On February 23, 1965, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, opened The Responsive Eye, an event which included 99 artists and collectives from 19 countries. This exhibition, which included, among others, a work by the Canadian artist Guido Molinari, came to consecrate the “Op Art” movement, a term which would have been used officially for the first time a few months earlier, on October 23, 1964, in a article from Time magazine. Responsive Eye excited many people, but also disconcerted others including the young David Hockney, then aged 27, who during his visit commented on it with these words: “These things are everything I hate. I don’t like anything that requires me to blink! »
Marie Fraser, curator and professor at UQAM, returns these days to this page in Molinari’s career and the history of art in the West. Even if the Guido Molinari Foundation had already discussed this subject well during a retrospective of the artist’s work in the fall of 2018 and in the catalog published at the same time – in an important text by the historian of art Roald Nasgaard —, nevertheless, the exhibition The attentive eye, brings together, in this same place, documents which will invite you to further reflection on the subject. Among other things, you can watch a 25-minute version of the 1966 documentary directed by Brian de Palma on this MoMA exhibition, available on YouTube.
In this presentation at the Guido Molinari Foundation, you will of course still see the Molinari painting identified in the catalog Responsive Eye as being Mutation: Green and Red (1964). Molinari fortunately kept this acrylic on canvas in his collection. But you will also find The stopper from going around in circles (1964) by Claude Tousignant, another work by a Canadian artist present in the MoMA exhibition, a work which is now in the collections of the Art Gallery of Yale University. The Foundation and the curator managed to bring this painting back temporarily to Quebec. The work The Tree from the original artist Canadian — but classified by MoMA as American — Agnes Martin, is however not presented here. Preserved in the MoMA collections, this oil and pencil on canvas would be too fragile to be moved that far… But at the Molinari Foundation we will find an appropriation of this work made by Tammi Campbell, an artist known for her imitations of classified works of the ‘the history of art. This is a very interesting initiative.
The hypnotized eye
One of the interesting surprises of this exhibition is certainly the links that are made between, on the one hand, the activities of MoMA and, on the other hand, the defense of modern art and American culture by the CIA. The recovery of modern art by the CIA is certainly not a discovery, but it will seem, even today, quite edifying. Let us recall, among other things, that in 1983 the art historian Serge Guilbault published the resounding book How New York stole the idea of modern art. Abstract Expressionismfreedom and the cold war, intelligent and surprising book. Guilbault explained how the circulation and reputation of works of American abstract expressionist art in the West owed a lot to the work of the American secret services who wanted to make them the standard bearer of an America, land of freedom, advocating values international.
Marie Fraser also provides here an overview of all the texts which, since the first forgotten in New York Times in June 1956, clearly demonstrated this interference by the American secret services. It also showed how, long after Abstract Expressionism, the CIA continued to use modern art exhibitions for political propaganda purposes through its involvement in the International Program of the Museum of Modern Art. Responsive Eye with its inclusion of a multitude of artists from around the world would be part of it. A reading of things that would certainly deserve more in-depth explanations in a publication.
Note that on Saturday October 21, at 2 p.m., a round table will take place at the Guido Molinari Foundation. It will focus on Investigative Museology: the investigation leading to the reconstruction of the exhibition The Responsive Eye.