Bridget Riley II

For Americans

Pollock has always been a hero of mine. But if there’s any similarity whatsoever, I have arrived at it by a very different route. The unexpected thing in his free structure is the immense control. The unexpected thing in my controlled structure is the free play of visual forces . . . I try to keep the constituents of any complexity simple.

—Bridget Riley to Robert Kudielka

My freedom consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings. I shall go even further: my freedom will be so much greater and more meaningful, the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself from the chains that shackle the spirit.

—Igor Stravinsky, Boston, 1940, quoted by Bridget Riley

Fifty years ago last February, Bridget Riley arrived in New York for the opening of The Responsive Eye exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. She immediately embarked on one of the swiftest, most vertiginous and peculiar trajectories of praise and blame in the history of Manhattan art celebrity. Riley’s paintings in The Responsive Eye were instantaneously the talk of the town and were universally recognized as the dominant works in the exhibition. Her concurrent solo exhibition at the Richard Feigen gallery sold out before the show opened, and not long thereafter, Josef Albers publicly claimed her as his “daughter.” New York’s acknowledged master of rigorous abstraction, Ad Reinhardt, volunteered to squire her around town (to protect her from the “wolves”), and even Salvador Dalí, who could smell buzz, sought Riley out and paid court to her, with his full retinue and live leopard in tow.

Then things got crazy. Her paintings were hardly on the walls at MoMA and Feigen before op-art imitations of her work began to appear on dresses and scarves in fashionable shop windows along Fifth Avenue and in boutiques in the East Fifties. Fashion spreads proliferated in popular magazines and daily newspapers. Head shops in the Village began offering straight knockoffs of her paintings as posters. These soon adorned the walls of crash pads all over lower Manhattan, providing visual accompaniment to the strains of Chocolate Watchband and Strawberry Alarm Clock. Shocked and astonished, Riley accepted the support of Barnett Newman and tried to take the predators to court, but the damage had been done. Local critics, unnerved by the enthusiastic popular appropriation of their newly discovered diva, were soon muttering. They began hedging their original enthusiasm with terms like “decorative,” “psychedelic,” and “purely retinal.” Carnaby Street fashion was mentioned. The bane of Warholian celebrity was bemoaned, and the dread specter of the egregious Peter Max evoked.

For Bridget Riley, devotee of Veronese and Seurat, haunter of museums, and rigorously adept in the young tradition of abstract painting, this carnival of celebrity and merchandising must have been hell on earth, but, as a friend of mine remarked at the time, Riley, at least, got to go home—unlike poor Pollock who had to live in the mess celebrity had made of his life. So home she went, to London, in a state of stunned dismay, fully convinced that it would be twenty years before anyone would look at her paintings seriously again. This turned out not to be the case, but henceforth, Riley would pursue her career in the UK and on the Continent, always keeping New York at arm’s length, as one would a foolish and fickle lover. Looking back at that moment now, with the length and richness of Riley’s subsequent career in evidence, one thing becomes clear: the clamor over her work was certainly justified, and the work itself almost fatally misconstrued.

We always see what’s new, of course, and recognize it as such, but we see it with old eyes—until the new work makes our eyes new again. It was Riley’s fate in the sixties to make works of art that any eyes could see, to make work that happened at a moment when artists let things happen, when works of art were things that things happened to. Such works existed to be discovered, praised, analyzed, selected, and historicized by the old eyes of a discriminating elite. In an environment like this, paintings like Riley’s that aspired to the rhetorical efficacy of the sixteenth-century Venetians and nineteenth-century Parisians whom she revered—paintings that could not help but be looked at—were simply anathema. In a moment when the painter’s innocence, purity, and impudence were presumably redeemed by the critic’s sensitivity, knowledge, and rigor, Riley was clearly more knowledgeable, sensitive, rigorous, and radical than any of her critics. What’s more, she presumed that it was the artist’s responsibility to be so. How else could one make new things happen?

Consequently, when you look at the progress of Riley’s subsequent career, you discover the history of an artist perpetually trying to exploit the resources of tradition to keep from repeating it. This untraditional traditionalism is grounded in Stravinsky’s edict: “that which is without tradition is plagiarism,” and informed by Riley’s own understanding that tradition is not history. “There are good traditions and bad traditions,” she remarks, and to distinguish one from the other Riley is always narrowing her focus, creating rigorous, formal parameters and physical limits within which she can exercise her improvisational empiricism. Accepting Goethe’s edict that “nothing but the law can give us freedom,” she seeks out those places where the law releases energy. “The perceptual medium is so strong,” she says, “the elements that one is using—that all painters use—have the dynamics of natural forces. They have their own laws, not rules but laws, and woe betide you if you upset the boat.”

Riley’s practice, then, might be described as a sequence of controlled efforts to rock the boat without upsetting it. Her op paintings from the sixties, for instance, evolved from her desire to demonstrate that “there are some absolutes: Black is not white.” Even so, something happens at the intersection of black and white. There is a zone of dynamic mystery there that is anything but absolute. So having observed that “Titian achieves his unity by building the painting according to those very factors which would seem most likely to tear it apart,” Riley sets out to do the same and creates paintings that maintain their cognitive unity while remaining virtually imperceptible. In her subsequent work, Riley will gradually relax the rigorous destabilizing controls on her paintings in order to achieve more controlled effects.

In the op paintings, Riley destabilizes the entire zone between the beholder and the work. In her next series, which I call her Flavin paintings (1967–1979), she focuses on the ambience of colored light created by extended edges of juxtaposed pictorial color. These paintings operate in a more restricted pictorial space than the op paintings but, like them, they still flicker and flash almost at random with the dynamics of our retinal accommodation to them, like thunderstorms seen from the air. In her next series of work, which I call her Stravinsky paintings (1979–1990), Riley seriously addresses the musical analogy that her paintings evoke as a matter of course. Throughout Riley’s career, her studies for paintings have always functioned less as plans to be executed than as scores to be performed. In the Stravinsky paintings, Riley’s performance aspires not just to activate space but also to shape it. By intuitively juxtaposing a restricted palette of vertical stripes in musical sequences, she creates a narrow zone of advance and recession within which the space-making dynamics of our perception make the surface roll like the soft Pacific off Newport Beach.

The space created by Riley’s more recently completed series of paintings, which I call her Veronese paintings (1990–1997), is even narrower—a taut, vibrating veil stretched across the surface of a canvas divided into an irregular pattern of diagonal parallelograms. The high-contrast color palette of these paintings is dispersed in such a way as to create cross-tensions that counter the radical thrust of the diagonals, à la Veronese’s The Adoration of the Kings (1573). These cross-tensions keep the paintings from “moving” as Riley’s previous paintings have, but they clearly want to move, and we feel this tension in our visual accommodation to the field. Riley’s more recent paintings open up this field into large areas of soft-toned, closely valued color enclosed by overlapping curves of similar speeds, Sumerian curves, they seem to me. In their faux-naïf clarity, these new paintings evoke Rousseau and Matisse. Speculation about what these new works are doing, however, must wait until Riley is done with them. Until then, we can comfort ourselves with Riley’s reminder that, if Mondrian was the Giotto of abstract painting, the High Renaissance is yet to come, and presume that, in one way or another, she is reaching toward that.

Now Bridget Riley is back in New York—not a moment too soon and without excuses. Her work is still in progress. Her paintings still succeed, as they always have, in their cool brightness, as art of the highest order within its deepest tradition. Should they fail in this aspiration, there are no fallback positions. If you care about them, then, you must care about this kind of art and recognize the anxious dazzle of the experience. Beyond that, none of the fashionable excuses that justify art by identifying it with something other than what it is are applicable. You can’t get a note from your teacher, your therapist, your clergyman, or your decorator excusing your frivolous enthusiasm. The best you can expect is a note from a critic who recommends prolonged mystery without explanation, wisdom without education—but mostly, always, pleasure—what Riley herself describes as stimulating, active pleasure, comparable to “running . . . early morning . . . cold water, fresh things, slightly astringent . . . certain acid sorts of smells . . . like wood being cut.”

This is the experience Americans now have the opportunity of rediscovering, which, in fact, is an experience that young American artists have been rediscovering for the last fifteen years, coming up to me at odd moments with tattered copies of The Responsive Eye catalog in hand, pointing to a reproduction of Riley’s work and demanding to know, “What’s this? Why haven’t I been told about this!” I never have an answer, but I am reassured that young artists are now finding in Riley’s work what she found in Seurat, what, in her own recounting, Delacroix found in Rubens. In an essay called “Painting Now” (1996), Riley reminds us that Delacroix, “convinced that painting had gone astray and lost sight of its basic principles . . . went hunting in the Louvre—scrutinizing, analyzing and searching the paintings he found there. In Rubens and later in Veronese he found what he was looking for: clean, fresh color used for the building of a painting.”

What young Americans are discovering in Riley’s work, of course, is exactly what she brought to New York in 1965 and brings with her now in the year 2000—clean, fresh color, to be sure, but also the idea of a clean, fresh, virtually authorless modernism expressed in painting and dependent for its authority on nothing more than what happens when we look at the work. What interests these young artists about Riley’s work, however, is something more specific. For them, her work constitutes an articulate precursor to the rhetorical-empirical brand of “behaviorist modernism” practiced by Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra, for whom, as for Riley, the manipulation of material and formal means is directed toward the evocation of a local, cognitive-kinesthetic experience that is quite distinct from linguistic communication (which presumes that the work of art bears a message) and formal appreciation (which posits the work of art as a dead thing, artfully manipulated and sensitively perceived).

For this generation of artists, Riley’s work constitutes the missing link between what they know and what they should know better. By connecting the concerns of Nauman and Serra with those of Seurat and, through Seurat, with a tradition of art making that leads back to the triumph of Venetian painting, Riley’s work infers a direction and a vision that heals the schism created by our recent, obsessive preoccupation with the dead nominality of physical objects and the putative circularity of linguistic expression. Most critically, however, Riley’s work liberates young artists from the tyranny of explanation, since the reinstatement of Riley’s work has, demonstrably, taken place without it, and contrary to all received opinion. Because something happens when we look at Riley’s paintings, and that “something” resides neither in our perception of their object-hood nor in our understanding of them as works of art, but in their “plasticity,” a quality which, according to Riley, “hangs between the cognitive reading of an image and its perception.”

In his famous study Logique du sens (1969), Gilles Deleuze calls the attribute of “plasticity” the “sense” of an object—an attribute that operates according to its own “logic” that operates along the border between the proposition and the thing, between de jure and de facto. Apropos of Bridget Riley’s method of bounded experimentation, Deleuze remarks that “the logic of sense is inspired in its entirety by empiricism. Only empiricism knows how to transcend the experiential dimensions of the visible, without falling into Ideas, and how to track down, evoke and perhaps produce a phantom at the limit of a lengthened or unfolded experience.”

It is likewise appropriate, then, that Riley would use Deleuze’s term in likening the experience of Seurat’s La Grande Jatte to confronting a phantom in which “the unfathomable appears in the guise of total visibility.” In all of her discussions of artists she loves, in fact, Riley focuses on the realm of “sense,” insisting the art occurs when the way we see something and the way we know it impinge upon one another. She identifies “the vital tension between knowledge and sensation” as the wellspring of Seurat’s vision; she quotes Cézanne’s remark that color is “the place where our brain and the universe meet,” and observes that “Veronese lays bare the web which hangs between perception and cognition more openly than Titian because he doesn’t seem to be interested in expression.”

She repudiates Clement Greenberg’s materialist reduction of the painter’s medium to mere stuff, arguing instead that the means of painting are turned into a “medium” only by the response of the artist who, through those means, is trying to make something happen in the realm of sense. It is exactly at this level of abstraction that Riley thinks and works, and only at this level of abstraction that a tradition stretching from Titian to Nauman (both of whom Riley greatly admires) can even begin to exist.