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  Good Vibrations November 10, 2002 Producer : Marianne Latham  Op art is "an abstract movement of the 1960s concerned with the exploration of various optical effects achieved by retinal stimulation," according to the Thames and Hudson Dictionary of Art Terms. Op art has also been described as an "optometrist's nightmare". Op art is a movement that appeared in the 1960s, with paintings that created optical effects to deceive the human eye. The art makes you believe there is purple and pink in a work that is totally black and white. A two-dimensional painting can appear to buckle and tilt with waves and raised spheres. And a totally flat canvas can seem to have rotating circles within its frame. Zara Stanhope, the curator of Good Vibrations: The Legacy of Op Art in Australia, currently showing at Melbourne's Heide Gallery, says: "You see forms that seem to move, or you see an after-image after you look at a particular pattern, or colours that are contrasting that leave a certain visual effect on your eyes, and on your body as well, quite often. That sort of art can make you feel a little bit unnerved or even nauseated to some extent, if it's really, really full on."  Op art is often associated with the Swinging Sixties — the era of psychedelic flower power, hippies, dope smoking and LSD. Although the images were used in this context, the optical illusions created were utilised just as often in high fashion, graphic art and interior design.Zara Stanhope says: "It's a whole melee of not only the fine arts and the applied arts but also I think commercialism, coming together into the sixties and causing a very rapid cross translation across all different forms of culture." Artist Lesley Dumbrell, who has been painting op art since the 1960s, says she believes its popularity was probably more due to the space race than mind-expanding drugs. She says, "If you remember back to the sixties, there was an enormous effort to get to the moon and I think optical art is in that category of being about the new, the future, and a different way of seeing. And if you think of the space movies of the time — Star Trek and things like that — they all wore these groovy little suits, and Mary Quant and the fashion and the fabrics and the pick up in that area … they picked up on optical art."  Another artist whose work is showing at the exhibition, Andrea Tu, was born well after the sixties. She believes that the term op art has become synonymous with the sixties, and although she embraces the elements of the art, she doesn't see herself as an op artist. She says, "What interests me about op art is the patterning and the vibrancy and the way the colours kind of reverberate."Although many artists in the 1930s and '40s were already playing around with optical illusions in art, Bridget Riley in the United Kingdom and Victor Vasarely in Paris, were seen as the pioneers of the op art movement. Bridget Riley began with black and white images. Victor Vasarely painted canvases and made sculptural pieces that he designed to be mass produced. "Their intentions were not necessarily about making op art that made your eyes dazzle or seemed to give you after images when you looked at it," says Zara Stanhope. "That was perhaps a by-product of work that was being produced too." Although op art sank from attention as quickly as it rose, there are some artists like Lesley Drumbrell, who still paint optical illusion art. She says that she is influenced by the modern techno trance music. She says: "Abstract art in general, and optical art in particular, relates more closely to music than it does to reality, visual reality."  "When you look at works that are in this exhibition," says Zara Stanhope, "you just can't imagine how someone could be up close working on a work and then be able to step back and see what the final image would be like."Lesley Dumbrell says: "It isn't until you've got the last piece of colour into the painting that you can stand back and it's all together that you really know whether it's going to work or not. And if it does work, there's always this buzz because the thing that optical art does is … there's a number of elements that go together … but when they're all put together, they create another illusion of something that isn't there at all, that is impossible. But you see it and you believe it's there." One of the most labour-intensive works on show is a film by Jonas Balsaitis which took seven years to create. It has 48,000 hand-painted frames, re-photographed on 16mm film and put together with an improvised soundtrack.  "What we've tried to show," says Zara Stanhope, "is that op bought into currency certain tenets in art and certainly one was the effect on the viewer; what happened when you looked at the art and the experience that you had when you looked on it." She says: "Op art's time in a way has gone but it's also still with us because it's been revived over and over again. I mean it's just like Austin Powers, it just wants to be seen." |
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