Art, Culture & Lifestyle - Italian Cultural Institute

Optical Art and Its Interaction With Its "Users"

MARINA APOLLONIO, CIRCULAR DYNAMICS N, 1968, ENAMEL ON WOOD WITH ROTATING MECHANISM, 86 X 86 CM.

Most people are used to associating the CIA, the 75-year-old “world’s premier foreign intelligence agency”, with political issues (coups d’état, counterterrorism actions, etc.) but few people know that the CIA played a role in moulding what Joseph S. Nye defines as the “soft power” of the USA. That is, the ability of a country to persuade others to do what it wants without force or coercion. Soft power is something close to “invisible power” that Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci defined as “hegemony”.

In a provocative article published in The Independent (Sunday 22 October 1995), Frances Stonor Saunders writes, “For decades in art circles, it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used modern American Art - including the works of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting worldwide for more than 20 years.”

The American artists supported by their government would have certainly played a fundamental role in global art history. This was also the case in the Italian Renaissance. After all, without Pope Julius II we could not admire the Sistine Chapel as it is now.

But it is also true that the treasure hunt is still open in the complex scenario of contemporary creativity.

Optical Perspective, the exhibition that Novalis Art Design presents during Art Central Hong Kong 2022, offers a rare opportunity to increase our knowledge of modern art and admire masterpieces by artists from the Optical Art movement.

“Optical Art,” writes Vera Canevazzi, curator of the exhibition whose representing artists come from a variety of experiences, “develops between the mid-1950s and the end of the 1960s, placing itself in continuity with the geometric/abstract experimentations of the historical avant-garde movements at the beginning of the 1900s, such as Futurism, Constructivism and the school of Bauhaus whose instances were adopted by ‘kinetic’ artists through a renewed study of the relation between art, psychology and technology.”

Italian society, at that time, was undergoing a profound transformation and development due to the “Economic Miracle”. In that period (1958-63), “growth rates reached a level never previously attained in the history of the unified state, an average annual increase in GDP of 6.3 per cent. [...] Industrial production more than doubled [...], with the engineering industry and petrochemicals leading the way. Above all, exports became the driving sector behind the expansion, with an average increase of 14.5 per cent per annum. The effect of the Common Market was clear for all to see: the percentage of Italian goods destined for the EEC countries rose from 23 per cent in 1955 to 29.8 per cent in 1960 and 40.2 per cent in 1965.” (Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition, p. 214).

YVARAL, INSTABILITY, 1963, WOOD, METAL, ACRYLIC, 90 X 90 X 35 CM.

It was also a period of intense artistic and aesthetic research. In 1962, Umberto Eco published Opera Aperta (The Open Work), “a significant work, both on account of the enduring historical usefulness of its concept of ‘openness,’ and because of the striking way in which it anticipates two of the major themes of contemporary literary theory from the mid-sixties onwards: the insistence on the element of multiplicity, plurality, or polysemy in art, and the emphasis on the role of the reader, on literary interpretation and response as an interactive process between reader and text. The questions the book raises, and the answers it gives, are very much part of the continuing contemporary debate on literature, art, and culture in general” (David Robey, Introduction to The Open Work, Kindle Edition). This new concept of “openness” of the work of art and the role of the “user” in its perception and evaluation is crucial in understanding Optical Art and most contemporary artistic movements.

“The optical artistic research,” writes Vera Canevazzi, “focuses on the human visive perception and the interaction between viewer and work of Art. It is based on theoretical principles of Gestalt psychology, according to which the totality of what we perceive is not only characterized by the sum of the individual sensorial stimulations, but also by the shape that we give to the things that allow us to understand the object in its totality. The user’s role becomes fundamental because it is only through his perception that the work of Art fully takes shape.”

Optical Art was an international movement. The merit of the exhibition, Optical Perspective is to present a rich selection of its representatives: Marina Apollonio, Marcello Morandini, Horacio Garcia Rossi, Yvaral, Dadamaino, Armando and Herman de Vries.

After Art Central, some of the works will be displayed at the Novalis Art Design Gallery from 9 June till 25 June 2022.

HORACIO GARCIA ROSSI, MOUVEMENT, 1964/1965, WOOD, PLEXIGLASS AND MISCELLANEOUS MATERIALS, 45 X 45 X 30 CM. THE FIRST WORK OF ART TO COMBINE LIGHT, WORD, AND MOVEMENT.

STEFANO FOSSATI

DIRECTOR OF ITALIAN CULTURAL INSTITUTE HONG KONG & MACAU

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