Review: L’œil attentif at Fondation Guido Molinari

The new exhibition at Fondation Guido Molinari takes a fundamentally different tack than its last few historical shows. Molinari the 60s and the 70s were both defined by decade, although this was limited to the highlighting of a small body of work and contained only slight means for contextually making their historical framing very meaningful. As a result, while interesting, the curation of the paintings did not typically shed much light on them, nor did it let either simply stand as a show of works.

The latter quality is something that is clearly present in Art Mûr’s current show of Claude Tousignant works, mixing those from the 1950s with some more recent ones. Making very little effort to historicize them, they stand quite comfortably as another current exhibition. The show at the Molinari, by contrast, does something very different.

Curated by Marie Fraser, L’œil attentif, is described as reconstructing “a fragment of the The Responsive Eye exhibition presented in 1965 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.” Cast as a form of “investigative museology,” the curator states that she was interested in the original exhibition’s

international scope, which was quite rare at the time. L’œil attentif explores this new mobility of art and compares it with the circulation of exhibitions at the height of the Cold War, and the role that MoMA sought to play on the international scene, both artistically and geopolitically. While our investigation provides a glimpse of the artistic atmosphere of the 1950s and 1960s, marked by numerous exchanges between Montreal and New York, it has most of all led us down unsuspected paths to the offices of the CIA—the Central Intelligence Agency—in Langley, Virginia.

One of the most popular exhibitions at the MoMa in the period, The Responsive Eye exhibition was largely a survey of (loosely) Op Art tendencies that were developing. It contained 123 works by 99 relatively young artists from more than 15 countries. It also marked a shift in framing from “modern art” to “contemporary art,” and from a stress on American art to the international. The exhibition would travel internationally and was heavily publicized in ways that were atypical.

Included in the show are historical works by Guido Molinari, Claude Tousignant, Agnes Martin, and Ellsworth Kelly. These are supplemented by contemporary works such as those of Tammi Campbell and Johanna Barron which comment directly on the status of the art object as something which is packaged for travel. These are combined with exhibition photographs by George Cersna and 60 documents.

Although there was a concern with scientific research, the original exhibition catalogue by William C. Seitz emphasized that it would be naive to rely on any easy kind of positivism, noted the limited nature of scientific knowledge of perception, the general questionability of “objective” perception and the role of “illusions.” While it stressed the substantial diversity of the techniques, aims, styles, and attitudes of the artworks, it likewise stressed that all of the art was “entirely abstract,” an art that was “stripped” of conceptual and experiential association, and addressed to perception. Given that much of the work might seem homogeneous and “invisible” to the casual viewer, the majority of the catalogue was emphatic about the substantial logical and functional differences that existed from one work to the next.

The overall tone of the exhibition at the Fondation is grey and white, something which softens the somewhat jagged juxtaposition of different display strategies and sets off the vibrant colour of the few works that are on display. The wall notes concentrate on the purchasing and provenance of the works. The vitrines contain collections of letters, primarily between artists and curators/institutions, various types of magazine and newspaper articles, maps showing the display routes of different artworks, catalogues, and even a Tousignant puzzle.

Besides these novelties, the corner video booth shows Brian De Palma’s entertaining documentary of the opening of the original Responsive Eye exhibition, featuring interviews with artists, critics, curators, psychologists, and confused gallery-goers. This serves as quite a useful supplement.

The artworks gain a new quality thanks to their museological framing, operating as proofs and props more than autonomous artworks. This is accentuated by a few gallery props that are integrated into the curation. (More on those later.) When the historical is not flattened and sealed off from contact, suspended with a remarkable lack of hallucinatory power as texts and objects that cannot be probed, it takes on the grey and white of the architecture. This is in the form of the cropped and blown-up photos documenting the original exhibition that are pasted to the walls. These mark out several intervals on the first floor and add to its staged feeling. 

Maybe there are too many ideas, but it is better than having too few. The CIA connection is well-known (one of the vitrines even includes articles from the early 70s relaying the point), but it is not really fleshed out here. Is there something interesting to be said about how Op Art hung in the Langley offices? The Barron works at least thematically or conceptually allude to this, but are not presented in a way that this feels like more than a footnote. Did the art go well with the furniture (and what could this furniture suggest about the art?), or was it supposed to serve a purpose somehow aligned with their psychological research? Could the optical techniques that were being used, and which are addressed a bit in the documentary, have been brought to the fore with more supplementary material from psychological testing kits, etc. of the time? Could it have been a show about the distinctions between two very different types of display rooms, that of the MoMA and the CIA? There are a lot of things that could have been addressed in a didactic or participatory way by the exhibition in line with these issues. But it is all a bit vague.

It feels unfinished in some ways. Numerous tangents are introduced and they do not all come together. This is not necessarily a flaw. History is full of tangents and excessive clarity tends to cost more than it is worth. While the distribution-CIA angle is dealt with quite a bit and so is the mapping out of the paths of artworks, albeit in ways that explain little about what it says about the art itself, it is the more singular details that stand out.

As strange as it may sound, one of the most exciting things in the exhibition is a bit of decor. In addition to (what I assume is a replica) chair from the original exhibition, the installation also includes a potted plant, a feature that was familiar to museum shows at the time and which sits in a corner with a photo and wall text that makes it nearly resemble a piece of Conceptual Art. It is this sort of condensing that seems to be desired by the juxtaposition of contemporary and historical works, but which the archival tendencies tend to dilute.

In a way, this is the basic figure that the exhibition creates, which serves as an interesting counterpoint to the paintings themselves. Each of the works from the original show was designed to draw you in and create slowly accelerating forms of visual animation that increase concentration on the work-in-itself. It is the painting as event.

The logic of the exhibition, however, is more serial and tangential, not collapsing into a vortex but extending out in various directions so that it becomes a set of ellipses. Explicitly, it does not seek to replicate the original but performs an operation on it, dissecting and x-raying one aspect of it, setting out all the fragments it has gathered.