CIRCA 111 review

London: Eyes, Lies & Illusions at Hayward Gallery

Curated by German experimental film-maker Werner Nekes (whose own collection forms most of this exhibition), in collaboration with cultural historian Marina Warner, Eyes, Lies & Illusions really is a behemoth of a show. It would be impossible here to try to express how much stuff is in it, or what most of it really looks like, for that, after all would seem to defeat the point of optical illusions anyway.

Samuel van Hoogstraten: Shadow games, print from his Introduction to the Noble School of Painting, 1678, Werner Nekes Collection; photo courtesy Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln (A. Wagner); courtesy Hayward Gallery

Divided into eight sections entitled Shadowplay, Tricks of the Light, Riddles of Perspective, The World Revealed, Enhancing the Eye, Deceiving the Mind, Persistence of Vision and Moving in Time (each designed with fancy eye-confusing graphics by Christophe Gerrard of Critical Space), the show encourages visitors to interact their way through its historical and often quirky overview, which follows, mimics and in some way perfects the science of the exhibits’ relative eras. The coptograph is a very good measure of this procedure of popularisation; derived from the art of silhouette-making, the coptograph used negative snipped-out figures and forms, whose enlarged projections of their shadows generated cartoonish positive images on walls and screens (and all of this before the concept of the negative in photography). Around 1820, this idea of ‘coptographic entertainment’ swept across Europe as a pastime or craze; ordinary people could buy pre-printed sheets and cut them out themselves: a very satisfying example of popular science, way before Tomorrow’s World. Christian Boltanski’s Shadow theatre (1985) of angel and devil characters flickers across the gallery walls, reminding us that this method of presentation is no simple archaic activity but rather a modern potential device to capture space, scale and movement.

Lovely Lulu the phantom nude, c.1930, a Beepee Production, printed paper, Werner Nekes Collection; courtesy Hayward Gallery

The tricky nature of spectacle or event underpins the exhibition as a whole, for whilst separately the works have the ability to engage and fascinate, when seen all together they rather begin to suggest repetition and disintegration of meaning. A good example of the former is the compelling oddity of a piece like Charles Philipou’s An ‘Incroyable’ of the Year 9 (1830), a small pretty painting of a dandified gentleman whose face has been cut out and replaced with a tiny convex mirror, allowing the viewer to enter directly into the work, thereby perceiving their own eye perceiving themselves.

Christian Boltanski: Les ombres (shadows), 1986, installation view, electric fan, light bulb, mixed media; courtesy Hayward Gallery

Whilst a good example of the latter is the special ability of optical illusions to conceal and gradually reveal, which is regularly used as a license for licentiousness. The current connotation of a ‘peep-show’ is obviously quite different from early-seventeenth-century descriptions of a box containing tiny perspectival panorama. There are fascinating items like a set of French erotic transparent playing cards, from 1880, that only reveal their tantalising true potential when lit from behind; or Lovely Lulu the phantom nude (1930), a busty gal whose figure remains on your retina as an afterimage even when you look away. They demonstrate, in some way, Michel Foucault’s observation that, “…the penetration of discourse into the form of things” reveals “…discourse’s ambiguous power to deny and redouble.”

The contemporary work included in Eyes, Lies & Illusions is very slim pickings indeed, both in quantity and quality, and frankly appears as an afterthought or lubricant for the show’s entry into the Hayward Gallery - surely Bridget Riley would have been an obvious choice as an artist who is fascinated with the eye and its illusionary tendencies, but her work isn’t included (and whilst it is clear that most of the exhibition is ‘drawn’ from Nekes’ collection, not all of it is, so if there were some gaps to address, why couldn’t more could have filled at the same time?). There are a few good works on show. It is always refreshing to see the continuing ‘nowness’ of Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs (originally produced in 1935 but here reconstructed by Jim Lambie), which whilst not strictly ‘contemporary’ still exert freshness and activity, especially when contrasted with some of the other more ‘static’ works on show. Carsten Höller’s Punktefilm (1998) is a charming animation of a constellation couple dancing in darkness, illustrated by gradually extinguishing points of light, reminiscent of the ‘Starkicker’ in the title sequence of The Old Grey Whistle Test. But Swiss artist Markus Raetz’s three-dimensional anamorphic optical illusions and games seem like turgid reworkings of historically earlier exhibits in the show, and Ann Veronica Jannsens’ Scrub colour II (2002), a looped five-minute sequence of hundreds of brightly coloured rectangles, could have easily been bettered by one of the Len Lye’s early rayogram films.

Arthur C. Clarke once observed that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Eyes, Lies & Illusions contains both the best and the worst of this.

Maria Fusco is a Belfast-born writer and lecturer currently based in London; she recently edited Put About: A Critical Anthology on Independent Publishing.

Eyes, Lies & Illusions, Hayward Gallery, London, October 2004 - January 2005

Article reproduced from CIRCA 111, Spring 2005, pp.100–101

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