Associations with a drug-happy generation of hippies and techno geeks are not so very far off the mark: sixties art plays a major role in The Expanded Eye, notably research into human vision and its perceptive apparatus comprising the eye and the brain, whose fallibility and manipulability Op-Art and experimental filmmaking attempted to portray with their boundary-expanding flickering pictures and optical illusions. The much quoted and occasionally misquoted concept of breaking with accustomed perceptions was coined during this period, and with it the idea of ‘seeing ourselves seeing’ that lives on today, for instance in the work of Olafur Eliasson.
The selection of over 100 works of art featured in the exhibition and the book starts with the early Rotoreliefs of Marcel Duchamps dating back to the 1930s, round discs showing asymmetrical coloured patterns that, when rotated, merge into concentric circles of colour. It continues its journey with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Light Space Modulators and Op-Art through to the present day–represented for instance by Olafur Eliasson, whose The Inner Kaleidoscope was on show in Zürich. The media chosen by the artists are as varied as the genres: paintings by Salvador Dalí and Josef Albers, pen and ink drawings executed under the intoxicating influence of mescaline by Henri Michaux, kinetic sculptures by Jean Tinguely, wire reliefs by Jesús Rafael Soto, holograms by Bruce Nauman, light installations by James Turrell and The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Andy Warhol’s intoxicating total art work comprising light projects and music by Velvet Underground that was to make an indelible stamp on the club culture of the later sixties and seventies. Surprisingly, the natural successors to these former underground installations, today’s pop videos, receive not so much as a mention in the book, which turns its attention exclusively to the products of what is perceived as ‘high art’. Even decades after Warhol preached for the breakdown of barriers between art and commerce, at least among the art world establishment, these seem as impenetrable now as they have ever been.
Anyone interested in finding out more about interaction between Op-Art and popular culture will be hard put to find any pointers in the editorial section of the book. The six introductory essays are still worth reading despite this, in particular Kritik des Auges – Auge der Kritik by Diedrich Diederichsen, in which the Berlin-born cultural scientist explains what made the sixties a time for the human eye to ‘run wild’ so consistently, and why Op-Art remained in vogue for such a brief moment in time: its proximity to the merely decorative and its dearth of content beyond the merely visual made it appear repetitive and tiresome.
The six essays and plethora of illustrations in The Expanded Eye issupplemented by an anthology made up of text examples and a lexicographic collection of key words taken from art, cultural theory, psychology and physiology. Ranging from Rudolf Arnheim’s Kunst und Sehen to Josef Alber’s Interaction of Color and Susan Sontag’s On Photography, the selection covers almost every aspect of human perception. Those who find this too narrow a perspective should take a look at the article by biologist Rüdiger Wehner. Wehner has been concerned for over 30 years with the study of the cataglyphis, a type of ant living in the Sahara. Although unable to distinguish between colours, its ability to recognise the polarisation patterns of the sunlight enables it to find its way back to its nest in the monotone desert landscape over distances of hundreds of metres. It would appear that nature offers the best paradigm for unbounded vision.