Time & Perspective Quote by Bridget Riley

Riley is talking like someone who watched the floorboards of certainty buckle in real time. The line has the cool, controlled cadence of a studio observation, but it’s really a diagnosis of a whole cultural pivot: the shift from a world that trusted stable meanings to one that treats meaning as provisional, negotiated, even performative. Coming from an artist whose work famously makes your eyes argue with your brain, that’s not abstract theory - it’s a lived method.

The first clause romanticizes neither the past nor its authority; it simply names an old deal we used to accept: that reality could be “fixed,” nailed down by institutions, shared narratives, maybe even by the camera’s supposed neutrality. Then she snaps the hinge: “when that sort of belief disappeared.” The phrasing matters. She doesn’t say reality changed; belief did. That’s the subtext of modernity: facts don’t evaporate, but our confidence in the frameworks that certify them does. Uncertainty isn’t a mood; it’s a structural condition.

In Riley’s context - postwar Britain, the rise of mass media, abstraction, and later the postmodern suspicion of grand narratives - interpretation becomes the new battleground. Her Op Art doesn’t depict ambiguity; it manufactures it, turning perception into an event you participate in. The quote reads like a defense of that practice against the demand that art “mean” one thing. It’s also a warning: once meanings de-center, power doesn’t vanish; it relocates to whoever controls the interpretations.