Originally
published in ArtNet, July 1999;
edited
for artcritical.com October 2000
Bridget Riley suddenly looks very sexy again. A wunderkind of the 1960s, she is making a comeback after years, if not in the doldrums then at least in a hardly hip state of eminence grise. When she initially shot to international artworld attention she was the epitome of bright, British young thing. She was the first woman to win a Golden Lion at Venice in 1968, and “starred” in the Museum of Modern Art, New York’s seminal 1965 exhibition, “The Responsive Eye”, defining the look with her waves of vibrating op abstraction, and inspiring fashion spin-offs with the warped hedonism of her psychedelic surfaces. It is tempting, now that Young Brits are again claiming the international limelight, to claim her as the first YBA. She can certainly count as protégés Damien Hirst (think of his dots) and others of his crew, and there is a comparable balance in the chemistry of her work and theirs: 90% style, 10% nausea. In her case the frisson isn’t provided by abjection (rotting meat) but is something more integral to the form of her work: in her canonical works of the 1960s and early 1970s Riley offers an optical equivalent of heartburn. Thirty three seminal canvases from this period, not seen together for many years, currently form a sharply hung exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London.
In
marked contrast to the youngsters she has influenced, though, there is no cynicism or smarminess in
Riley. (As well as Hirst, there is Peter
Davies, who cites Riley in one of his euphoric text paintings – “Bridget Riley
so complicated but such eloquent funky results” – and her work has also been
parodied and paid homage by Philip Taaffe and Rosemarie Trockel). Quite the contrary, she is an artist of high
earnestness, which comes across in her copious interviews and eloquent
writings. This point is well made by
Lisa Corrin, co-curator of the Serpentine show, who argues that while Riley was
genuinely horrified at the “bandwagoning” (the artist’s word) with which the
fashion industry appropriated her wave paintings, like “Current” which went
straight from “The Responsive Eye” catalogue cover to dresses in the windows of
Madison Avenue, today’s artists anticipate and celebrate commercial interactions
with their strategies and designs.
Riley
is actually one of the most pursuasive artist-writers of the last quarter
century. A collection of her words,
“The Eye’s Mind: Bridget Riley Collected Writings 1965-1999”, is just published
by Thames and Hudson, while her “Dialogues on Art”, the transcripts of five BBC
radio interviews conducted with her by a distinguished rostrum including Sir
Ernst Gombrich, the art historian, and Neil MacGregor, director of the National
Gallery, is issued by Zwemmer. She
makes a riveting read, and is especially illuminating on the modern masters who
make some sense of her own esthetic, like Mondrian and Seurat. The problem I have is that there is no
comparable – sustainable – pleasure to be had from her paintings, try as one
might (and as her eloquence exhorts one to).
The
theory of Riley is easy enough and fun to grasp: optical effects are in the eye
of the beholder. She reduces painterly
elements to the precisely crafted minimum to allow for maximum vibrant interaction
on the retina. In her painting,
perceptual phenemona are both the raw material and the refined result,
exploited and explored as scientifically as the pixilations of her hero Seurat. But with Riley there is this nagging doubt:
what is the point of her (equivalent of) pointillism? It is hard to supress the suspicion that Riley’s pictures are
like test cards, that a Psychology major ought to be able to name the effects
by the end of sophomore year.
Certainly,
some odd things do happen. “Current”,
and “Crest”, both of 1964, are the most vitriolic of her optic nerve
attacks. Bands of parallel wavey black
lines bunch together in the centre of the composition: give it the penetrating
gaze this center seems to compel and it becomes quite impossible to work out
which way the lines flow: they bounce this way and that. Allow the eye to rest in a semi-gaze, and
the whole picture begins to do the shimmy.
The lines – which are all black – seem to alternate first in tone then
in actual color. Yellows seem to creep
into the white spaces between them.
Other colors emerge from somewhere, too. Even more intense eye grating occurs in the herringbone forms of
the following year: effects that one actually observes whenever someone is
wearing a herringbone garment on TV.
The acidness of Riley’s optical ill-effects declines (softens) as her
career unfolds. By the early 1970s, as
color has made its entrance, we are into, at worst, mild sea-sickness, and
possibly a more socially-stimulated nausea at the 1970s color schemes. What happens to her career after the
timespan of the Serpentine exhibition is that she enters a hermetically sealed
world of chromatic investigation in which the only pysiological effect is that
the mind is numbed at the sheer tedium.
They seem to have no point beyond graphic design.
But
what graphic design Riley makes, throughout her oeuvre! There is an undeniable buzz coming off my
desk as I write this review from the gorgeous covers of various Riley
publications. She provides the perfect
cover, too, for volumes by her scholar contemporaries and mentors, men like
Ernst Gombrich (see the current edition of his Art and Illusion) and Anton
Ehrenzweig, whose seminal work, The Hidden Order of Art, acknowledges his
conversations with the artist. But
ultimately, the idea of Riley far outstrips the actuality. We need to look inside the fuzzy cover of
her collected words for the best she has to offer.
Bridget
Riley: Paintings from the 1960s and 70s, Serpentine Gallery, to August 30
The
Eye’s Mind: Bridget Riley Collected Writings 1965-1999, edited by Robert
Kudielka, Thames and Hudson 1999, GBP 16.95
Of related interest:
'The Knowing Consumer:
Richard Hamilton in the criticism of Peter Fuller' in Modern Painters
(Summer 1992)