“If there is one thing more than any other that we like to assume about a work of art, it’s that it will sit still and behave itself while we take a look at what the artist has created.”

That’s a young Mike Wallace, laying out the 60 Minutes perspective on the founding assumption of all art in his dispatch from The Responsive Eye, the seminal 1965 MoMA show on Op, or optical, art. As a style, Op art enjoyed only a fleeting moment in the modern art mainstream before being swiftly consigned to the thrift store donation bin of artistic memory, stashed in a box with some lava lamps and psychedelic screen prints. “Old junk to donate,” scrawled on the side. 

As captured at a handful of major mid-sixties exhibitions such as The Responsive Eye and Art Today: Kinetic & Optic (also 1965) at Buffalo’s Albright Knox, Op was in its most basic form an exploration of geometry’s active nature, a more rigid form of abstraction on the far left of expressionism. It was about what happens when you render otherwise meaningless shapes and patterns in such a way as to make far out things happen in the brain, to use the vernacular of the time. Of course, all perspective in two-dimensional art is in some sense a parlour trick—that’s the inherent nature of the most basic of trompe l’oeil. We don’t have art without misdirection. But the lines, contrasts, and movement of Op art push even deeper into our nervous systems, tugging at threads just to see what happens. It’s about what happens when art misbehaves at the level of basic perception. 

But it was never just about the lines—even if Responsive Eye included the work of Agnes Martin, presumably because her paintings were geometrically bound, she was certainly never an Op artist. Martin’s quiet paintings don’t care for the science of seeing—like the best of abstract expressionism, they’re about using shape and form to activate something more interior. She said it herself once, that her paintings are not about what is seen, but what is “known forever in the mind”. 

As you move through Electric Op, Tina Rivers Ryan’s six-decade survey of the movement, and her last show as curator at the rechristened Buffalo AKG Art Museum, it emerges that the question being asked with Op art wasn’t so much about what was immediately visible or known, but what we haven’t yet seen. 

If that seems a little cold to you, you’re not alone. The generally held memory of Op art that has settled over the art world is of a moment defined by a frigid and artless tricksterism best left in the past. Movement in space but not in the heart. In the meantime, we’ve grown a lot more accustomed to our art refusing to sit still. Electric Op, which has taken over the bottom floor of the AKG’s gorgeous new Gundlach Building until late January, is an attempt at not just reclamation, but more so an effort to situate it along a trajectory of optical and visual explorations that have radically transformed artistic practices, pushing at our boundaries of what we consider to be art, especially as access to new digital artmaking tools has expanded. Laid out in front of you as it is here, the warmth and playfulness are obvious and even infectious—it’s just that those qualities are as much in the questions being asked, and the process, as they are in the canvas (or screen) itself. 

In “Op Art: Pictures That Attack The Eye”, an unbylined essay for Time magazine in 1963 that may or may not have given the movement its name (Donald Judd separately used the term earlier), critic Jon Borgzinner painted the work as slightly malevolent—because Op artists were literally “preying” on the basic fallibility of human vision. “Man’s eyes are not windows,” wrote Borgzinner, “although he has long regarded them as such. They can be baffled, boggled and balked. They often see things that are not there and fail to see things that are. In the eyes resides man’s first sense, and it is fallible.”

As somebody susceptible to migraines from the slightest erratic moiré or the flickering fluorescent tubes of a department store, my brain has always been particularly sensitive to optical kinds of attacks. I was wary of even seeing this show, partly for the migraines, partly because I worried it would be the sort of post-Kusama show galleries feel they have to aim for these days, demanding you interact with some big QR codes, like Douglas Coupland used to produce with his art (on show here, Sworn to Fun, Loyal to None, 2011; I Miss My Pre-Internet Brain, 2012), and which then leads you to think, “Huh, I guess this is what they have to do to justify all this flashy new architecture.” What I found instead was a deeply thoughtful, even fun, reconsideration of the influence and legacy of a short-lived movement in which most of the key players—perhaps most notably Bridget Riley—denounced their own presumed membership. 

Even more interestingly, the show demonstrates how the early threads spun by Op art would later manifest in the emergent fields of digital and new media art, as subsequent generations of artists—often dismissed as even being artists—poked and prodded at the ever-expanding capabilities of the computer, from mainframes and early plotter machines capable of outputting vector graphics to the complex algorithms of the present day. In 1965, the computer’s presence in the art world was only beginning to make itself felt, and we were 14 years away from the first Ars Electronica.  Electing to set aside the overasked question of whether the computer is the tool of the creator, or the creator the tool of the computer, the exhibition spans early laboratory work via 8-bit play and the bitmap aesthetics of Deluxe Paint, proceeding through the wild, somewhat piracy-driven explorations of the 1990s, until finally arriving at contemporary web-based interactive art and generative net art. Rather than a nostalgic look back at a lost movement, Electric Op instead takes our current, wildly changing digital media environment as the ideal moment to present a 60-year survey of the possibilities of what it is to see.

Ironically for a movement that was largely about what happens in dimensional translation, Op art often does not translate well to the screen—which is what separates the best of it from a Magic Eye. When you meet any of these classic Op pieces in person, you tend to fall victim to one of their key demands—that you cannot properly behold them statically. A work such as the motorized swirling psychedelic void of Francis Michael Celentano’s Kinetic Painting III (1967)—a centerpiece here and a longtime star of the AKG’s mid-century holdings—relies on the physicality of being present in three-dimensional space with the work, to let your body be pulled around by the curious flailings of your brain. These inner tensions feel related though less compelling in Yaacov Agam’s Free Standing Painting (1971)—probably the show’s most Instagram-ready work, its rotating form offering an infinite array of colourful compositions as you actively position yourself in relation to its spin. None of the compositions tug particularly hard at your synapses, but the urge to use movement as a tool of perception is there, as it is in the perforated metal moirés of Josef Levi’s Simurgh (1965), which dares you not to spend your time moving forwards and backwards in front of it, watching its circles form and reform in a way that only you can see. 

Here’s a young Brian De Palma watching people figure this out, back at the MoMA —

Op art did not emerge from an algorithmic void. Of all the works in Electric Op, the two works from Josef Albers’ Structural Constellation series provide the clearest pathway back to the Bauhaus. Even if these three-dimensional vector renderings of impossible objects came late in his career, long after his days on the Bauhaus faculty, Albers had already been doing this stuff for decades by the time Op was briefly cohering. Along with the Hungarian-born Victor Vasarely, Albers was among the artists who smuggled the remains of Constructivism out of eastern Europe (often in their own luggage) and tore it through a wormhole. On the other side, they continued the work the Constructivists had started, laying out possible futures when the order has been upended. 

While conforming to a very strict set of rules based on rotational symmetry in a 12x16 grid, the forms of Albers’ Structural Constellations refuse to behave. As you attempt to visually reconcile the object’s planes, you become mostly aware of the impossibility of the task. Unlike grappling with, say, the planar confusions of an Escher, your instinct is not so much to try to solve its true path, as it is to enjoy its stubborn instability. 

In Rivers Ryan’s accompanying catalogue essay, she writes that the show “presumes that vision is not merely a biological function, but a way of experiencing the world that is continually shaped by visual technologies.” In that same essay, she curates a few responses to the movement from critics during its brief heyday, such as Rosalind Krauss writing of its “quasi-scientific gadgetry,” and Barbara Rose in Artforum decrying Op art as “empty and spiritless,” writing that “science applied to art results in applied art, not fine art.” Over in ARTnews, Thomas Hess went for “painting by numbers,” like television designed to turn audiences into passive participants, or “peripatetic zombies,” their critical faculties numbed by cheap tricks. The great Lucy Lippard argued in Art International that lusting for a technological ideal is insufficient in itself as a goal, but also if the point were to be science, the science should not be so elementary.

Electric Op takes Lippard’s challenge seriously, but mostly to point out what she might have been missing. Much of Lippard’s work over the years, including her classic book The Lure of the Local, was about exploring the question of “place” in art and society. What she perhaps wasn’t seeing at the time with Op art was the beginning of an exploration of a place that was only just coming into existence—the disembodied one we’re all living in now. A case in a back room of the exhibition contains decades of old science and computer magazines, not just for their gorgeous moiré covers, but because of the unfolding process of inquiry that was happening alongside the evolution in Op-inspired or derived artmaking. As we moved from a post-industrial, technological world into our irrevocably mediated, present-day digital reality, the artists and programmers and scientists were all exploring and playing with the possibility of what was to come. 

A key work bridging Op into this digital future is A. Michael Noll’s Ninety Parallel Sinusoids with Linearly Increasing Period (1964). Noll was a researcher at Bell Labs, and probably would have described himself as such before ever calling himself an artist, though he was expressly inspired by the painted works of his contemporaries. In this case, Bridget Riley’s painting Current is Noll’s model, only expressed mathematically, with a single wave, repeated. With Hypercube from 1965, Noll did something similar with Albers’ etchings, turning them into animations for an early computer monitor, a precursor to the very best of 1970s vector art. Had I walked around the corner and seen a 1983 Star Wars arcade game unit ready to play, the progression would have felt linear and entirely reasonable. Instead, I found an old television looping Analivia Cordero’s proto-video art dance piece M3x3 (1970), which only confused matters in further good ways.

The exhibition catalogue excerpts Vera Molnar’s 1982 essay Art and the Computer. Molnar’s art is represented here through her gorgeous plotter outputs such as (Dés)Ordre (1976), where straight lines seem so woozy as to induce the same feeling in the viewer. Shall we call her the mother of computer art? Godmother? Either way, the essay documents elements of her journey from abstract painter to joyful explorer of the digital form, from her early collaborations with her scientist husband François, a researcher of visual phenomena (for more on their relationship dig into HOLO, an excellent platform for exploring the nexus of science, art, and technology), to the contemplative place where she’d found herself by the early 1980s. She contrasts the “beauty” of her own preparatory sketches with the sheer volume of output she gets from her computer. What she writes could be lifted verbatim from a contemporary critique of GenAI tools.

“And yet, whether the constituent elements are geometric shapes or other, more convulsive forms, the problem remains the same. Because the real task of the painter is to sift out from among the vast number of possible assemblages of shapes and colors from those that fall into the category of “art.” (On a surface of 10cm x 10cm, using no more than sixteen different shades of gray, and without taking into account the immense richness of the colors, it’s possible to produce 161,000,000 different images). How, then, to choose which images to keep? And which to discard? 

The computer used as a simple tool cannot help us in any way. It can produce a fabulous quantity of images according to our instructions: if our ideas are true painters’ ideas (and we don’t know what those are), the resulting images will be good. But if the original ideas are banal, neutral, or worse still, kitsch ideas (we don’t know what those are either), the images that come out the other end will be bad. And there will be lots of them, because this technique promises a dizzying speed of execution. Therein lies the danger: not only is it quick, but it’s easy as well, too easy to do. Learning a few basics of programming is easier than a traditional apprenticeship in a fine arts school, or more particularly, the workshop of a demanding master.

We should now move on to the next stage. Make better or different use of the computer, this powerful servant…”

Electric Op traces the aesthetic possibilities of the 8-bit world of the 1980s that Molnar was writing from—here rendered in many forms, but most strikingly Eduardo Kac’s blocky animation on a Minitel terminal, spelling out the word Tesão (Portuguese for “horny,” apparently a message for his girlfriend). From there it’s a short journey to this reviewer’s own memories of patiently firing up the 9600 baud modem in the early 1990s, scouring bulletin boards for the rave-era hacker experiments in ray tracing and dimensional space that were emerging from the lively, largely Scandinavian and Eastern European “demo” scene, the legacy of which you can see in the current century with the overwhelming broken-algorithmic video noise art of Ryoji Ikeda’s data.tron (2007) and net.art projects such as Rhea Myers’ Facecoin (2020). This stuff is as fun now as it was when we were arguing about it on mailing lists.

“Did you find it was as disturbing as you’d heard?” Mike Wallace asked some of the patrons at MoMA. “Physically, yes it was disturbing to my eyes,” one responds, before going on, as several others do, to talk about how they’ve just seen things they’ve never seen before. And perhaps things that only they have seen. For the artist, the computer is a powerful servant, the brain a capricious and complicit ally. The negative reactions are just as timeless. Says one furious patron, “art is something you live with and appreciate and enjoy, and you couldn’t live with this for five minutes.”

In trying to look too closely at one of those video pieces at the AKG that I’d never want to live with, perhaps the frenetic Molnar-esque analog video corruptions of Gary Hill’s Black/White/Text (1980), I got so carelessly close to the projector while figuring out what sense there was up close that I triggered its emergency cutoff, the image abruptly blanking with a stern digital squeal. I was gently led away by a museum attendant who helpfully pointed me toward more deliberately interactive pieces—some glitchy 2010s web apps, mostly, on a wall near the Couplands. Instead, I found myself drifting back to Levi’s Simurgh. Taking steps forward, steps back, steps forward. Tamping down the brain’s instinct for rejection through migraine, finding new things to see which were mine and only mine; things which I had no choice but to take home and live with.

Electric Op runs at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum until January 27, 2025. It will be presented at the Musée d’arts de Nantes later in 2025.