What is Op art ?

Getting a friend at art school once joked that Op art is Pop with the P fallen off.

Getting a friend at art school once joked that Op art is Pop with the P fallen off. We tend to link these two movements because of their similar sounding names, but actually the two are separated by almost 20 years. Op is the abbreviation for Optical Illusion and Pop of course stands for Popular Culture.

While the former movement was an offshoot of the German Bauhaus constructivist theories perpetrated by Walter Gropius in 1933, the latter emerged in Britain in the 1950s as a response to mass media and mass culture. The principle of Op art is to induce an illusion of movement and vibration, swelling or warping through the use of pure geometric forms. Pop art is tackled head-on with the breaking down of the artist as a 8216;talented genius8217; and embraced mediums like the comic book and banal kitschy elements of everyday life. It was a response that opposed the elitism of High Art. Art critics like John Berger and Lawrence Alloway have interesting takes on pop art, which arguably looked less like art and more like mass produced media images.

Op art, on the other hand, was not an opposition of high art or culture; it is a more playful and purely visual, and in fact upholds some of the tenets of high art. For example, Minimalist Frank Stella was a prominent artist whose work has been cited as Op Art. To understand the subtitles of figure and ground which Op art plays with, there is an assumption of a certain 8216;intellectual8217; quality that is a pre-requisite for enjoying Op Art.

One could argue, however, that the unstoppable forces of popular culture did subsume some of the illusionary visual patterns of Op Art into the Flower Power and the Hippie Movement. Many design schools took off on Bridget Riley8217;s paintings and made it part of fabric and soft furniture design. Riley, a British-born artist, was hugely popular during the 1950s when she began her iconic black-and-white squares that were said to induce giddiness and sea-sickness in viewers. It produced sensations similar to hallucinogenic drugs and on an intellectual level tied up with the anxieties expressed by writers like Aldous Huxley8212;the angst of a future driven by science and technology that could either be beneficial or detrimental for mankind.

Demystify art, e-mail georgina.maddoxexpressindia.com