Abstract art can be tough to love. It treads a dangerous territory, in which its purity of color and composition can allow it to be read as simple pattern, a backdrop for the real objects in the world. (This happened quite notoriously to Pollock's drip paintings. When in 1951 Vogue photographer Cecil Beaton posed a number of models in evening gowns in front of them, the delicate figure-ground game the paintings play within themselves collapsed, as the works quite literally became a purely decorative ground for the women cavorting before them.)
The problem becomes: how to inspire continued visual interest in the viewer when you've dispensed with representational reference to the "real world" that we're essentially hard-wired to find intriguing?
In the early 1960s, a number of artists, largely inspired by former Bauhaus instructor Josef Albers's complex experiments in the perceptual psychology of color and form, coalesced into the movement known as Op Art. The high-water mark of the movement took place with the 1965 exhibition "The Responsive Eye," organized and shown at New York's Museum of Modern Art. An exhibition now on view at the New York State Museum in Albany, "Op Art Revisited," draws upon the rich collection of Op Art at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo to recapitulate some of the history of the movement.
The key characteristic of Op Art painting is the way it manipulates color, depth, and perspective to create eye-popping effects—when the correct colors are placed next to each other, for example, the artist can create an intense visual vibration that implies movement, even as the painting itself remains stock-still. It's a rather sensational approach, and one that can become a one-trick pony effect, depending on the artist who executes it.
Richard Anuszkiewicz (an-OOSH-ka-vitch) stands out, largely due to the breadth of the Albright-Knox's holdings of his work. The show includes no fewer than six of his paintings, treating the viewer to something of a mini-retrospective of his work, which demonstrates clearly his restless energy over time, from painting to painting-plus-sculpture and back again, as he persistently explores various avenues of expression within the bounds of Op.
By contrast, Victor Vasarely (sort of the M.C. Escher of the group) evolves to the point of his 1969 canvas Vega-Nor—at which point he continued coasting with its unique brand of psychedelic geometry, immortalized by posters in stoners' dorm rooms ever since.
Possibly the most important painting in the show is Larry Poons's Orange Crush, a signature example of his hard-edged abstract phase. A vibrant red-orange field sports an irregularly arranged series of pale blue dots and oblong blips, which create the illusion of bouncing around inside the canvas like so many quickly moving ping-pong balls. While it's the sort of painting that can be easily parodied, experiencing it in real life (as opposed to knowing it only through reproduction) is essential to "getting it." Orange Crush quickly rises to the top of the show as a bold yet sensitive foray into pure painting, in contrast to some of the more dubious attempts by (deservedly) lesser-known artists on view.
In an effort to continue the relatively small bit of momentum started by this interest in optical illusions, a number of artists attempted to expand the illusions into the physical realm, developing the even shorter-lived movement of kinetic art. Francis Celentano's Kinetic Painting III of 1967 sets disks of painted masonite into motion, spinning to create something like the funhouse illusion I last saw in an Austin Powers movie—the whirling spiral that represented the portal into a time machine. Heinz Mack's White Light Dynamo spins a field of clear, ridged glass to create a series of constantly shifting, fluctuating refractions of light. There's something hypnotic about these works—and they were my kids' favorite pieces in the show—but at a certain level, they come across as just trying too hard.
 Victor Vasarely Bora III, 1964 Oil on canvas, 58¾" x 55½" Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo |
Lacking any works with the seriousness and intensity of focus of Stanczak's recent work, the Albany exhibition falls a bit flat. The curatorial statement claims that the show "aims to explore the vast influence of Op Art," a statement that presses the limits of historical credulity. The demonstration of this supposed "vast influence" is traced through the development of kinetic art, which turned out to be little more than a blind alley, while the inclusion of a few contemporary artists working in the Op Art vein only shows that in today's "anything goes" art world, the optical games of Op continue to find a place. While it's worth the trip to Albany just to see Poons' pieces (and an amazingly beautiful Albers work in incised Plexiglas), the exhibition as a whole misses its stated mark by a wide margin.
This month, the artistic center of gravity of Ulster County will experience a significant shift away from the usual Woodstock-Kingston axis, down south to Ellenville. Cragsmoor resident Judy Sigunick has curated an invitational exhibition, "10x10x10," which will take place in storefronts along the main streets of downtown Ellenville. The title derives from the concept of inviting 10 artists from 10 other towns in the region to contribute work to be displayed in 10 storefronts. The list of participating artists include Germantown's Pamela Wallace, Grace Knowlton from Palisades, and the up-and-coming Stephen Spaccarelli from Hopewell Junction, each of whom is contributing challenging, interesting work. A high point of the show will doubtless be an innovative performance piece by Eeo Stubblefield, the details of which were still being worked out at press time.
The concept behind the show is to promote both the arts and Ellenville, using the interest sparked by this explicitly noncommercial exhibition to enliven public space and to highlight the town as an attractive destination for visitors and for business. This is exactly the sort of community-based project that can advance the understanding between artists and the public, emphasizing the high quality of regionally-based work that we are enjoy here in the Hudson Valley, a task that is absolutely essential as we move into the brave, new, globalized future.