Walking into the David Winton Bell Gallery, located in the lobby of the List Art Center, visitors are immediately confronted by a barrage of brightly colored pop-art pieces, photorealist prints and politically relevant montages. These pieces make up the featured exhibition, "Optical Noise: American and British Prints/Films from the 1960s-1970s."
The exhibition, which opened officially Jan. 27 and will be on display through Feb. 21, was conceived and created collaboratively by Monica Bravo GS, Alexandra Collins GS, Sara Hayat GS, Amy Huang GS, Sarah Rovang GS and Rebecca Szantyr GS, all first- and second-year graduate students in the History of Art and Architecture department.
The exhibition features works representative of the main art movements, themes and images that defined the 1960s and 1970s. The works of well-known artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and Bruce Conner are featured. The overarching commonality between the works is not rooted in the time period itself, but rather in their shared illustration of the idea of "optical noise," which is the primary focus of the exhibition, according to the exhibition's pamphlet.
Termed by American art critic Leo Steinberg, "optical noise" refers to the manipulation, reproduction and decontextualization of widely recognized images drawn from popular culture, according to the pamphlet.
Though some of these images have become so ingrained in contemporary society as to be perceived almost as peripheral white noise, a combination of fragmentation, layering and montage renders them new by de-familiarizing and obscuring them, the pamphlet explains. As such, the pieces exhibited in "Optical Noise" come to both embody and critique popular culture and its accessibility.
This idea is not something that pertains exclusively to the art movements of the 1960s and 1970s, according to the curators of the exhibition. They saw the idea of "optical noise" as something that maintains resonance within today's society. The art movements embodied in the exhibit can be perceived as the movements that inaugurated our modern lifestyle, defined by a constant bombardment of noise, information and images, Bravo said.
In keeping with the ideas behind "optical noise," the exhibition breaks from traditional presentation norms. "Part of what makes the exhibition different is its unconventional hanging style," Rovang said, referring to the lack of painting labels on the walls and the busy presentation of the visual installation. In organizing the works as such, the focus is placed more on the visual components of the art instead of the details of when the work was created and by whom.
This capacity to display the works in a way consistent with their content and purpose is one of the great strengths of the exhibition, said Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture Herve Vanel, who oversaw the creation of the exhibit with Catherine Zerner, professor of the same department.
"What is great about the exhibition is that you have big names being displayed, but it is not about that," Vanel said. "Visually, you create an inclusion or common ground, where Warhol is no more or less important than artists like Mel Ramos."
Instead, they all work together to create a coherent ensemble that embodies the quote printed at the entrance —"Noise hovers on the periphery of sensory perception."
