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Bridget Riley. Current. 1964. © 2001 the Museum of Modern Art, New York 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. OCTOBER 98, Fall 2001, pp. 27–46. © 2001 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 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 sup- porters 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, dis- cussions 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.
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