work together (or against each other) to recognize patterns, depth, and motion. It explored the points of failure between what the eye sees and the way the brain interprets it.

Artists like Victor Vasarely and Bridget Riley continued to produce Op Art for a somewhat-smaller audience for decades after The Responsive Eye, and influenced new generations of artists. The exploration of Vasarely and Riley answered many of the questions about the disconnect between the brain and the eye, but also left many questions unanswered.

New generations of artists have explored those questions; and armed with the tools of technology, have taken the exploration much farther. While Op Art may never again reach the level of frenzied public awareness it reached in the 1960s, it’s never gone away — and the artists creating it continue to baffle, boggle, puzzle, and confound.