Bridget Riley. Current. 1964. © 2001 the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.98.1.27 by guest on 27 September 2021 Bridget Riley’s Eye/Body Problem*

PAMELA M. LEE

Let the hand be numb, but let the eye be agile, perspicacious, cunning. —Félix Fénéon, as paraphrased by Bridget Riley

Current. Stand in front of Bridget Riley’s painting with this title from 1964, and ask yourself, “What do I see?” Or rather, think to yourself “How do I feel?” It is a picture that plays with the terms of seeing and feeling, of eye and body, as starkly as it is rendered in black and white. Yet just as black and white admit to a vast range of grays in between, so, too, does Riley’s work beg similar questions of value and scale. To what extent do we see this painting? In what lies its retinal appeal? To what extent do we not so much see it, but feel it, experience the picture less as an abstraction than as a woozy sense of gravity visited on the body? Stand a little longer, look a little harder, and then what happens? In time, the surface begins to ﬂicker, like a stroboscope; or wave, like a lenticular screen; look longer still and surprising colors—psychedelic phantoms—emerge from between the lines. Spangles of gold, pink, and green burst and ﬂash, lining the eyelids and rattling the skull. The eye is ennervated while the body feels something else: nausea, perhaps, or even a blinding headache. Here is another picture, presented to complicate the problem of seeing and feeling in Riley’s art. For the sake of a shorthand, let us call this problem an Eye/Body problem. The picture was taken the same year that Current was painted by no less a celebrity photographer than Lord Snowdon, and it appeared in a

* This essay is part of my current research entitled Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s. In this text’s expanded form, I consider how the work of other women artists working in the mid-’60s (notably, Carolee Schneemann’s performances Ghost-Rev and Snows) confronted the Eye/Body problem in terms of the spatializing effects of the visual within new media. It was originally delivered at the conference “Media Pop” at the Getty Research Institute, April 6, 2001. I am grateful to its organizers, David Joselit and Cecile Whiting, as well as Andrew Perchuk.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.98.1.27 by guest on 27 September 2021 28 OCTOBER

rather celebratory volume on the London art scene of the mid-’60s called Private View.1 The image is alternately striking and silly. It shows the thirty-three-year-old Riley emerging from between the disassembled walls of her only installation work, no longer extant, entitled Continuum. Crisply dressed in opaque black tights and a white pencil skirt, she strikes a pose beﬁtting the worst kind of fashion photography. With her right hand to her cheek and her left elbow propping her up, she leans forward slightly on her right leg, the other bent so far behind that it disappears into the depths of the photograph. It is an improbable, certainly uncomfortable, posture. Still, its effect is to locate the artist in the work of art, as if stationed at the picture’s vanishing point. Now I want to suggest that this image of the artist physically embedded within her work can tell us something about the reception of Riley’s black-and- white paintings of the early- to mid-’60s. Admittedly, it may seem odd to speak of the body at all in relation to the movement with which the British artist was most famously, if reluctantly, associated: Op art. During the moment of its greatest publicity in the mid-’60s, Op was invariably described as an art of high science and technology, a rigorous, retinal art linked to theories of perception and the historical study of optics. For my purposes, though, Op’s virtual fetish of visuality occasions a reading of the body under the conditions of a shifting technological culture, and how the temporality of that body speaks to the repressive consequences of a burgeoning technocracy. More often than not, this body is a speciﬁcally gendered body, feminized and thus deemed impotent. Although Riley was as quick to challenge the notion that she be considered a “woman artist” as she was to reject her status as a painter of Op, it is her body that becomes the allegorical nexus of these debates, debates that turn around the mythic antinomies of reason and irrationality, control and chaos, the abstractions of science and the debasements of fashion and mass culture.2 Focusing on events surrounding the artist’s appearance in an important group exhibition of 1965, The Responsive Eye, I want to argue that the body is the blind spot to Op’s technological optimism. It performs what Op’s supporters insistently failed to see.

The history of Op, such as it is, finds its origins deeply entangled with postwar kinetic art, particularly its reemergence in Europe and Latin America.3

1. The image was reproduced in Lisa G. Corrin, “Continuum: Bridget Riley’s ’60s and ’70s, a View from the ’90s,” in Bridget Riley: Paintings from the 1960s and 70s (London: Serpentine Gallery, 1999), p. 34. 2. On Riley’s hostility toward the notion of “woman artist,” see Bridget Riley, “The Hermaphrodite,” in Robert Kudielka, ed., The Eye’s Mind: Bridget Riley Collected Writings 1965–1999 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999); on her distrust of “Op,” see Jack Burham, “The Art of Bridget Riley,” Tri–Quarterly, no. 5 (1966), pp. 60–72. 3. On the problematic of Op’s distinction from kinetic art, see Stephen Bann, “Unity and

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.98.1.27 by guest on 27 September 2021 Lord Snowdon. Riley with Continuum. 1965. © Snowdon/CameraPress/ RETNA.

While the term “Op” is thought to have come well after the fact of the work— credit is sometimes given to a critic of Time magazine for coining the word in 1964—it was in the mid-’50s that many of the artists subsequently treated through Op’s terms began to be exhibited collectively.4 Then, ﬁgures variously linked with the Galerie Denise René in Paris (Victor Vasarely; the Groupe de Recherche d’art visuel, or GRAV; Jesús Rafael Soto) as well as loose collectives such as Group Zero in Germany (Heinz Mack, Otto Piene) had already established an informal history

Diversity in Kinetic Art,” in Kinetic Art: Four Essays by Stephen Bann, Reg Gadney, Frank Popper and Philip Steadman (St. Albans, England: Motion Books, 1966), p. 49. 4. Jon Borgzinner, “Op Art: Pictures That Attack the Eye,” Time, October 23, 1964, pp. 78–86.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.98.1.27 by guest on 27 September 2021 30 OCTOBER

of association. And a peculiar strain of kinetic art—namely, work that suggested virtual movement in time, rather than objects that literally moved—was increasingly exhibited as a genre unto itself.5 Generally the art was two-dimensional and abstract, relief work or painting; and like the example set by postwar kinetic art, much of it claimed a kinship with the historical avant-garde, the Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism in particular. In 1965 Op achieved its most spectacular public profile when William C. Seitz, curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized a large-scale exhibition that highlighted the proliferation of the new “optical” or “retinal” art—what he preferred to call “the new perceptual abstraction.”6 This was the decisively American articulation of Op, for in addition to showcasing American artists, it brought to New York figures who were already quite well known in the European and Latin American context, some of whom did not share the critical and formal agendas espoused by Seitz. It was strange company, to be sure. Featuring over one hundred artists from fifteen countries, its participants ranged from Vasarely to Josef Albers, to Larry Poons, to Gego, to Mack, to Ad Reinhardt, to Julio Le Parc, to Kenneth Noland, to Riley herself. But what drew the greatest attention in the popular press was the sense of movement some of the works seemed to produce: the walls of the museum appeared to quicken, flicker, pulse, vibrate, as if subject to temporal flux. Entitled The Responsive Eye, the show opened on February 25, 1965, and became the most popular exhibition in MoMA’s history up to that point, with some 6,300 visitors crowding the galleries on the weekends. Yet just how popular it was begs a bluntly worded question: Who would have thought it? On paper at least, a show dealing exclusively with abstract art hardly makes for blockbuster museum entertainment, and the language promoting The Responsive Eye was anything but popularizing. Self-serious, dry, and academic, discussions of Op were as likely to appear in the pages of Scientific American as Artforum in the 1960s.7 For Seitz’s account was promiscuous in its allusions to the historical study of optics. Names such as Goethe, Chevreul, Laforgue, and Helmholtz appeared alongside references to color theory, optical mixing, simultaneous contrast, and afterimage.8 As if to justify the historical references, the curator seemed equally indebted to C. P. Snow’s more recent call to bridge the humanities and the sciences in his 1959 Rede lecture at Cambridge published as The Two Cultures.9 “It is only recently,” Seitz wrote, “that a meeting ground is being established on which artists, designers, opthamologists and scientists can meet to

5. Bann, “Unity and Diversity in Kinetic Art,” p. 49. 6. Indeed, “optical” art was only one of six categories of work featured in the exhibition. 7. See, e.g., Gerald Oster and Yasumori Nishijima, “Moiré Patterns,” Scientiﬁc American (May 1963), pp. 54–63. 8. William C. Seitz, The Responsive Eye (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1965), pp. 5–9, 12–13, 16–19, and 41–43. 9. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.98.1.27 by guest on 27 September 2021 Bridget Riley’s Eye/Body Problem 31

expand our knowledge and enjoyment of visual perception. . . .”10 Seitz’s faith in emerging postwar science and technology was unwavering, and his belief in their influence on the visual arts deterministic. As he observed, “the visual impact of mechanization, modular building, automation and cybernetics everywhere around us has also influenced perceptual art.”11 And while Seitz attended to the optical aspects of both the historical and contemporary theories (and was joined in his appraisal by one of the best-known Op artists, Vasarely, who had long called for an “optically effective” practice of artmaking), he seemed far less compelled by the physio-optic dimensions animating the reception of the work. Yet none of this seems to account for the frenzy surrounding Op in quarters outside the worlds of art and science. For whatever scientific motivations were attributed to the work (to say little of its utopian aspirations), the new perceptual abstraction would be understood at a radical distance from its promoters’ claims. Importantly, much of the energies surrounding its discussion would be directed at Riley. Her body of work—her body itself—would become a screen for Op’s most heated controversies.

Imagine being the young Bridget Riley, recently landed in New York in 1965 for a three-week visit. It is an exciting time for her. She will have her first solo show in the United States at the Richard Feigen Gallery; the show will sell out before it officially opens. So, too, will her painting appear in the much-vaunted The Responsive Eye, an exhibition that will swiftly ensure her international celebrity. No doubt about it: Riley was on the fast track. Only three years earlier her work debuted at London’s Gallery One, and from then on she was hailed as a painter of considerable rigor and promise, an artist closely aligned with the traditions of modernist abstraction. Perhaps she stopped to reflect about the work that got her there in the first place. In 1961, Riley produced her first series of highly reductive paintings in black and white, pictures that owed something to the work of the American Hard-edge painters she so admired. Two years following, she introduced her more dynamic black-and-white work, demonstrating an acute interest in the “visual tempi” of a work, what she later described as painting’s relative “fastness” or “slowness.”12 These were fields of discrete geometric units—lines or circles or triangles mostly— in which “the whole picture surface is used to plot the transformation of a gradual pattern.”13 The artist, in short, had arrived upon the periodic structure, a compositional device soon exploited by many artists associated with Op.

10. William Seitz, “The New Perceptual Art,” Vogue, February 15, 1965, pp. 141–42. 11. Ibid., p. 142. 12. See Riley, “In Conversation with Maurice de Sausmarez,” in The Eye’s Mind, p. 51. 13. Norbert Lynton, “London Letter,” Art International 7, no. 8. (October 1963), p. 84.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.98.1.27 by guest on 27 September 2021 32 OCTOBER

Periodic structure: the name evokes something of a foundational shift, temporally conditioned. Difference within repetition. And indeed, the periodic structure presents the methodical, although not necessarily mathematical, repetition of a formal unit, which then slowly gives way to subtle or fractional irregularities in its placement, proportion, and design. Sometimes this movement produces the spatializing effects of perspective, and its effect is one of intense pulsing or vibration, conveyed further by Riley through her peculiar choice of titles. Climax. Shift. Shiver. Arrest. Nouns and verbs all at once, words that ﬂip between conditions of restiveness and calm, these are titles that attest to the very instability of phenomenal and temporal states. Take, for example, Fission of 1963, a work of tempera on hardboard. Here is a square of black dots on a white ground— what could be more simple?—that seems to be pulled into the center of the picture plane. The circles of black, so regular, so ﬂat at the edges of the canvas, appear to warp and bend around an invisible vortex, their forms distended as if sucked into the painting with gathering velocity. There is an implied movement in

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.98.1.27 by guest on 27 September 2021 Bridget Riley’s Eye/Body Problem 33

time from the stamped and blank quality of the dots to their attenuation at the center. Yet when one attempts to parse Riley’s “visual tempi,” a patterning emerges at the center like a cross, only to quickly give way to the headlong rush the painting illusionistically engenders. It was with this body of work that Riley arrived in New York and was immediately swept up in the city’s everyday life: “I came across this great market they have down there under Central Park, I think it was . . . [and] I loved that stinking, cheap artificial life underneath.”14 Such colorful observations on American culture were not limited to the urban surround: “The clothes?” she offered, “I couldn’t believe it. . . . Beautiful silks and furs, but years behind Europe.” As for her own view on personal style, Riley was to the point: “This idea of the grimly dressed woman in the arts is ridiculous. There’s no reason why an artist can’t be well-dressed and aware of clothes and . . . things like that.”15 Like that indeed. Such impressions may be of interest as a document of a young Briton in 1960s America, but Riley’s words would prove fatally ironic in the context of her larger New York experience. Soon after hanging her works at MoMA, the artist was introduced to Larry Aldrich, the well-known collector of contemporary art. To say the encounter changed the course of Riley’s reception is to traffic in understatement. A dress manufacturer, Aldrich owned one of the two Riley paintings in the show, Hesitate, and he invited the artist to his Seventh Avenue studio for a “surprise.” Upon her arrival, though, Riley was less surprised than horrified: Aldrich had commissioned Maxwell Industries to make a mass- produced textile out of its pattern, which was then fashioned into simple modish shifts. One dress, sealed up in a neat cardboard box, was offered to the artist as a gift. For the artist, though, Aldrich’s gesture constituted little more than an act of plagiarism, and it inspired a deeply American response on the part of the British artist. She contacted a lawyer. In spite of strong moral support from other artists, lack of financial resources and emotional energy militated against her pressing the case. “I left three weeks later,” she remarked, “with feelings of violation and disillusionment.”16 Thus begins the vertiginous rush into the craze for Op fashion of the mid- 1960s. Aldrich was not alone in his efforts: the artists Julian Stanczak, Richard Anuskiewicz, and Vasarely would also have their work transformed into fashion, but unlike Riley, they were content to oversee the metamorphosis. Days after the opening of The Responsive Eye, photos appeared in the papers documenting the vibrant styles that artists, collectors, and socialites wore to the event. Black and white was the order of the evening, taking the form of checks, stripes, dots, various

14. Ann Ryan, London Bureau, “Interview with Bridget Riley,” Women’s Wear Daily, May 11, 1965, p. 4. 15. Ibid., p. 5. 16. Bridget Riley, “Perception Is the Medium,” Art News 64, no. 6 (October 1965), pp. 32–33.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.98.1.27 by guest on 27 September 2021 34 OCTOBER

mind-numbing patterns. Stores in New York—Bonwit’s, I. Miller, Lord & Taylor, Altman’s—all scurried to showcase the new fashions in their windows against equally eye-popping backdrops. And then such improbable inventions as Op restaurants, Op girdles, and Op eye-shadow ﬂourished. In short order, then, Op became something of a media spectacle. It even made a television appearance on Eye on New York, a show hosted by no less of an art connoisseur than Mike Wallace. Bad optical puns notwithstanding, the Op fashion frenzy raises the question of its movement from the medium of painting to mass media in general. For some insiders, the reason for its acclaim was obvious enough, and it invariably crystallized around the body. “Women have long been aware that certain stripes and patterns are slimming or becoming,” one fashion editor wrote of Op’s broad-based appeal.17 But Op’s art-fashion nexus underscores a far more complex association than that which sees the relationship between art and popular culture as simply one of undialectical borrowing. While one can hardly begrudge Riley’s cries of foul play (her complaints about the appropriation of her art are to be taken seriously), they distract from a quite transparent observation about the phenomenon itself. In sum, Op fashion blatantly contradicts the most basic claims made of this art by its promoters: its appeals to science and technology, its intellectual abstractions, its fetish of the visual. That the body in question happens to be the exclusive domain of women is likewise to the point. Fashion and interior design, cosmetics: one needn’t belabor the issue of how such things are gendered as feminine and therefore irrational, the antithesis of science’s masculinization.18 The feminization of Op was pervasive throughout the media, with most of the discussion directed at Riley. Journalists commented on the family resemblance between Op’s periodic structures, moiré patterns, and textile designs.19 Riley’s physical appearance was likewise made an object of public scrutiny: here was a “pretty, smiling Irish girl,” as one rag condescendingly (and incorrectly) described her, or perhaps she was “slender, shy and garbed all in black—as achromatic as a Riley canvas, though much easier on the eye.”20 So, too, were her technical skills thought to derive from the conventionally underprivileged crafts of the domestic sphere.21 Riley paraphrased the observations of one critic: “He said, ‘If I had to track down a feminine footprint here, I would point to a certain unforced patience, that quality which can add the thousandth stitch to the 999th without a tremor of triumph.’”22

17. Angela Taylor, “Op Art Opens Up New Design Vistas,” New York Times, February 16, 1965. 18. On the masculinization of science, the central text is Evelyn Fox Keller, Reﬂections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 19. Alice Hughes, “A Woman’s New York,” Eagle (Reading, Penn.), February 16, 1965. 20. Grace Glueck, “Ripples on the Retina,” New York Times, February 28, 1965. 21. Eugenia Sheppard, “Inside Fashion: At a Loss for Words,” New York Herald Tribune, March 5, 1965. 22. Bridget Riley, “Personal Interview with Nikki Henriques,” in The Eye’s Mind, ibid., p. 21.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.98.1.27 by guest on 27 September 2021 Bridget Riley’s Eye/Body Problem 35

Patience, modesty, and the labor of hands: never mind that Riley had employed studio assistants to execute her work since 1961, the image of the artist as craftswoman would persist. At the same time, though, this steadfastly humble persona was also thought to belie an equally dangerous capacity to seduce. One critic of the black-and-white paintings wrote that Riley “assumed the modest patience of a sewing-woman, but it was the disguise of a femme fatale.”23 At once insidious and banal, such statements are a commonplace in the reception of women artists. But Riley’s story cannot—and should not—be simply accommodated into the historical archives of their marginalization; indeed, the ﬂagrant gendering of Op brings us closer to the most troubling aspects of the Eye/Body problem in mid-’60s visual culture at large. This begs the question: How might fashion speak to technology? How might something as seemingly innocuous as a polka-dotted shift invoke the emerging media and digital culture of that decade? The answer lies less in thinking of Op fashion as the debasement of Op art than taking it seriously as an acutely embodied form of its reception.

23. Robert Melville, “The Riley Dazzle,” Architectural Review, October 1971, p. 25.

Illustration of Op fashion from Art in America. April 1965. Courtesy Brant Publications, Inc.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.98.1.27 by guest on 27 September 2021 36 OCTOBER

To be sure, my concern here is not with the iconography of technology in fashion during the 1960s—André Courrège’s space-age stylizations, for example— nor the technology behind its manufacture. Bluntly put, fashion is not merely the stuff of clothes. In its endless cycles and turning of seasons, its periods of stagnation and acceleration, its retrograde visions and its forward motion, fashion betrays a certain temporality of the historical. “Fashions are a collective medicant for the ravages of oblivion,” Walter Benjamin wrote in his formulation of the dialectical image, “the more short-lived a period, the more susceptible it is to fashion.”24 Fashion, then, is implicated in the relative shelf life of commodities, whether clothes or art or technological forms. For some, the rapid turnover in the art world of the early to mid-’60s (“Pop, Op, and kinetic” as the mantra used to go) bore comparison to the speed with which hem lengths rose or fell. “This present craze is treating it too much like women’s fashions—rather like short skirts,” one British critic complained, before adding that the quickening tempo of the art world was guided by specifically American habits of consumption and planned obsolescence.25 But the temporality associated with Op as either fashion or art or both was also stamped on the body itself. For as much as Op seemed to move in time, however virtually, so too did the body that encountered or wore it; it put into play what inhered in its representation. And far from the technological rationality ascribed to Op by its supporters, Op’s larger reception dwelled on the visual enticements of the object, which then passed on to a sense of bodily assault, vertigo, and nausea. This was work of a keenly felt physicality, even a dangerous physicality, and the spectator’s kinesthetic identiﬁcation with Op was articulated in equally anxious terms. As one critic offered, “What (Op) does aim to do is to assault the eye and stimulate it, often with devastating results. . . . At a Kensington boutique not long ago an Op Art dress on a dummy dazzled so many shoppers that it had to be removed and at one of Bridget Riley’s exhibitions—she is perhaps the best known British Op art painter—someone is said to have fainted after looking at her paintings.26 The statement neatly collapses a number of concerns within Op’s reception: the movement of the body in fashion is analogized to the movement of the viewer in her reception of Op; the eyes are at once hypnotized and then attacked by the

24. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 80. 25. Joyce Hopkirk, “A Plain Guide to Op,” Woman’s Journal (London), February 1966, pp. 26–29. 26. Ibid., p. 29.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.98.1.27 by guest on 27 September 2021 Bridget Riley’s Eye/Body Problem 37

paintings; the body is physically destabilized as a result. Descriptions of bodily repulse, headaches, and far worse are commonplace in the literature; viewers were reported to pass out in the galleries, a kind of postwar Stendahl syndrome gone violently amok.27 Op’s body was therefore a powerless, perhaps even hysterical body, one that could no more resist the seductions of fashion than it could the spell cast by Op’s illusionistic dazzle. It should come as little surprise that Riley’s work was the most frequent target of such complaints. On principle, however, she accepted the notion that the bodily and the visual were inseparable in perceiving works of art, even attesting to the synesthetic horizon of reception. “I agree with Boccioni that even smells, noise, and so on have a visual equivalent and can be presented through a certain vocabulary of signs,” she offered.28 Likewise, the artist’s own readerly engagement with Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the 1960s would appear to conﬁrm some belief in an incarnate visuality, an intractable relationship between the senses.29 Yet Riley seemed genuinely surprised that anyone would find her work tough on the beholder’s body, and was insistent that the phenomenal violence attributed to her painting was beside the point.30 If her work was physically abrasive, it was invigoratingly so, shocking only to the extent that it produced a kind of cognitive jolt, like a splash of cold water or the astringent odor of cut grass.31 Still, the force of such denials gives one pause. The public well understood that eye and body were indivisible in the reception of her work, but what was the imminent fallout of this confrontation? Eye/Body, embodied eyes: for a number of critics of the moment, the degree to which eye and body converged opened onto the problem of Op’s illusionism itself. And this illusionism, by turns, would strike an even more dissonant chord with the popular literature surrounding recent technology.

No doubt the art historian engaged with the question of the visual and the tactile is likely to correlate these terms to a far older tradition.32 More than any other, Jonathan Crary has demonstrated that the dissociation of vision from the

27. See, e.g., (author unnamed) “Op? Urp.” Miami Herald, July 25, 1965. 28. Riley, “In Conversation with Maurice de Sausmarez,” in The Eye’s Mind, p. 59. 29. On Riley and Merleau-Ponty, see Francis Spalding, “Bridget Riley and the Poetics of Instability,” in Bridget Riley: Paintings from the 1960s and 70s, p. 18. On comparable perceptual dynamics, see Anton Ehrenzweig, “The Pictorial Space of Bridget Riley,” Art International 9, no. 1 (February 1965), pp. 20–24. 30. Riley, “Interview with David Sylvester,” in The Eye’s Mind, pp. 70–79. 31. Ibid., p. 74. 32. It is important to acknowledge the considerable literature within ﬁlm studies that attends to the “haptic” dimension of cinema as well as its phenomenological import. Two examples will sufﬁce here: Vivian Carol Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992) and Antonio Lant, “Haptical Cinema,” October 74 (Fall 1995), pp. 45–73.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.98.1.27 by guest on 27 September 2021 38 OCTOBER

body in the nineteenth century coincided with the emergence of a nascent spectacular culture; the body was industrially “remapped” or rebuilt to meet the “tasks of spectacular consumption.”33 To the point: that separation was not free of ideology, as the impulse to rationalize the practice would suggest. As Marx describes capital’s abstraction of the sensorium, “the senses have therefore become theoreticians in their immediate praxis.”34 But in separating out sight from the sense of touch, the art historian also invokes the categories of the optic and the haptic so crucial to the practice of art history. From Alois Riegl’s articulation of representational space to Adolf Hildebrand’s concept of the Fernbild, the dialectical knot between kinesthetic and visual sensibilities in the perception of works of art is at the foundation of the discipline. Most famously, Riegl defined the haptic and optic in his consideration of antique relief, Late Roman Art Industry (1901); indeed, he saw the secession of a tactile model of representation by an optical modality as the precondition of an early modern elaboration of space (e.g., perspective).35 To summarize the main thread of his argument: Riegl claimed that when the figure/ground relationship was characterized by a distinct sculptural contour within antiquity, it was perceived by the beholder as a self-contained and isolated body, appealing to the sense of touch (the haptic) in its projection of volume. Over time, he argued, the relief plane grew progressively shallower and more homogeneous, with a greater coherence of visual incident as the result. This gesture belongs more to the optic sense than the haptic, for it implied a new visual plane and a more open relationship to the beholder.36 Riegl’s interests may seem to cleave little with the more contemporary concerns surrounding Op, but the language that describes the optic as superseding the haptic is no less than the ground of high modernism. It points ultimately toward the Greenbergian apotheosis of flatness, the emptying out of the illusionistic “cavity” of the easel picture in its reorganization toward a homogeneous (read: allover) frontality; a purely optical painting would come to represent the next step in painting’s progression. It was in light of this progression that Rosalind Krauss attacked The Responsive Eye in her essay “Afterthoughts on Op.” Underlining her account is the notion that Op resorts to the most regressive modes of painterly illusionism to produce its effects, in the process confusing its tactile sensibilities

33. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), p. 19. 34. Karl Marx, as cited in Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 62. 35. Alois Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, trans. Rolf Winkes (Rome: G. Bretschneider, 1985). 36. As Christopher Wood notes, Riegl’s account “is grounded in liberal optimism about the capacity of the freethinking subject concretized in aesthetic experience—the subject that democratic institutions are built on—to overcome obscurantism and prejudice.” Christopher S. Wood, “Introduction,” in The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s, ed. Christopher S. Wood (Cambridge: Zone Books, 2000), p. 15.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.98.1.27 by guest on 27 September 2021 Bridget Riley’s Eye/Body Problem 39

with the visual priorities of a “genuine optical painting.”37 “The term optical,” Krauss observed, “has always been used in the description of painting or sculpture to refer to that mode of presentation which addresses itself solely to one’s vision and which in no way elicits sensations that are tactile in kind. . . . Painting which employs the conventions on which illusionism is built, that is of modeling and perspective . . . is thus essentially haptic rather than optic. The whole tradition of trompe l’oeil painting rests on the ironic heightening of the intensity of this imagined tactile exploration, heightening at the same time the feeling of duplicity which knowledge of the painting’s actual ﬂatness always brings.38 Duplicity is the word that haunts Krauss’s reading of Op, tied to the literal trick- ing of the eye in the service of producing bodily sensations. And that visual chicanery is immediately applied to the work of—who else?—Bridget Riley.39 Krauss, then, offers a rhetorical parallel to a different discussion around the new perceptual abstraction, one that would reflect on the beleaguered status of painting as inflected by emerging forms of electronic media. It saw in Op’s Eye/Body nexus a dangerous proximity to the abuses of 1960s technology: the duplicitous and ultimately controlling dimension of a postwar visual culture gone increasingly haptic.

For what was at stake was not only the notion that the eye could be tricked, but that Op’s trompe l’oeil excesses represented a deeper threat concealed under the sign of technological progress. This was not, in short, the rational, scientific orb described by The Responsive Eye, the reified emblem of insight and Enlightenment. This was an eye, rather, that was vulnerable to damaging environmental influences, an innocent, even stupid eye that passively absorbed visual information without critical distance or judgment. Of course, there is a considerable tradition that holds to the fallibility of the eye, and speaks to the dark underbelly of the sublimities long accorded the sense of sight.40 And a modernist, seizing on the image of a subject absorbed and then stupefied in the face of contemporary visual phenomena, might describe such conditions through terms of an acute critical pedigree: shock, for instance; or distraction; or even empathy. This is a theoretical legacy deeply internalized within the reception of

37. Rosalind Krauss, “Afterthoughts on Op,” Art International 9, no. 5 (June 1965), pp. 75–76. 38. Ibid., p. 75. 39. Ibid. p. 76. 40. See, e.g., Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) and Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.98.1.27 by guest on 27 September 2021 40 OCTOBER

Op, and it announces that the historicity of the Eye/Body problem is far from unique to the postwar era. Even still, the “optical” dimension of popular culture in the mid-’60s arrived with a markedly expansive sense of what constituted the visual—and of what the visual had progressively colonized—with the decade’s emerging electronic culture serving as its backdrop. Television and the visual potential attached to new forms of computer technology were the most frequent objects of attack, and the rhetoric stemming from their powers of manipulation—that is to say, their capacity to “handle” the subjects of visual culture as physical beings—points precisely to the Eye/Body nexus around Op. When, for instance, Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society was translated from French into English in 1964, his warnings on the totalizing capacities of “technique,” and television more speciﬁcally, resonated deeply with his new American audience. “Television,” Ellul wrote, “because of its power of fascination and its capacity of visual and auditory penetration is probably the technical instrument which is most destructive of personality and human relationships.”41 Ellul is hardly singular in his phobic considerations of television, but he speaks to conditions of spectatorship that neatly ratify discussions on the Eye/Body problem in Op. Note that, for Ellul, television is an instrument of both visual and auditory penetration: it is as much something to hear as something to watch, and is therefore a tool of doubled instrumental capacities. It both fascinates and destroys through engaging multiple senses simultaneously. Ellul’s words on television, originally published in 1954, seem to fulfill Marshall McLuhan’s well-known prognosis on media culture in advance of his infamous volume of 1962, The Gutenberg Galaxy. Here McLuhan suggests nothing so much as the complete reorganization of the sensorium through the introduction and transitioning of new media, in this case, the shift between the pretypographic culture of the Greeks to the invention of movable print under Gutenberg to the electronic age of the postwar era. It is through McLuhan’s formulation of the “sense ratio,” however, that the Eye/Body problem ﬁnds its decisive articulation within 1960s media culture. In brief, the “sense ratio” is the shifting index between the senses in the body’s assimilation of knowledge. It is a kind of balance sheet of the sensorium, whether the privileging of one sense faculty over the next, or the virtual cross-wiring of the senses as synesthesia. The notion stems from McLuhan’s better known reading of “extensions”—any sort of tool or technology that mediates the subject’s relationship to the phenomenal world. Extensions, as such, play a formative role in recalibrating the network between the senses. “If a technology is introduced either from within or without a culture,” McLuhan writes, “and if it gives new stress or ascendancy to one or another of our visual senses, the ratio among all

41. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage, 1964), p. 380. On Ellul’s reception, see Katherine Temple, “The Sociology of Jacques Ellul,” in Research in Philosophy and Technology 3 (1980), pp. 223–61.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.98.1.27 by guest on 27 September 2021 Bridget Riley’s Eye/Body Problem 41

other senses is altered.”42 Hence if the pretypographic world of the Greeks was auditory in its orientation, because organized around the the oratory, Gutenberg’s universe was decidedly visual, because the new print technology interiorized the subject’s relationship to the fixed word. But it is with the advent of the electronic age that McLuhan detects a “return” to a more synesthetic culture, for the subject’s relationship to media is no longer exclusively typographic. I want to be clear that the significance of McLuhan in this context does not lie in the correctness of his social forecasting (his prognosis for new media was nothing if not celebratory, not to mention, for many critics, technologically deterministic) as much as the resonance of his language with the Eye/Body problem in 1960s art.43 For McLuhan himself takes up the position that the visual within the electronic age has such a bodily dimension, has colonized the tactile, has become progressively spatialized. In Understanding Media, a volume that appeared a year before The Responsive Eye (and was tirelessly cited by many critics in their appraisal of Op), he paints a picture of television’s effects on the body in the most literal strokes possible. “Perhaps the most familiar and pathetic effect of the TV image,” he wrote, “is the posture of children in the early grades. With perfect psycho-mimetic skill, they carry out the commands of the TV.”44 One passage makes a prescient (if unintended) remark about the relationship between clothes and television that seems to mirror the “optical dazzle” associated with Op fashion. McLuhan observes, “clothing and styling in the past decade have gone so tactile and so sculptural that they present a sort of exaggerated evidence of the new qualities of the TV mosaic.”45 These are deeply suggestive comments for the reception of Op, and they go far to confirm Samuel Weber’s deeply incisive analysis of the “differential specificity” of the medium of television.46 Weber reflects critically on the word “television,” in both its commonplace usage and what is obscured within its everyday understanding, and thereby uncovers a range of concerns for the Eye/Body problem in the visual arts of the mid-’60s. Attending to the English prefix “tele-” in the word “television,” he restores to the medium its emphatic internalization of distance; quite literally, it is a modality of “seeing-at-a-distance.” There is, then, as much a spatializing as visual component to the operations of its technology, and Weber argues “the notion of ‘distance’ (in the word television) is preserved only as an obstacle to be sur-

42. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), p. 24. 43. For the most incisive critique of McLuhan’s technological determinism, see Raymond Williams, “Effects of the Technology and Its Uses,” in Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), pp. 126–30. 44. Marshall McLuhan, “Television: The Timid Giant,” in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), p. 308. 45. Ibid., p. 328. 46. On the differential speciﬁcity of medium in the visual arts, see Rosalind E. Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.98.1.27 by guest on 27 September 2021 42 OCTOBER

mounted.”47 Even more to the point, the spatializing capacity of television bears profound implications for the coordination of the spectator’s body. “The over- coming of distance in (television and other technologies of distance) is linked to the ability to transcend the spatial limitations usually associated with the body,” Weber writes, “If television thus names ‘seeing-at-a-distance,’ what it appears to overcome thereby is the body, or more precisely, the spatial limitations placed by the body upon seeing and hearing.”48 Now the intertwining of new visual technologies with the body speaks well to a certain suspicion of the optical within the reception of Op. For that suspicion not only stemmed from the idea that appearances lie; it went further in insinuating that the visual could wreak havoc on the body through a peculiar sense of its displacement, even a loss of control. As numerous confrontations with Riley’s work were to demonstrate, this anxiety was triangulated further around the terms of gender, the popular, and technology. Among them, Thomas Hess’s discussion of The Responsive Eye neatly stitches together the elements in this chain, and in the process warns of the dangers of an ever-expanding visual culture: At the press opening, it was noticed that one black-and-white Op panel by Bridget Riley had been dirtied in transit. The artist happened to drop by, and she volunteered to make repairs. I came across her cheerfully scour- ing the surface with Ajax, the “Foaming Cleanser” ( just a whiff of Ajax . . . would melt a dozen Bonnards that had hung on these walls a few weeks before) . . . the quick association from the episode is pure TV.49 There is a kind of stream-of-consciousness logic at work in Hess’s ruminations. Riley the Op artist has somehow metamorphosed into Riley the dutiful domestic. A can of Ajax captivates Hess’s attention, and it comes to figure as a trope for the artist herself. Its presence suggests that things are definitely not business-as-usual at the museum, as if its space has been trespassed (contaminated?) by a foreign (female?) body, leaving the old guard with their Bonnards shrinking in her wake. Hess’s domestication of Riley then segues into a broader reflection on television. “Marshall McLuhan,” he begins, suggests that the content of every new medium is another, usually older form . . . Op uses TV . . . its image made up of hundreds of tiny dots which the eye reads by filling in the gaps. . . . Like the TV viewer, the Op audience passively participates, conditioned into giving up critical faculties, or at least suspending disbelief. Peripatetic zombies.50

47. Samuel Weber, “Television: Set and Screen,” in Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 114. 48. Ibid., pp. 114–15. 49. Thomas Hess, “You Can Hang It in the Hall,” Art News (April 1965), pp. 41–43 and 49–50. 50. Ibid., p. 43.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.98.1.27 by guest on 27 September 2021 Bridget Riley’s Eye/Body Problem 43

Op is a Pandora’s box for the new media age: the idiot box of television. When opened (or switched on), it exerted a damaging toll on the spectator through its endless and stupefying streaming of images. And just like television’s mass appeal, Op was nevertheless considered user-friendly stuff in spite of its eye-hurting glare, hypnotic powers, and nausea-inducing effects. Compared to most forms of painterly abstraction, Op was an open community—a club for all comers—precisely because it didn’t take a genius to “get it.” At the same time, Op’s populist appeal veiled a consumerist threat. “If Op is an alliance of Science and Art—Lord Snow’s Third Culture—,” Hess continues, Science is conceding only its obsolete apparatus. . . . Actually Op is not involved with science, but with the pseudo-scientific crafts of display— shop-window designs, textile patterns, eye-catching wrapping papers . . . which in turn have salvaged a few techniques from the commercial labs.51 Hess does not so much criticize a genuine confrontation between art and science as find fault with Op’s pretensions to do so. Implicitly, he maintains the common if problematic distinction between science as a pure discipline and technology as little more than “applied science”—the business of craft or commercial labor, science brought down from its pedestal.52 His words betray a certain chauvinism toward technology as popular culture. Shop-window designs, textile patterns, wrapping paper, Bridget Riley and Ajax, television, even: technology, in opposition to science, has been feminized as craft, as the domestic; and women were especially susceptible to its designs. Aside from corresponding to both the somatic and consumerist ramifications of television, the new perceptual abstraction was also thematized through the twinned discourses of technocracy and information theory. For Op’s capacity to control was further tied to the notion that it “programmed” its audience, as much as its artists “programmed” the variables composing their work. Op’s supporters regarded the programmability of their work as a function of its aesthetics of impersonality, understood as critical of the emotional excesses attributed to the previous generation of Abstract Expressionism. As Seitz proclaimed, “the technologically oriented perceptual artist speaks of the units repeated in his work as ‘information’ and their arrangements as ‘programming’ . . . we cannot yet estimate the potential of static or moving images for the alteration of consciousness.”53 John Canaday would likewise confirm the futurist possibilities attributed to Op. “Perhaps these experiments,” he wrote, “are in truth only the first steps towards a

51. Ibid., p. 50. 52. The distinction between science and technology represents one of the fundamental debates in the philosophy of technology. For an introduction to the problem, see James K. Feibleman, “Pure Science, Applied Science, and Technology: An Attempt at Deﬁnitions,” in Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey, eds., Philosophy and Technology: Readings in the Philosophical Problems of Technology (London: Free Press, 1972), pp. 33–41. Note that Seitz uses the terms interchangeably. 53. William Seitz, “The New Perceptual Art,” pp. 141–42.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.98.1.27 by guest on 27 September 2021 44 OCTOBER

new concept of form in painting, one that can develop into systems which will enable a once-static art to control retinal response.”54 This is, perhaps, the most disturbing recommendation for the new abstraction. It suggests that the work might effectively discipline the perception of its viewer; and to that end, both Seitz’s and Canaday’s language touches on a kind of social engineering organized around the power of the image. Here, then, the specter of a radical behaviorism raises its head, a behaviorism that reflects the darker possibilities attached to a culture of “programming” and its sense of “control,” terms held in common by cybernetics, broadcast media, and the popular rhetoric surrounding behaviorism.55 Op was implicitly seen, to borrow a phrase of B. F. Skinner’s, as such a “technology of behavior”—a form of operant conditioning— to the extent that one could effectively program the response of an experimental subject. Or, as Max Kozloff warned in The Nation, “The Responsive Eye” hints of realms enticing because involuntary, and of a sure-ﬁre continuum of stimulus and reaction from which no one, with reasonably normal vision, would be excluded. . . . To reduce the viewer to a helpless scoreboard of sensations, to deprive him of his will, is a fundamental breach of propriety, committed by many artists through an appalling scientistic innocence. . . . It (the Responsive Eye) might be seen as the search to untap resources within the impersonal, almost computerized, geometries and visual artifacts of an automated age. . . . Yet this spectacle is extremely deceiving.56 Like Seitz and Canaday, if from a radically different perspective, Kozloff regards the emergence of Op not simply as a pale reﬂection of its era’s technologies, but as a potential means to “untap resources of an automated age.” But those resources are ultimately deceptive in their capacity to produce responses in Op’s viewers. Or, better put, to control them.

54. John Canaday, “Art That Pulses, Quivers and Fascinates, New York Times, February 21, 1965, Section B, p. 57. 55. Vasarely was perhaps the best-known Op artist who spoke of his work in terms of programming, which he justiﬁed as cybernetic. See, e.g., Werner Spies, Victor Vasarely (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1971), p. 127. Programming, of course, is also a term associated with mind control and brainwashing. As for control, note how Norbert Wiener’s groundbreaking volume was entitled Cybernetics: On Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1948). Also see B. F. Skinner, “The Question of Control,” in About Behaviorism (New York: Knopf, 1974), pp. 208–27, and Gardener C. Quatron, “Deliberate Efforts to Control Human Behavior and Modify Personality,” in Daniel Bell, ed., Toward the Year 2000: Work in Progress (Boston: Beacon Press and Daedalus Library, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1967), pp. 205–21. My use of the term “behaviorism” approximates the popular understanding (or perhaps, strong misreading) of behavioral psychology as a disciplinary technique commonly associated with Pavlovian experiments and rats caged in Skinner boxes. Its supporters in the 1960s and ’70s, however, regarded behaviorism as the most scientific means to counter the insistence of mentalism within psychology. Even still, Skinner’s attempts to consider behaviorism as a way to improve social relations can be understood in terms of a longer historical tradition of social engineering. 56. Max Kozloff, “Commotion of the Retina,” Nation, March 22, 1965, pp. 316–18.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.98.1.27 by guest on 27 September 2021 Bridget Riley’s Eye/Body Problem 45

Kozloff’s comments are deeply technophobic around their edges, embedded as they are in a New Left suspicion of media that is Orwellian in its resonance.57 But he can’t even begin to approach the paranoia toward media culture implicitly expressed in a nameless editorial from a local Richmond, Virginia, newspaper, which analogizes Op’s effects to the way information is distributed and received in mid-’60s America: And what is the point of this, someone will ask? Well the point is this, that art is the expression of the age. The pressures and upheavals of our time have the same effect on our observers: Now you see it, now you don’t. Now the facts are clear, now the facts are muddled gray. . . . It is painful.

Who is to tell what are the facts in Vietnam, for instance? The government of one day is not the government of the next; the actions of our own ofﬁcials there are deliberately distorted. . . . It is all painful.58

One might forgive the editorial its tired clichés about art as well as its argumentative leaps. What is striking about this passage is the creeping sense that like Op, the distortion (and illusion) of the image in American culture is ubiquitous, all- pervasive, and that its effects, in kind, are somatic. In fact, we are informed two times in as many paragraphs that “it is painful.” And so the viewing of Op art is taken as an allegory for the mass confusion wrought by popular media itself, like the brutalizing, potentially anesthetizing images of the television war ﬂashed night after night on the evening news. Anxiety, pain, and overstimulation: these were the sensations that so many critics derided in Op art. These were the conditions of a mid-’60s visual culture now dangerously spatialized.59 And on this note, I want to end with a 1965 cartoon from The New Yorker, one from a series that treats the Op art phenomenon as literally closing in on the spectator as an environmental force. In the ﬁnal image of the suite, a man strides out from a building (the Museum of Modern Art, perhaps?) only to discover a world turned vibrantly, if suspiciously, optical. Checks and dots and grids veil the facades of buildings, pavement, garbage cans; the sun itself glows like a cathode-ray tube. But while the cartoon is playful in its winking allusion to the perceptual effects Op produced for its viewers, it also suggests a far more sinister scenario for Op’s detractors. It is as if the paintings inside the museum were

57. See Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media,” in The Consciousness Industry: On Literature, Politics and the Media (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), p. 102. 58. Author unnamed, “Editorial Page: The Painful Eye,” Richmond News Leader, Saturday, March 6, 1965, p. 8. 59. Indeed, in the 1960s Vasarely called for the spatialization of his optical practice into the environment as both architecture and urban space; his pun for this was plasti-cité. See Victor Vasarely, Planetary Folklore (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.98.1.27 by guest on 27 September 2021 46 OCTOBER

hooked up to a vast network outside it, conspiring in its visual effects to produce a tactile experience of the world more real than real, like a hallucination.60 It is the image writ everywhere, the world picture gone haptic. And it is Riley, as the reluctant “It Girl” of Op, who has been forced to lead the charge. The Spectacle is just around the corner.

60. The longer version of this essay considers the link between Op and mind-altering drugs; the artist Gerald Oster, for example, was convinced that viewing Op might induce effects similar to an acid trip. The connection also points to a deeply sordid history: in the 1950s and ’60s, LSD was infamously exploited by the CIA and other governmental agencies as a potential tool of mind control. On this history, see Martin A. Lee and Bruce Schlain, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion (New York: Grove Press, 1985).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.98.1.27 by guest on 27 September 2021