"Eyes, Lies & Illusions" Hayward Gallery London
“Lost in the funhouse”
by: Tom Lubbock
in: The Independent Review, 12.10. 2004
A show of optical illusions at the Hayward Gallery blurs the line between science and art. Tom Lubbock is fascinatedConsider the humble thaumatrope, that wild flower of optical gadgetry. Its name means "wonder turn". It was invented in the 1820s, and it is a small flat disc with a different image on either face, and two looped strings attached on either side. Wind the disc on its strings, then pull them out tight, and the disc will spin, and in its whirring blur the two images will blend together and appear as a single image. A squatting demon and a sleeping woman, for example, will become a demon squatting on a sleeping woman.The thaumatrope demonstrates the persistence of vision. mehr...
Sleight of mind
Hayward plays tricks
By: Charlotte Higgins
In: The Guardian 07.10.2004
Gossip, and Satan Came
Also, is a typically witty yet sinister image from the exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London, which opens today..
Drawn largely from the encyclopaedic collection of illusory art made by the German film-maker Werner Nekes (nicknamed "Mr Smoke and Mirrors" by the Hayward curators), the show delves into the delightful world of magic lanterns, zoetropes, puzzle pictures and flickbooks - as well as arcane devices, from the wonderfully named phenakistiscopes, praxinoscopes and coptographs, to mysterious harlequinades, myographs and thaumatropes.
It brings to light the great feats of showmanship that gripped audiences through-out Europe before film's domination: the flickering, candlelit delight of magic-lantern shows; the spectacle of phantasmagoria in which sinister creatures were projected on to smoke
and combined with tricks and pyrotechnics; the wonder of the camera obscura. mehr...
„Magical time out of mind“
by: Jacki Wullschlager
in: Financial Times 06.10.2004
Our eyes are famous for playing tricks with us, and two new exhibitions beckon us into an irresistible history of alternative realities
According to classical fable, a Corinthian girl traced the outline of her lover's shadow cast on a wall, and so made the first fixed human likeness. Millennia later, the new technology of the cinema fulfilled ancient myths about animating statues and bringing images to life. Appearing to recapture lost time, reproducing the unfolding of time itself through the illusion of motion, the 20th-century evolution of shadow pictures changed for ever art's relationship to reality.
"Photography is truth," said Jean-Luc Godard (...) mehr...
With the angel of death as the warm-up act, the Hayward Gallery's interactive journey into science and magic presses all the right buttons for Waldemar Januszczakin: The sunday Times culture
0ctobre 2004
Various visitors will find various ways in which to enjoy the extraordinary collection of optical knick-knacks that has landed at the Hayward Gallery. Kids - for whom the show should be made compulsory on the national curriculum – will gawp at the impossible sights and squeal at the thaumaturgic thrills, thereby getting back in touch with the childish side of themselves that all this watching of East-Enders and listening to Nelly has so cruelly shrunk. Adults, however, will become more adult as they seek to work out how it's all done and find their grey matter being toned and stretched. Art lovers, meanwhile - who ought, after all, to be the ones catered for most directly by the Hayward Gallery - will be reminded, ever so charmingly, of what art is for. What it does. And why we need it. mehr...
Illusions of grandeur
By: Philip Hensher
In: The Mail on Sunday, 17.10.04
„.... This is a marvellous, massive rediscovery of a completly lost world of entertainment.“
Fiendishly clever trickery
Visual Art
Rachel Campbell-Johnston finds primitive magic in a brief history of optical illusions
Eyes, lies & illusions, Hayward Gallery, SE1
In: TIMES, 06.10.2004
„..... The basis of Eyes, Lies & Illusions is he extraordinary encyclopaedic assemblage of optical inventions built up over 30 years by the German experimental film-maker Werner Nekes. Combining some thousand objects from his historical collection with a handful of loans and a few contemporary art commissions, this exhibition re-opens the gateways of wonder, leading the viewer back into a bewitching realm of optical delusions that erode the boundaries between fantasy and fact.....“
 |
