Clifton Hall Link

The abstract artist Josef Albers celebrated art as a “swindle,” delighting in its ability to teach us about the chasm between physical facts and our visual perception of them, and to undermine our trust in the information our eyes convey. Although he was primarily focused on demonstrating the relativity of color, Albers also studied how composition and linear design could render his works both illusionistic and enigmatic. Like Albers, many other twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists worked to depose vision from its historically enshrined role as the “noblest” sense. Some made art in the form of conceptual statements or instructions, circumventing visual sensation entirely. Others asked audiences to privilege different senses in artworks that relied on sound or touch. Given the increased volume and circulation of images made possible by today’s technological advances, it is more urgent than ever to examine how images convey the information that becomes the basis of our shared perception.