Palomino
Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, Germany
In the 1960s Op Art’s effect of look-mum-it’s-moving made audiences flock to see it and the avant-garde wrinkle its nose in disgust. Today the naivety is gone, and so is the aloofness, allowing the work of artists such as Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely to pulsate to their hearts’ content. ‘Palomino’, conceived by artist Carsten Höller and curator Jan Winkelmann, traced the history of optical illusion in art, science and popular culture.
The 2000 light bulbs of Höller’s Lichtecke (Light Corner, 2001) flickered at short intervals like a hysterical 1970s neon from Las Vegas, but once you closed your eyes as instructed, retro hell gave way to retinal heaven, as multiple colours appeared to be projected on the inside of your eyelids. Borrowing is OK as long as you don’t conceal your source, a point acknowledged by the inclusion of veteran beatnik Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine (Bohemian Model) (1959-2001).
If ‘Palomino’ had simply revelled in the cloudy rhetoric of psychedelia, it wouldn’t have been worth - excuse the pun - the trip. Instead, pieces such as Anthony McCall’s wonderful Line Describing a Cone (1973) implied much more than just that. The work comprises a single white dot projected into a dark, empty space. While your eyes adjust to the lack of light, clouds from a smoke machine expand the dot into a ray of light which spans the entire space. Slowly, the ray is transformed into a cone, its contours vibrating with the irregular flow of smoke. Then the cinematic concern with projector and screen is replaced by a sculptural one. At first you feel hesitant to interrupt the surprisingly solid shape of the cone, but as you step inside it and look back at the projector, it is as if you have entered a dramatic fantasy scenario. The smoke, sliced by the circular beam, suddenly looks like revolving galaxies. It’s worth noting that Gordon Matta-Clark referenced Line Describing a Cone when he sliced a huge chunk out of a 17th-century building in Paris (Conical Intersect, 1975).
Max Wertheimer was one of the originators of Gestalt theory. In 1912 he published his Experimental Studies on Seeing Movement. One of his experiments was included in ‘Palomino’: Phänomen Phi comprises a green and red spot projected alternatively onto two sides of a corner. You get the impression that the green ball is jumping into the red ball - or is it the red ball jumping into the green, and at what point does it change colour? You start to feel like a scientist asking a simple question, and an imbecile, unable to answer it. This illustrates one of the benefits of optical illusion: while it activates surfaces it can also encourage the viewer to loosen up.
Len Lye’s Color Cry (1952) brought the tension between light touch and edgy abstraction to a head: with surprising synchronicity, pink, red, blue and green ribbons (painted directly onto the film) dance like high-spirited blood vessels to Sonny Terry’s hilarious, equally Abstract Expressionist music - a shuffle with the yowls of a stepped-on puppy emitted between harmonica riffs.
The exhibition comprised a few smart juxtapositions: Heimo Zobernig’s Zerbrochener Spiegel (Broken Mirror, 1990) reunited the mirror-as-Minimalist-prop with its neglected sibling from armchair psychology, giving the gentle waves of Bridget Riley’s Cataract 3 (1967) on the opposite wall a twist of drama. Olafur Eliasson’s Konvex/Konkav (1995-2000) - a flexible circular mirror alternating between convex and concave - made Victor Vasarely’s Vega 200 (1968) throb like a psychedelic bubble about to burst.
To the sound of Eliasson’s hydraulic device pumping air behind the mirror and Duchamp’s revolving hypnotic patterns (Rotoreliefs, 1935) cranking away near by, you left the gallery from behind Höller’s wall of flashing light bulbs. What distinguishes this kind of art from David Copperfield is that it doesn’t hide the mechanisms that create the magic. You left the show wondering not ‘how did they do it?’ but ‘what did it do to me?’ - perhaps a more potent question.
Jörg Heiser
