Word: visualizing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...guide his meditations. Nepalese cloth paintings often contain mandalas, magic diagrams of the cosmos without and the self within. One such (see opposite page) focuses on the mighty mediating god, Mahakala, whose blue bulk is crowned and garlanded with severed heads. The worshiper is expected to make a visual pilgrim's progress from the edges of the mandala, where he buries his worldliness in stylized cemeteries showing scenes of torture and immolation. Four godlings representing the cardinal compass points help him purge external reality. At the center Mahakala waits, clutching ritual symbols of self-annihilation: a skull bowl brimming...
Some artists are convinced that pleasing the eye is no virtue. They call themselves visual researchers, and their wriggly art is as readable as Dr. Jekyll's new, improved eye chart...
...Chief visual researcher is Victor Vasarely, 56, a Hungarian who has lived in Paris since 1930. He lives as immaculately as he paints, speaks more like a physicist than a painter. Says he: "I do not like to use the word painting to describe my works; they are plastics." Then he asks: "What remains of the Muses, who inspired beautiful souls, under the hard light of biochemistry, genetics or bionics?" Answer: plastic art. Vasarely weaves zebra-ziggly patterns that actually seem to move on their white backgrounds...
...master has pupils that he has never even met. One is U.S. Painter Richard Anuszkiewicz (TIME, July 19). Another is Bridget Riley, 32, whose visual torments are on view in London's Whitechapel Art Gallery. Precise black and white herringbone lines constantly wriggle, peak and valley, in an embodiment of vertigo. Visitors have become nauseated and dizzied by Riley's intense, chattering images that force their eyes to jerk to and fro. Not simply geometric tricks, they are larger than sheer optical delusions: orderliness clashes with chaos in the precarious proximity of black and white bands. They also...
...visual research is often challenged as phony. Yet in the permutations of pattern that sometimes hurt and sometimes enchant human vision lie the power and the challenge to change reality. As Bridget Riley says, "I wish somebody would give me a big wall to destroy. I mean, to make it no longer seem a wall...