Current Exhibitions

Optical Art, or Op Art, is a term used to describe abstract, highly patterned artworks that create an impression of movement, vibration, and shifting three-dimensional effects. Four artists in Plastic Alphabet—Richard Anuszkiewicz, Karl Gerstner, Julian Stanczak, and Victor Vasarely—are heavily associated with this movement, in part due to their inclusion in The Responsive Eye, an extremely popular 1965 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. However, this single exhibition does not define the movement, as Al Held’s Untitled (1970) also explores how indeterminate perspectives can be generated through simple geometric form.

For many artists associated with Op Art, depicting a constantly changing, even overwhelming, perceptual field was motivated by a desire to investigate the effects of emerging digital technologies on 1960s society and what this might mean for human, and human-machine, communication. Vasarely’s 1966 work CTA:102 VI is from a series he termed “Plastic Alphabet, ” which he generated using a set of rules to permute basic modular relationships. He believed his method to be a universally communicable programming language for the generation of art. Other artists in the exhibition more explicitly depict how language and communication has been transformed by computational and related technologies. Nam June Paik, a pioneer in video art, often created piles of monitors that displayed broadcast signals he would inject with noise, to dizzying effect. His Robespierre (1989) depicts an anthropomorphic stack of these monitors inscribed with text that reminds us of Paik’s prophetic 1965 proclamation “artists will work with capacitors, resistors and semi-conductors as they work today with brushes.” Likewise, Peter Halley’s 5759 (not dated) recalls a rudimentary textbook diagram of an electronic circuit. Edward Ruscha’s Angel (1991) looks to the effects of noise on how information is culturally transmitted, while Vernon Fisher deploys an artistic cryptography in Aardvark (1992), exploring how viewers’ experience of art often “involves a process that is much like breaking a code.”

Whether activating a perceptual, even visceral, response in viewers or through explicitly depicting these critical issues, works in Plastic Alphabet provide historical perspective on the place of language, noise, and information in digitally modulated communications channels today.

Plastic Alphabet is organized for the Dean’s Gallery by the MIT List Visual Arts Center and includes works selected by residents of Sydney Pacific Graduate Dormitory for installation in their dorm’s public space.

The Dean's Gallery is located at:

The MIT Sloan School of Management
30 Memorial Drive, Building E60
Third Floor Room 300
Cambridge, MA 02142

Gallery hours are Monday thru Friday 9:00AM to 5:00PM. The gallery is closed all holidays (November 24 & 25, and December 23, 2011 - January 2, 2012).

Questions can be directed to:
Ted M. Hoppe
The Dean's Gallery
MIT Sloan School of Management
30 Memorial Drive, E60-300
Cambridge, MA 02142
Phone: 617-253-7150
E-mail: thoppe@mit.edu