The Electric Op exhibit at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum is not an Op art show exactly. It is a show of some Op art alongside art created outside and after the movement, over the last six decades. The pieces are united by a “technological” quality that has more to do with the imagery itself than the ways in which the images were produced. Rendered by hand or by machine, each piece is a supreme example of that sort of image the world seldom saw before the invention of computers and can’t stop seeing now that computers are everywhere. 

Given the focus on technological imagery over time, I feared that the curator would try to trap me in a historical narrative. (I’m not the easiest to trap because I’m too restless to read the wall text.) But I don’t think a trap was set. No arrows ordered me around. The galleries were not numbered. One path through the show was as good as the next. The grouping of the work betrayed only the slightest conceptual order. 

In this way, the curator, Tina Rivers Ryan, allowed the work to stand all together, all at once. This was generous because it freed me to see, as I wandered around undirected and uninformed, how perfectly continuous the work is, how little the distances of time and technological advancement separate the older and newer work.

Thus, Electric Op reveals that the Op art movement was an early manifestation of a visual culture still flourishing today. The exhibit’s indefinite historical narrative is a recognition that this moment begun by Op art is not over yet. More than recalling the past, Electric Op is the site of something happening now, something I was given to see by the show’s straightforward curation.

mh.