Art is not an exam you can fail. Art is a way of seeing

Op Art (optical art) is less well known than Pop Art. Until you see the works in question. There may be no Op Art stars of Andy Warhol status, but their creations resonate directly with images familiar from art history. On Saturday 25 February, a major exhibition opened at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam[hints]In collaboration with the Louisiana Museum in Denmark[/hints] about this art movement, which is mainly about so-called "mindfucks".

You only start seeing it when you realise it

Slightly more neatly called the 'psychology of perception', and well, this is as old as Willendorf's Venus, for the diligent chiseller who decided to turn a small stone into a woman more than 20,000 years before Christ also naturally guided our perception. After all, that proto-artist desired his spectators not to see a pebble in that, but a voluptuous woman, looking for amusement.

No cult

So in the 1950s, the human desire to see things differently also became a much-discussed movement of artists who took directing perception even more literally. With dizzying results. This is Op Art: rotating grids fire ever-changing impulses at the eye and brain configuration. Hallucinatory, multicoloured, kaleidoscopic installations still create dizziness and other experiences. An artistic signature is pleasantly often entirely absent, not for nothing did star cults like Warhol emerge from Op Art. These are works to be experienced, not admired.

Eternal 'rebel with a cause' Willem de Ridder opened the exhibition with a resounding speech of seventeen minutes[hints]*The recording has a somewhat suboptimal sound quality, I forgot my HD recorder so you have to make do with the recording from my phone. With headphones on and some added bass, it is somewhat listenable. The passages you don't understand you may - entirely in keeping with the philosophy of the Op Art movement - fill in for yourself. Better still is just a visit to Schiedam.[/hints] which for a long time admittedly seemed a little too anecdotal. In the end, it did turn out to have surprisingly topical relevance. To please the reader: I will write more about this later for the cultural news agency.

Cross

With those delightful stories by De Ridder, it always remains difficult to separate him from the blessed baby boomer generation to which he belongs. But the man still has a drive that doesn't sound an inch outdated or dated. It is a monty obstinacy that pontificates against that outdated notion of art as a higher form of being to which, in order to enjoy it, you have to go through a balloting of connoisseurs and gatekeepers. Only to rest on your laurels once you have succeeded.

Act and flux

Art, in De Ridder's view, is an act, an action. At least not a passive confession in a secular church, reverently kneeling before a papal figure. Nice was the quote by Umberto Eco, in which art appreciation, or less chicly put: experiencing art, is compared to planetary systems. Every conjunction presents a different picture and really nothing should count as eternal, static. What wonderful imagery from the great, dead Italian! Note to self: finally read those other books by Eco too.

Of course, we have known about the relative relativity of art experts for some time, but it certainly doesn't hurt to establish it again. Reputation of the artist, importance of a movement - everything is eternal in flux and attempts to shoehorn this into a strict canon are tinkering - as well as irrelevant and imperialistic in a culturally diverse society.

Liberation

That idea of Eco fits nicely with this Op Art expo, which was brought to the gin city from Denmark and completed with Dutch representatives of the international movement. Op Art, which are mindfucks in all colours, shapes and sizes. Invoking today's games industry and high-quality 3D visual entertainment in your personal home cinema, a cynic might conclude that this art movement is perhaps somewhere outdated. I turn against such short-sightedness, for the materials may appear quite analogue, but the intended effect is not at all. What a liberating, joyful exhibition! Moreover, you can also see the origins of many expressions derived from Op Art, such as an album cover by David Bowie, and the effects of this movement on fashion and design.

Intermezzo

The reader will hopefully allow me an interlude; I will come to a point later. My relationship with museums is as follows: I am a performing arts junkie and proud resident of the town of Cineville. Therefore, I am often sadly left with too little time for thorough gallery and museum visits, but the museum card proves to be an effective means of increased visit frequency. Especially during spring break: visiting museums is preferably done with young, bright kids who can still see exactly what you are no longer surprised about.

To do

So last week, I visited the Teylers Museum in Haarlem with J. (7 years old, half-Korean, child of a journalist and a language teacher) and then with L. (9 years old, child of two lovely artists) the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and finally, accompanied only by my inner demons, visited the Stedelijk Museum in Schiedam for the first time. This as part of my ever-lengthening To Do List. (Next city I have never been to: Dordrecht. Cultural tips are welcome, dear reader).

No exam

To my own surprise, I found the really packed Stedelijk (the Amsterdam one, we went for the great Tinguely expo) suddenly just very cheerful. This while I usually prefer to visit museums at the most unusual times: before or after mass. But those children running wildly from one Tinguely creation to another proved the point of both Tinguely and the Op Art movement: art is not an exam you can fail. Art is a way of looking at the world. You are never too old or too young for that. Distrust the art experts with their gibberish that sometimes wants to demonstrate mere self excellence. In the Stedelijk Museum of both Schiedam and Amsterdam this time, I did not see a single hermetic French philosopher justifying the works on the text boards - what a relief!

Wordless

Back to Schiedam. Curator Colin Huizing put it this way shortly after De Ridder's inspiring words: 'Our motivation to make this exhibition? It is an art form that was very quickly questioned at the time, but still, or precisely because of that, became very popular. Discussing so-called high and low art is tiresome, but Op Art is a liberating middle ground. People find a lot of art incomprehensible, but it doesn't have to be at all. You can also experience art wordlessly, you don't have to give the right answer.'

Huizing speaks lucidly and very enthusiastically about this new major exhibition at the Schiedam Stedelijk, which has paid serious attention to good art more often in recent years. Huizing: 'Compared to the original Danish exhibition, the busiest in the Louisiana's history, we have added Dutch artists. The Danes gave us complete freedom, a pleasant way of working together. They had of course checked beforehand what kind of museum we are, and saw that our desire to dedicate an expo to Op Art is not just an incident, but that it fits well within our programming of recent years.'