Bridget Riley at the Musée d'Art Moderne: Live and Direct From Consciousness Itself

J. Christian Guerrero writing for I V Y paris

Marshall McLuhan, famous media theorist of the Pop and Op-Art eras, once suggested that impressionist painter Georges Seurat's pointillist technique comprised the invention of television.

The retrospective of Bridget Riley's running at the Museé d'art Moderne through the 14th of September arrives as a clear statement of the meaning of aesthetic conscience in a world which since McLuhan's time (and certainly Seurat's) has only become ever-more feverishly pixellated, photo-manipulated and broadcast.

The show opens with the suggestion that although McLuhan's assertion about the true origin of television may have been correct, it was also perhaps inadequate - given the conditions of representational hegemony that television and the internet have ushered into contemporary consciousness with the subtlety of an RER line going through a living room.

Riley's work starkly explores the relation between the reception of art and the machinations of human cognition itself through its attainments of austere balances between form and content. Neither of these are put into the forefront by her work, which remains as inviting as it is cautioning; conceptually interesting as it is also clearly engineered to put one's senses - balance as well as sight - the former through the latter - on a truly unstable footing.

Achieving an effect diametrically opposing the seductive hypnotics of the televisual, Riley's work expressly reminds the viewer with the calmness of deep ethical clarity that to remain passive before art is simply not an option. If it is, it always remains a matter of choice, of an "opting-out" from the reality; to recognize the beautiful and/or the sublime is also to take a direct role of participation in the personal as well as the broader stakes of their cultural significance.

Riley's uncompromising message to her viewers is "You are Here;" Free to walk away from a piece, come closer to it, think about it, respond to it, and appreciate not only it, but also one's own intimately held capacities of perception.

Producers of works classified as "op-art" have historically wrestled with an understandable yet essentially unfair critical assessment that it comprises a mere fusion of trompe l'oeil gimmickry and easily reproduced Bauhaus-inspired design techniques.

In response, the current retrospective of Riley's work should help to show how such a lazy (or merely reactive) critical approach to the genre can itself be considered the programming of a dead channel.

The most carefully wrought examples of the "op art" genre (of which many of Riley's works stand as simply paradigmatic) function no less than to return their audience to a profoundly intimate space of personal responsibility over not only the negotiation of human perception itself, but also a real sense of involvement in its inexpressibly greater cultural effects.

In an era that "eyeballs," attention spans have been reduced to little more than commodities easily manipulated by the baroque machinations of public relations campaigns - even as fodder for the ostensibly therapeutic interventions of pharmaceutical industries (viz. "ADHD"). Appearances of impossible movement instigate curiously soothing sensations of seasickness and equally forceful consistent refusals to abandon how such effects resonate within a larger cultural topography.

The generously subversive effects of Riley's canvases not only restore to the experience of contemporary art an irrefutable sense of what Walter Benjamin described as the irreplaceable "aura" of works of art, but do so by underscoring how the reception of art forms an irreducibly key subjective question in each individual's life.

Riley's work is shown in its continuum from her early pointillist investigations to the latest geometrically oriented works is a true service to the body of work itself as well as its viewers; pieces which act almost as optimistic replies to the nihilistic abstraction unfortunately tethered to certain works of Rothko and Pollock.

The effect each painting has on each person must remain as individually held yet generally available as is each viewer's own cognitive capacity as a simple human being. Thus the sensations of genuine dizziness instigated by certain of the works ultimately serve to remind one of nothing so much, in the end, as the inter-subjective vertigo one feels in gazing at the face of a new found love.

While much of contemporary art and visual discourse in general seems to compulsively repeat and further underscore a message that "you have not yet arrived" (Damien Hirst's infamous shark-in-a-tank sculpture "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" constitutes a prime example of how so much contemporary art is catalyzed by cruel reinforcements of a sense of stasis as imperative), Riley's uncompromising message to her viewers is instead "You are Here" - free to walk away from a piece, come closer to it, think about it, respond to it, and appreciate not only it, but also one's own intimately held capacities of perception.

Restoring aesthetic space as an arena in which aesthetic reception becomes a matter more of active participation than passive consumerist reception is thus the sum effect which the Musée d'Art Moderne's gracious arraignment of Riley's work achieves.

When one takes distance from or approaches her canvases merely to better examine particular details or alternate effects instigated by assuming different viewing angles, you never have the feeling that you're examining an object on a table or a mere "piece" of art. You're instead engaging in an actual conversation with the ethical results of one artist's extremely coherent sensibility.

Because the full effects of Riley's works quite literally require one's personal presence before them, the exhibit is not only one which should not be missed, but even one which should not miss you.

Manifesting a deep respect for the contingencies of being human, Bridget Riley's work explains why any form of revolution - especially the most personally felt and vertiginous participatory forms of revolution - simply cannot be televised.

Comments

bienvenue christian and thanks.

Posted by: suzanne | Aug 12, 2008 at 11:03 PM

Looking forward to addressing September's Jeff Koons retrospective at Versailles in a similar manner. This is a wonderful forum for discussing these necessary concerns.

Posted by: J. Christian Guerrero | Aug 14, 2008 at 12:22 AM