Julian Opie Interviews and Texts – from his own website
1. Guardian Online – 2003
Seeing is believing
Dominic Murphy
Artist Julian Opie believes "public art" should mean more than prosaic local
authority-commissioned sculptures of shopping bags outside malls. Dominic
Murphy meets a man determined to bring his work to the people
Some people relish a stroll round an art gallery, but there are many others who
loathe the idea and would rather eat their coats. So what if the work is taken out of
this potentially intimidating environment and placed in the street or on the side of a
building? Would more people be receptive to it?
It's a question Julian Opie has been pondering recently, as he put together three new
public installations which are all launched this month. "People are very suspicious
once they know something is art," says the 44-year-old artist. "I wanted to defuse that
moment of suspicion so that people are given the chance to enter the work visually
before worrying about whether it is art or whether they are supposed to like it."
So, with one of his new pieces, we are treated to a giant landscape covering the entire
west wing of St Bart's hospital, London - not the first place you think of as a venue to
see some art. And despite the size of this work, you still end up stumbling across it,
tucked away in a square at the centre of a rambling collection of buildings. The
surprise, however, is punctured by the blandness of the subject - a computer-graphic
representation of a B-road in Hertfordshire - and the lame, neutral way it has been
coloured in.
Opie's images consist of reality reduced to outlines, and strong yet flat colours where
nuances have been swept away. It's a world of universal signage where landscapes
evoke those catch-all instructions on children's toys and flat-pack furniture, and
figures look like cardboard cut-out or the male and female silhouettes on toilet doors.
He begins by scanning a photograph of his subject into a computer, then draws the
outline he wants. This can be output in a number of ways, depending on what Opie
wants the finished result to be. He's collaborated with road sign manufacturers (to
create, among other things, his animal sculptures outside Tate Modern) and has
recently been working with a company in Sweden, emailing them his finished image
which is then translated on to vinyl.
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His two other new works - one up the road from St Bart's, in the foyer and facade of
Sadler's Wells Theatre; the other at the front of the new Selfridges department store
in Manchester - have been created this way. In the former, Opie depicts swimming
figures and stretches of water in lengths of wallpaper; in the latter, it's lines of people
walking past one another.
This adult master of the stick figure was, as a child, actually very good at drawing.
He had a middle class upbringing in London, the son of a schoolteacher mother and
an economist father (Roger Opie, who presented the Money Programme in the
1970s). By the time he was 14, Opie tells me, he would be painting every night,
stretching his own canvasses and thinking how he could improve on a work in
progress. "People said I should go to art school," he says, "which I thought was for
losers." Encouraged by his mother, though, he attended Chelsea art college and then,
in 1979, Goldsmith's, where his tutors included Richard Wentworth and Michael
Craig-Martin.
He graduated with a first, but in the early 1980s there was not much of a culture of
going on to become a professional artist (Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Gary Hume et
al would not reach Goldsmith's until later in the decade, and the arts-bashing
Thatcher administration was in its heyday). "The idea was you'd get a studio for the
first 10 years or so, go travelling, maybe do an MA." But, typically, art-swot Opie got
his head down straight away and within a year had an exhibition at the Lisson
Gallery, in Marylebone, with whom he still works today.
Moving out of the gallery and into a public space, he says, has its risks. After all,
Sadler's Wells foyer, where theatre-goers have their interval ice-creams, hardly has
the industry prestige of Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art (he's also exhibiting
there, from February 20). But this comes from someone who, like Andy Warhol, has
never shied away from themes of mass production and commercialisation. In 2000,
he produced the artwork for the hugely promoted Best of Blur CD. And for his last
show at the Lisson, Opie designed the catalogue to look like a freebie product
brochure you pick up somewhere like B&Q.
He's either a gambler or he doesn't really care.
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2. South China Morning Post 2009
Julian Opie
I have around 35 artworks going, which are effectively focusing on the human figure.
There are a few relating to landscapes, but most are centred on the human face and
figure. There are some 3D works (statues), and also some which are
moving/animated on computers.
There are some LED works - dancing and walking figures, which are fairly large.
The Primary gallery was where my first gallery shows started about 25 years ago.
There is a gallery in Seoul, called the Kukje gallery, where there is a show, and I have
a gallery in Tokyo called Scai, and there are various works at each.
I have just had an exhibition is Seoul. I don't tend to go to art fairs myself. They are
exciting to look around, but are not really an exhibition - more of a show.
I have worked with Alan Cristea. It is a print and multiple gallery, so I run the web
shop through them.
I work with about 13 galleries around the world - they are all listed on the website.
I don't really know Hong Kong that well, I have visited there, and seen some of the
islands, and spent a little time in Shanghai.
Computers are very central to what I do, as they act as a tool or a lens through which
most things pass at one point. Some works are shown on computers/LCD screens,
and LED (light emitting diodes) are generally used for larger scale, and are linked
to/run by a computer. Paintings and sculptures are generally drawn on computer.
They may start with a real figure or landscape, which will then be transferred onto a
computer to be out put in various ways.
I am focusing on commissioned portraits again to a degree, in the style of
Manga/Japanese animation.
I am also moving towards 17th/18th century portraiture, which used to be used as
the process of commissioned portraits, so I quite like mimicking that in a way. I have
also done a family group.
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I have done work on dancing and walking figures at the Royal Ballet, which was a
project with a choreographer named Wayne McGregor. That was on stage earlier this
year, and lots of projects have come out of that linked to dance. Some of these are on
display in Hong Kong.
Seoul focuses on a ballet dancer and human movement. This can be close up eyes/fingers moving, or more distant - whole body moving/people walking.
I have also done some outdoor commission work, which often focuses on large
moving figures. I was reading about Hogarth - he said "true human beauty was in
movement". I don't quite know what he means by that but thought it was interesting
he thought the same. Humans are always moving, and especially humans we don't
know we often see moving, on the street, walking, or outdoors.
Even sitting down humans are quite animated, so to depict humans in a realistic
way we need to use movement, which is available now with computers.
Making images move used to be less easy, and used to be only available as films,
with time stretches and a story to engage people. A painting in a gallery doesn't need
a time stretch or a story; we can include movement but keep to a single picture. I am
not the only person to do that - Warhol was doing that but without computers.
I have always combined movement with non-moving images, and to a degree I have
solved that now.
We spend a lot of time and energy looking at screens, and I don't tell my kids not to
got on the Internet, or watch the television too much - just tell them " not too much
screens'.
They are the common denominator, and are a threat to the real world, but are also a
great way of processing the world and understanding it.
I don't confine myself to working on the moving images - often even still images
contain a lot movement.
I have spent a lot of time looking at Japanese wood block prints from the 19th
century like Hiroshige and Utomaro, as lots of their works involve suggested
movement:
Birds flying across the picture
People punting boats
Rain falling
Somebody smoking
Somebody playing with a child
I have made a series of landscapes after Hiroshige, and I also collect his work as did
Van Gogh.
I set off in Japan with a GPS guided car following Hiroshige's route around mount
Fuji.I took photos, and then put these images together.
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I have always liked Japanese culture, as it is quite particular and refined, and has a
certain melancholy to it. I think Hiroshige is one of the great geniuses of it. I have
double computer screens that hang on the wall and show his landscapes - if you look
closely you can see they are all moving, if not only small things:
Clouds pass by
Aeroplanes go over
Water ripples
Insects/birds fly around
This adds a narrative without there being a story, and makes people slow down
when looking at something. There are so many images everywhere now, and
something simple moving allows one to slow down, and gives time to stop and
listen. It allows one to focus on our surroundings and allows it to enter your
consciousness. Making pictures with small amount of movement allows people to
just look, and let the art work or not work for you.
I am careful not to use the phrase "computer generated" as it suggests that the
computer generated it. It doesn't, but simply acts as a sophisticated drawing tool. It is
simple, sensible, and is easy to copy and change. I think of Digital cameras more like
a mirror. We can use it to record images and information, and then take it back to the
studio. It works like a series of mirrors.
Technology used to be more expensive and difficult, but can now be used as a
constant feed for you. I don't think it is further away from reality. Art instead is a
processing of reality. It is seen by someone and thought about and processed, and
then drawn by someone. It often allows us in a strange way, to see things more
clearly. Sometimes books or films are more understandable/digestible than real life.
Insight teaches us about the world through other people, whether they be a
filmmaker, writer, or artist, and it adds to our understanding of the world. Artists
process and dream about, and complain about, and praise the world around them,
and it is the results of that that what we as an audience enjoy. It is a tool in order to
look at reality, and enjoy it. You can use a pencil or computer, really what works best
for you. Do, in a certain sense, what is easy, but take it to the level where it is better
than you could ever expect to do.
In the 90s I used to copy the way computers imaged things, but do it by hand.In the
end it is easier just to draw on the computer.
Generally, so far, I have felt websites are good for information as opposed to being
artworks themselves. I am producing a new site now, and like an artwork it will
have a theme or idea, it won't just be an online list of lots of my pictures. It is a means
of communication and information. I also have an online shop. It is frustrating that I
make a few multiples for museums, and they very quickly disappear, so it is an
opportunity to have them available. My outlet is for prints without edition numbers
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for multiples, posters and catalogues. It is another option for getting work out there.
Galleries and museums are relatively modern, there never used to be a system for
showing work. I have made billboard projects and CD covers, installed works on
building facades and on street corners, made book covers and my own artists books.
The Lisson Gallery stand at the fair will be just my work; I have tried this once or
twice before. I think it gets away from the feeling that it's a bit of a jumble sale, as
most galleries tend to show all the artists that they represent. Some galleries try to
show just 1 or 2 artists, and it makes more sense for people who don't know the work
that well. In China my work has not been shown so much there's a chance for people
to catch up with it a bit.
===============
Sandy Nairne
Essential Portraits – Preface for Julian Opie Catalogue 2008
What is the essence of a portrait? What is the absolute minimum by which a person
can be represented? What are the intrinsic elements that convey a person's
specialness? How can a mix of colours and line convey someone's character or
personality?
Julian Opie's portraits depict specific individuals, but simultaneously explore such
longstanding and intricate questions. They engage with a five hundred year-old
tradition - that of making two dimensional representations of people around us,
whether in genre scenes as part of everyday life, or whether specially arranged to 'sit'
or pose for a portrait. The questions span matters of recognition - is it this person? through to those of expression - what is this person feeling?
In daily life, we instantly recognise people that we already know, whether meeting
friends, family or colleagues, and this is equally true when observing public figures
transmitted through the media on TV, the web or in newspapers or magazines. But
after the first moment of recognition we naturally watch the person or search their
image to understand the occasion and the mood. In doing so we take in the very
finest gradations of facial expression, bodily shape, posture and shadow.
Perhaps even more closely than looking at a person, we survey and scan a portrait.
Portraits are there to be interrogated.
Through his art, Julian Opie has long been examining how we, as viewers, see things.
Even before his portraits, his sculptures and reliefs provided a way of depicting the
world in which he balanced the apparently more nuanced styles of western art with
graphic traditions of caricature and illustration (and even cartoon). His radical
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approach, which for a period involved offering his works to be ordered from a
catalogue, has caused him to perfect the translation of object and person to art: from
reality to artifice. Opie's are brilliantly constructed images, shaped and honed,
whether sketched in metal, or crafted through computer software.
Julian Opie's more recent work makes links with British and Dutch painted portraits
(from the 17th and 18th centuries) and Japanese prints (from the 18th and 19th).
These are periods of art and culture when presentation - both pose and poise - had a
special place. Whether from Europe or Japan there is something especially confident
in these figures, something in their stance, that is often intended to convey wealth or
intellectual substance. The source materials are generally public portraits for public
consumption, with symbols and allegorical references sometimes added to offer
additional references. But these costumes and poses are translated by Opie to
contemporary individuals or families, from public to private, from the formal to
informal, from the historic to the contemporary.
Once again the portrait is constructed in order to present an individual, but equally
to question the nature of portraiture itself.
------------------
7
Julian Opie
SIGNS, 2006
In 2000 I was commissioned to make a work for a Munich based insurance company.
I used a local company to produce two large glass wall panels back painted with
portraits of a male and a female employee of the firm. The glass panels mimicked the
corporate look of the offices. A number of wall mounted, glass paintings followed
but these three statues were the first freestanding works. The paint is sandwiched
between two sheets of glass, visible from both sides, creating a two dimensional
sculpture. The backgrounds are left as clear glass allowing the figure to float free
above the plinth.
Kiera has appeared in a number of projects. Originally she was the nanny of my
elder daughter and was later employed as a studio assistant. She is now an artist
working and exhibiting in London. She usually dresses in a grungy studenty way
but turned out to be a great model.
Bijou is a professional fashion model, the first that I ever used. She also appears in a
number of works in many different poses. This is the first frame from a film titled
"Bijou gets undressed."
Monique, an art collector and businesswoman living outside Zurich, commissioned
me to make portraits of her entire family in 1999. In 2003 she asked for another
portrait of herself and I used the occasion to undertake an entire project based on her
and her wardrobe. It became a kind of "mega portrait" looking at her from all angles
in many different media.
The sighting of these works in a niche in front of a grand corporate building attempts
to combine references to classical statuary and shop window display.
Having served as a design advisor during the building of The Baltic art museum in
Newcastle, I was asked to create a system of signs that would alert people to the
opening of the museum in 2001. Five versions of thirteen different animal signs were
proposed and museums around the U.K. were free to choose a group to be installed
outside their building. Three to thirteen animals can be installed together in any
configuration depending on the location and the viewing angles. The physical objects
and the colours are taken from actual road signs but the animals themselves are
traced from small wooden toys.
When driving on the motorway I am often admire the huge signs on poles that stand
beside the road in the countryside. Although they are there to give information they
seem to also act as giant paintings. For a 1996 commission for Volkswagen in
Wolfsburg I created a row of eight giant motorway signs along the canal opposite the
car factory. Each sign depicted an animal, a person, a building or a car. Official road
sign coding colours were used and the drawings mimicked the diagrammatic
depictions found on actual road signs but retained some elements of other sources.
The animals depicted on these signs are from the countryside, if perhaps an
imagined one. They have escaped into the city or are on their way back out, they
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seem to stay together for safety. The piece was originally conceived for a traffic
island where the multiple poles might remind one of trees. There were no available
traffic islands in Indianapolis so we settled on a busy street corner.
In 1996 I bought a set of toy animals in Vienna for my daughter whilst installing an
exhibition. The shop specialised in wooden toys made in the Black Forest region of
Southern Germany. Once home, some of the animals were removed to the studio,
scanned and redrawn. At first they were painted on the sides of wooden boxes that
could be moved around to create sculptural installations. When asked to make a
lakeside project for the opening of the Kusthause Bregenz in Austria, I used a local
wood company to create this life-sized, ( at least for some of the animals ) version.
The animals are solid wood like the originals, with a thin layer of paint, which
reveals the wood grain. With a few pieces of painted, shaped wood, children are able
to animate an area and enter into a different world. In a sense it doesn't matter too
much what the elements represent. I have shown these sculptures in many countries,
different arrangements tell different stories. In Bregenz the animals were arranged in
a loose line following the direction of the lakeshore. In New York they grazed
randomly beneath the trees. In Indianapolis they mount the ridge of a hill against the
sky.
Even when there is no actual movement, the eye can read movement into a series of
still drawings as it scans across them from left to right. This is how cartoon strips
often work. While working on an animated film of a figure walking I noticed that
placing the drawings in a row had this effect. For a large-scale commission in
Manchester, England, I broke three walking films down into single frames.
The resulting string of drawings animated the glass facade of a department store and
a number of interior walls. I went further for a poster campaign in the Tokyo subway
and had two or more figures walking in both directions in the same strip. The IMA's
glass facade is made up of four rows of forty-five vertical pains of glass, almost
acting as blank reels of cine film. It was a simple matter to place every other frame of
four walking films on every other window to create an image of movement and
because the facade is curved, of circulation.
I have used dancing as well but walking has proved the most useful and natural
human movement for me. A person walking is as likely as one standing still, in fact
when it is people we don't know, it is more likely. My experience of strangers is that
they are most often seen walking. By drawing a lot of walking people I have realized
how different and telling each persons gait is. I walk in an ape like fashion, arms
hanging forward. Some men and most women keep their backs straighter and their
arms sway behind them as well as in front. Men take varying but longer strides,
some people glide while others bounce or sway. I can keep detail to a minimum
while gaining a sense of character by drawing these particularities.
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I have used vinyl again on this project. Vinyl is poured plastic and therefore similar
to paint but instead of being brushed into shape it is cut from a roll by a computer
guided knife. It gives me a flat characterless surface that is quick to read and is
similar to the look of the computer drawings. I first noticed vinyl in America and it
has become the common look of public imagery and signage in most places that I go.
I like to use standard, predictable materials and then insert my own language and
thoughts.
Bruce is a professional dancer with the Ballet Rambert in London. His partner
commissioned me to draw his portrait and in the process I used him as a model for
this film. Suzanne is a fashion designer and writer but she also collects art. She was
buying one of my prints when my gallerist noticed her walk and suggested that I
might like to draw her. I have made five films of her walking so far. In both cases the
model was asked to walk on a walking machine in various outfits and at various
speeds.
The resulting video footage was downloaded onto the computer where the necessary
section can be edited and stored as single frames. At twenty-four frames per second a
double stride is described by around forty frames. Each frame is drawn over and
these drawings are laid on top of each other and "smoothed out". A friend then
animates the frames and after further smoothing to eradicate any jumps, the film is
translated into a format that can be played by the LED ( light emitting diode ) panels.
I link the first frame with the last creating a loop that allows the figure to walk
continuously, (easier said than done).
The figures are drawn in a diagrammatic fashion based on public signage systems.
They employ a minimum of detail omitting neck and feet, whilst retaining, through
stance, clothes and movement, particularities that reveal the identity and presence of
the model. One of the inspirations for these works was the small LED horse to be
found on taxi meters in Korea. These are simply animated to appear to gallop whilst
the meter is running. Such a small, pathetic animation seemed to have such drama
and I liked the way that motion became almost still. The first three resulting, double
sided, walking LED monoliths were placed on marble plinths in the lobby of a Tokyo
office building in 2002. The plinths emphasize the statues like quality of the figures.
During the process of making this exhibition some projects have had to be dropped
and new ones inserted. Making outdoor installations requires pragmatism and quick
changes. A plan to make some scrolling landscapes proved too complicated and I
started to look for another solution for the sight. Monument circle seems to be the
heart of town. The huge war memorial with its' many carved figures is flanked by
busy modern office buildings. It is a tourist attraction and is usually quite crowded.
People often gather outside office buildings, usually to smoke, so when I made a
mock up of my figures standing in front of the building they seemed to sit quite
naturally while also perhaps reflecting the figures on the monument. I have used a
common form of street signage to hold the images of the men who are drawn in a
sign like manner. Over the last few years I have built up an archive of images of
people. I picked only men to give the group an identity and perhaps a slightly
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intimidating air. Men tend to stand quite straight and evenly balanced, facing the
camera directly. The men are composed as if they were elements in a painting, using
colour, spacing and gesture.
When I received an e-mail from Bryan Adams I assumed it was a joke but when I
phoned the given number he picked up and said: " How great is the internet ? ". He
wanted a portrait of himself for the next album and we set a date for a photo-shoot.
He lives in West London in a large studio by the River. Bryan took a break from
practicing with his band and we retired to the large sky-lit kitchen, to work. I had
been drawing pictures of women in various poses and was keen to find an
equivalent way of drawing men. I asked Bryan to hold his guitar and he played some
riffs from the latest album but without plugging in the guitar. I photographed every
pose without knowing quite what I would do with them. I first used the images for a
series of paintings, which emitted sound.
Bryan agreed to swap the portrait for a short piece of music, which plays from
speakers attached to the rear of the canvas. I have considered men playing tennis or
basket ball, even fencing but somehow playing the guitar is the only male pose that
works. Recently I drew the poster for a music festival in Switzerland and used the
rock group Deep Purple. In this case the singer with his microphone also seemed to
work. Here in Indianapolis, Bryan Adams seemed to hit the right mood, jeans and a
t-shirt and a low-slung guitar. I have long tried to bring the paintings I have been
making off the wall and out into three dimensions. The glass statues and the LED
moving monoliths are other solutions, but I wanted to use the look of business signs.
Modern towns are full of these, often large and illuminated, objects but they are
somewhat invisible now. They have an equivalence to historical statuary, relating to
architecture and having a symbolic role.
In 2002 I took my wife and nine year old daughter on holiday to Bali. I had work to
do in Tokyo, so we stopped off there first. I bought an underwater camera in the
airport as I had a plan to draw my family swimming underwater. I had been invited
to make a museum installation in a long corridor of the national museum in Tokyo
and wanted to use the Bali holiday as a way of knitting together a series of images. I
was drawing portraits and a lot of landscapes at that time and was interested in
finding a way of showing them together. Inspired by Rosenquist's F1-11 painting, I
envisioned wallpapering images of faces from Bali interspersed with landscapes, sea
scapes and underwater scenes. I hoped the mood, colours and subject matter would
fall together and make sense of the diverse images. Once in Bali I asked the people
working in the hotel and those selling various services on the beach if I could take
their photo. I wandered around the local hills and villages looking at the landscapes
and photographed the monkeys at a local temple. I asked my wife and daughter to
swim past me as I sat on the bottom of the hotel pool taking photos. There was a
coral reef near the hotel and we took local wooden boats out there to snorkel. We
were surrounded by colourful fish and I photographed them too. Without flash the
images of the fast moving fish were not great and I later resorted to a London
aquarium to get better ones.
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To further knit the work together I recorded the sounds of the waves on the stone
beach, the musicians playing their wooden xylophones and the early morning bird
song. These sounds were played from concealed speakers along the corridor in the
Tokyo museum. The fish drawings surprised me. I would not have planned to draw
fish, it came up almost by accident but they proved to be very useful. They act as a
kind of automatic compositional tool. It takes a long time to place them correctly so
that they seem natural and make a dynamic picture but in theory they can be placed
anywhere on the canvas almost as if they were abstract marks. I have made some
works with fish only and others of fish in combination with swimming figures. The
bodies give the scene a focus and a reference to classical painting. The American
habit of joining buildings together with glass bridges gave me an opportunity to
further use this project. The bridge creates a screen across the road and the double
image of my wife swimming creates an animated connection between the two
buildings. In Tokyo I had used wallpaper which is a lovely surface but very difficult
to get just right. The fish and the figures are black and white so another option was
to simply use sticky backed plastic (vinyl). The stick-on quality emphasises the
possible movement of the elements.
I have always been drawn to statues. They are a subset of sculpture and play a
particular role. They are often placed on plinths, have a relationship to architecture
or are even part of a building. You find them in city squares depicting heroes or in
parks, gardens and palaces showing gods and goddesses in various poses. In a sense
they are stand-ins for people and as such are often used as memorials. Indianapolis is
a city of memorial statues and I wanted to connect to this but in a contemporary way.
I have placed Sara on a high brick plinth modelled after a garage forecourt sign seen
on the outskirts of town. Since I started showing art in the early 80's I have played
around with the relationship of something drawn and something sculpted. I often
draw on sculptures, or rather turn the material that I draw on ( the sheet of blank
paper ) into a sculpture of the same thing that I am drawing. Over the years I have
found that the relationship between the two can be loose. Watching children play I
see that a whole city or farm can be imagined using simple wooden blocks as long as
each block carries a simple sign for the thing that it is. This is the first time I have
made a four sided LED statue. Each side is a flat drawing and she is always seen
from the front. I hope that the eye and brain put the information together to make a
whole person.
The five buildings were drawn in London and New York but the window
configurations and building shapes are mixed and matched. The scale brings the
buildings above eye level and whilst keeping the sculpture as small as possible aims
to create the sense of being in a city. The question mark in the title undermines the
emphatic quality of the noun and the object. It also adds an element of anxiety.
"City?" was built by a commercial sign maker in London. The body of the work is
made of aluminium, which is electro-statically powder-coated white. The windows
are cut from sheets of black vinyl by a computer-guided knife. The unwanted vinyl is
"weeded" by hand and using water and soap each side of the building's windows are
floated on as a single sheet and manoeuvered into place.
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I first made sculptures of schematic office buildings drawn on boxes in 1996. They
were made of wood and were intended to be individual works although they were
often used in installations with other wooden sculptures of cars, trees and animals. A
similar out-door work, "My brother's office." was commissioned for the Dutch town
of Assen in 1997 but City? Is the largest and most complicated of the office buildings
series to date.
I have drawn a lot of portraits. The format has been passport style close-up. I wanted
the bare essence of a face, a presence. However I am always looking for ways to
expand on the logic of the works I have made in order to make new works. I take a
lot from looking at other peoples art, including, perhaps particularly, older art. In
fact I often want my works, in some ways, to look like older art. I wanted to try halflength portraits and multiple portraits as so often seen in museums. I think I have
managed the half-length portraits, mainly by getting the models to pose with
something, a staff or a book but the multiple portraits have been more difficult. The
eye can flick annoyingly back and forth between the different people and the
question of the relationship between the people seems to hang unanswered.
The only time I got it to work was when drawing monkeys; in fact a single monkey
did not work. I was not sure why but felt that maybe one reason was because the
relationship between them was obvious and they looked the same (to me). I very
much like the woodblock prints of Kitagawa Utamaro made in the late 18th Century.
He is most famous for his portraits of women or "beauties". You may have a mug or
calendar with one of them on it, I do. He manages to portray groups of women. At
first glance they seem to be the same woman repeated but they are not. The same is
true of a lot of early Renaissance paintings by artists such as Giotto. All the haloed
figures can seem to be the same person, often drawn from the same angle. This might
seem a limitation or lack of imagination or skill but it offers great possibilities in
terms of making a picture.
I set about trying to use this logic by asking a family that I have known for a long
time to pose together for me. I have seen the girls grow up and they seem very much
a unit. They don't all look the same but have a lot of shared characteristics and
colouring. It was awkward to do the group session in the middle of a family
weekend. There was much giggling but once I was safely behind the camera they
worked hard at it. They were joined by their mother for some shots. It's not just the
similarities of the four that bond the image but also the body language between
them. I have drawn other groupings of these four women but this format, which
echoes film posters and the wide screen, seemed to ask to be very big. Since the
painting is of a group it avoids the problematic question that arises when presenting
the single portraits out of context, which is; who on Earth is this person?
Armed with a solution I have made my first large outdoor portrait work. Being
outdoors it begs a form that fits into the urban surroundings. Usually I use a canvas
on stretcher (albeit computer cut plastic), which reminds you of a museum painting
and I show these in a museum-like context. For "Esther, Lottie, Hannah and Ginny." I
13
have used an aluminium light box. It is closer to the way in which advertisements
are presented. One could imagine an entire exhibition of paintings around a town
using the walls of the city as the equivalent of the walls of a gallery. It might be
easier to drive.
--------------------------
14
Julie Morere
"Impersonality and Emotion in Julian Opie’s /People/, /Portraits/ and
/Landscapes/", /Impersonality and Emotion in Twentieth-Century British Arts/,
J.M. Ganteau et C. Reynier (éd.), PULM, Montpellier III, coll. "Present Perfect 2"
(2006): 217-231.
Julian Opie's People and Portraits series ambivalently reconcile the impersonality of
the digital media with a strong sense of self, since Opie poses himself as thinker and
prolific creator, thus breaking the impersonality pact as he allows emotions to slip in.
On the other hand, the impersonality of his stylized drawings may disconcert the
viewer who finds no familiar bearings in the drawings which look like empty shells.
The artist recommends a highly disengaged attitude towards his works, but he also
knows that they cannot be taken in and understood if the personal emotions,
memories and ideas of the viewer do not come into play to fill in the blanks of the
narratives that are to be 'read' in his drawings.
Digital art seems to be the most impersonal and vacuous means that one can think of
to relate to the external world: Yves Michaud, in L'Art a l'etat gazeux: essai sur le
triomphe de l'esthetique, evokes the paradox found in the ethereal, vaporous quality
of postmodern works of art, 'des experiences esthetiques ou il ne reste plus qu'un
gaz, un ether, une buee artistique,' as opposed to those rare objects that used to be
hung in museums and that people contemplated religiously. On the contrary, digital
art is the result of a complexly coded combination of numbers and reasoned
formulas which seem to have no relevance to aesthetic emotion. In her article entitled
'Bodies and Digital Utopia,' Catherine Bernard evokes a 'dissociation from
experienced physical reality,' a 'dematerialization and slow disappearance of the
physical dimensions of our beings.' Such a statement seems to apply directly to
Opie's work at first, but as I discuss his exploration of the codes and conventions of
representation, I will show how in fact, he tries to combine the personal and the
impersonal in his people and portraits series.
Juggling with the economical aesthetics of computer creations that come to life
through various media such as vinyl, LED, enamel-on-glass sculptures, aluminium,
steel, plywood, stickers, screensavers, road signs, CD covers or billboards, Opie
departs from traditional visual arts as he sculpts, prints, or installs his works. Opie
emerged as an influential figure on the British art scene in the 1980s, and from the
start, he ambivalently combined individuality and impersonality in his
reinterpretation of a cultural past that he reclaimed or re-appropriated. His
accumulated objects and heaps of canvases or his plates of portraits made him a
direct inheritor of Pop Art aesthetics. He was also greatly influenced by minimalist
and conceptual artists, reflecting on the status of abstract art and its vision of the
world as surfaces and signs, as well as on the (lack of) correspondence between
signifier and signified. Opie achieves detachment in the same way as Pop artists did
15
through the sense of distance given by new techniques. While Andy Warhol used
serigraphy and Lichtenstein Ben Day Dots, Opie chose the digital image in his recent
works. This medium conveys an apparent lack of subjectivity and individuality
which seems to dissolve the self of the artist and place the work of art to the front of
the stage. The clean-edged lines of the drawings confer them an impersonality which
seems to imply that the artist does not engage his human personality or emotions in
the creative process.
However, Opie ambiguously poses himself as creator, and his work is very much
connected with real life persons or situations. He talks about his 'greed' to grasp and
draw anything available and explains how he came to realize that the realism of his
works was a key factor to artistic creation. By realism, he means something which
tallies with his experience of the world, something that is held as information in his
head and that he tries to remake into his own language. Ironically then, as he takes
photographs of people and draws from them, it is as if he took in fact four steps back
from reality: first he perceives/sees these people in a certain way, then he takes a
picture of them, thirdly, he executes his drawings, and lastly, he endlessly reprints
them or redraws them on various media for the exhibits. Another main dilemma is to
decide whether to add lots of details to be as realistic as possible or, on the contrary,
none at all, which is the solution he chooses with de-saturated images that could be
endlessly reproduced with slight variants.
As he strove to remain as detached as possible from his creations, Opie has
elaborated a very unique form of art, which is very recognizable and very personal,
nearly hyper-personal, or 'hyper-real' in Jean Baudrillard's terms. Opie reduces
bodies and faces to the most essential lines and colour planes, omitting idiosyncratic
details. As he seems to strive towards a universal mode of expression, a new form of
artistic language, in fact he achieves a balance between the generic (the impersonal)
and the specific (the personal or the individual), which first confronts the spectator
(or 'reader' in Opie's own terms) with an endless repetition of disconcerting lookalikes that hardly stir any emotion in the viewer. I will first discuss Opie's
ambiguously detached artistic treatment of people. Then, in spite of the fact that
some critics have interpreted Opie's work as alienating and representative of the
estrangement from our nature, caused by the advance of technologies and industrial
modernity, I will show how despite the seeming neutrality of the drawings, the
'reader' slowly feels a sense of exhilarating identity with the characters depicted, as
well as a sense of freedom about how to look and understand the pictures, reacting
personally to the works he sees.
The creative process
Opie soon departed from his Minimalist phase to represent real life landscapes,
animals and people, but the stripped down lines of his digital drawings retain some
abstract quality. Opie's glitzy and ungraspable surfaces are deprived of the torments
16
of the flesh, at the antipodes, if only to take one example, of neo-expressionist
paintings whose brushwork imprints the body on the canvas in a painful and
distorted manner, disfiguring, or de-personalizing it. Opie seems to eliminate the
tactile dimension as if all that went through it were an obstacle to an immediate inner
truth, in a world where sight is almighty. Opie's work seems to be an art connected
to thought only, a form of art that would be disembodied since the artist's own body
stands out of the creative process, refusing to participate in the physical exhaustion
of the creation, a clean art with no paint stain on one's cheeks or hands or clothes.
Although a lot of technical efforts are put into his works, Opie rarely participates in
their setting up and has people do it for him: '[it] allows me a position further back,
more like a puppeteer. […] Physically, my hands don't touch that material that
you are standing in front of […] but I have pored over it for many hours.
[…] poring over is for me the way in which I work' (Julian Opie, video).
As he started drawing modern buildings Opie took a further step in detachment.
Because most modern buildings were rectangular, just like a painting in a way, the
object on which he drew the building was itself rectangular. Just as for children toys,
Opie thought that if he drew the shape of a car, a tree or a human shape on one side,
it would become a car, a tree or a man or woman, and that he would only have to
increase the size of these drawings to make them on an adult scale. His objects are
all-surface and the emphasis on form and colours makes them easily and quickly
readable. Just as the pristine signs and logos that flood our visual field daily, the
drawings have no perspective but only a two-dimensional quality which helps the
artist to keep them at a distance. Besides, the formal properties of the drawings are as
important as the vocabulary they use to communicate meaning.
Opie started drawing people using the old Letraset tracing paper over photographs
but then he explains: 'I consciously looked around for a way in which I could draw
[people] and it started by buying the aluminium symbols for male and female toilets
and I looked at them and thought [that thus] I could combine as I often do the
impersonal with the personal' (Julian Opie, video), tracing sharp lines which remind
us of Michael Craig-Martin's schematic drawings. In the creative process, Opie
concentrates on limbs, faces and necks, fragmenting the bodies but also stylizing the
shapes and eliminating unnecessary parts: as a result, the bodies of his characters
seem maimed or dismembered. The characters' round heads are severed from the
torsos and they strangely look like the glory or aura that can be seen over the head of
an angel. The absence of neck, feet or hands gives an eerie feeling to the viewer, for
de-personalization at first seems to reach an unbearable extreme.
When Opie drops the photograph (with relief, he says), the work of art ceases to be a
multilayered copy of reality. According to Mary Horlock in her 2004 monograph,
Opie's style is a '"non" style,' for it tries to rationalise the human body, 'as if a special
computer programme could abstract and reduce reality to quintessentials and
fabricate them in multiple forms.' Moreover, Opie considers his portraits as objects: 'I
play with images and then I define them as objects, so the portraits exist [only as]
digital files and at that point I don't deem them to be art works yet' (Julian Opie,
video). Thus digital technologies are just a means in Opie's hands, a new tool or
17
media allowing him to create new pictures faster and more accurately, to play with
shapes and colours.
With smooth faces and all imperfections wiped out (no pimples and no wrinkles), the
portraits present two button eyes, two dots for the nose, the mouth a longer upper
line and a shorter lower one, the eyebrows two neat brushstrokes. However, Opie
retains one or two details-an exotic flower for Muliati in the eponymous portrait
Muliati, Shop Assistant (2002), a hair-band for Christine in Christine, Gallery
Director (back) (2000), or auburn textured hair for Jo in Jo, Architect (2001). Thus he
never completely erases the personalities of his models, no matter how schematized,
'and their particularities bec[o]me more prominent through the reduction of
everything else' (Horlock 81). Differentiations can also be noted in the titles (first
names, professions, actions, gestures, postures or specific item mentioned), thus
maintaining a sense of individuality within the multiplicity and giving a new
resonance to the drawing. The characters' serial forms prompt us to think about
society, how we relate to one another and resemble one another, and whether we are
all reducible to types.
Opie actually met the people he drew, and he liked the idea of their getting
'enmeshed in the process' (Julian Opie, video), but at the same time, he radically says:
'I want it to be as if each person I draw were a multinational company with a logo.' In
the end, he seems to have achieved a sort of balance between the personality of his
'real' models and the impersonality of a generic form. Such an impersonal attitude on
the side of the artist enjoins the viewer to do so as well. But as the viewer tries to
tame his fear of an appalling void (the void in the pictures as well as the vapidity
that our world resounds with despite its being saturated with signs and meaning), he
inevitably loses some of his neutrality, as he becomes a sort of co-creator who fills in
the blanks of the drawings' minimal narratives. Through the simplicity of repeated
gestures in the LED installations or computer animations, and plain faces in the
portraits, the 'reader' is inevitably captured in a sort of story that he himself creates,
reacting emotionally to the works of art presented. How does Opie's 'fiction' affect
the viewer? How do Opie's disengaged drawings invite but also thwart
representational and emotional identification?
By thoroughly studying the history of human responses to images, in his book
entitled The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response,
Freedberg detected many factors that question a tidy separation of intellect and
emotion and highlight the need 'to acknowledge the role of sensation in knowledge.'
Besides, the word 'aesthetics' derives from the Greek word aisthanestai ('to feel') and
then acquired a larger meaning related to the notion of taste. In Kantian terms, the
judgement of taste is subjective, disinterested and free, a triad which seems to
correspond to the attitude that Opie's viewer should adopt: 'Opie often argues that a
sense of detachment is necessary, that we must distance ourselves from reality in
order to see it clearly' (Horlock 43). As aesthetics explores the compromises and
pitfalls of representation, one may wonder what drives an artist to create. Is it the
emotion stirred in him by a face? Is it the colour of a person's eyes or hair? This
emotional absence stimulates the imagination of the reader who willingly
reconstructs emotions, and thus always faces the threat of abandoning his
18
disinterested standpoint and slipping down the emotional slope. Why is the 'reader'
so eager to rush in to fill the emotional gap, ascribing melancholy, arrogance or
surprise to the characters depicted by Opie?
'Reading' Opie's pictures
Computers interconnect the image and the viewer to merge representation and
reality in a new dual way. It seems that 'digital representations not only possess a
power to move us borrowed from their analogue predecessors: they also contain a
vitality which enables them to engage us in unique and personal interactive
experiences. If images make their subjects present to us, digital representations make
us present to them.' In fact, Opie's characters all seem to be prisoners of the frame in
which they are drawn, as well as prisoners of our gaze.
In This is Kiera walking, the female protagonist walks aimlessly. The rhythm, tempo,
and flowing movements of the kinetoscopic mural installed in Braga, Portugal, at the
Mario Sequeira Gallery in 2002, call to mind the aesthetics usually found on
catwalks. The computer-generated animation of This is Kiera walking could be
interpreted in two different ways, first as an alienated walker, with a sense of
indirection: she is walking in a non-space, going nowhere. Nevertheless, one could
say that she walks freely, sensually and harmoniously: we could watch her endlessly
and let our dreamy or mesmerized minds wander, wondering where she might be
going. But Kiera remains an ethereal character. Her body is weightless, fleshless, and
inconsistent. She leaves no traces where she walks, and has no physical presence
such as in the work by Richard Long for example: A Line Made by Walking (1967)
shows a trampled line of grass which raises complex ontological questions that may
allow us to throw a new light on Opie's work. Are we all possible objects or subjects
of a work of art? Is it art to draw a line just by walking? This photo is im-personal, in
the sense that the person who created the line is only present through absence. Yet
the photo appeals to our emotions as viewers and stimulates our artistic perception.
The individual act of walking relates us to the world and impersonality abandons the
picture since we imagine ourselves doing this, as if walking on this lawn allowed us
to escape alienation and to exist as individuals performing a singular action.
Kiera, Christine and Julian were used for a project for the Selfridges Manchester store
(2003). Ironically, Opie is not so detached since he is Julian and he gets involved in
his own process of creation, in a mirror game that punctually undermines his
impersonal treatment of the world. All three people are depicted walking around the
building. The image is fixed but the sense of movement very powerful. Sometimes
the three protagonists meet, walk together, and then head off in different directions,
just as we do in the real world where we are perpetually moving, meeting and
leaving other people. As the viewer identifies with Kiera, Christine or Julian, he
becomes the alienated object of the work of art, but also the free-thinking subject that
can 'read' the work of art in his own terms.
19
Opie's art seems to subvert and reverse any conventional perception of reality, as if
we lived 'inside an enormous novel' in which the external world would be complete
fiction and the only reality left would be inside our own heads. This idea is the basis
of 'Two minutes out of Time' (2000) or 'Anywhere out of the World' (2000), two
movies by Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno in which the protagonist Ann Lee
questions the conditions required for a story to emerge. Ann Lee lives in our
imagination, and through the look (or non-look) that she sets on the spectator with
her empty eyes, she opens the doors of the world of fiction. Just like Opie's
characters, Ann Lee has few facial attributes, but unlike them, she has no history and
no life, whilst Opie's characters have at least an inchoate professional life behind
which they disappear in the portraits series. Ann Lee 'is a fictional shell with a
copyright, waiting to be filled with a story.' She questions the status of reality as she
addresses the spectator to ask him or her who is real, giving the viewer an existence,
acknowledging his presence, however artificial this acknowledgement may be.
In the same vein, Opie's recent works are reactive. The people in the frozen portraits
look at us, blankly at first, through two deadpan dots representing the eyes. On
closer look, in some portraits, the blackness of the eyes is speckled with small white
circles as in Fiona, Artist (2001), or the iris is coloured as in Madeline, Schoolgirl
(2002), and these details make the characters look a little sad or melancholy. In the
animated drawings, at first glance, the portraits appear to be static, lifeless images as
in Christine (blinking) (1999), but as you keep looking at them, the figures in the
portraits may suddenly shake their head, smile or raise their eyebrows, engulfing the
spectator's gaze: '[t]he incongruity of something so fugitive, fragile and human vies
with the production of these works, which is stylised, mechanical and impersonal.
Moreover, the actual experience of watching such simple gestures in perpetuity is
unexpectedly captivating' (Horlock 85).
As Kathy Cleland puts it in her article 'Talk to Me: Getting Personal with Interactive
Art,' just because 'a few moving pixels simulate behaviour we associate with life[,]
[w]e are also caught up in the interactive moment, as the portrait we are looking at
suddenly looks back and subject object viewing relations are reversed, we become
the object, subject to the gaze of the portrait,' challenging the traditional relationship
between the active viewer as subject and the art work as passive object to be gazed at
and interrogated. We are used to seeing static human portraits in galleries and our
imaginations speculate on the personality behind the image but our interaction with
them is essentially one-sided. On the contrary, Opie's installations have created new
interactive experiences for audiences, challenging the ontological status of the art
object. We may wonder how life-like a simulated human persona needs to be for the
audience to treat it and respond to it in the same way they would to a real human.
Can these responses be generated by digitally created human personae? 'In a gallery
context […] it is obvious that we are dealing with a virtual, rather than a "real"
human. In this situation, there is either a willing suspension of disbelief as the
audience member "plays the game," treating the human entity as a person or,
alternatively, the audience member might try to catch out and wilfully break the
illusion' (Cleland 15).
20
When the viewer faces Opie's nudes, the illusion is hard to break, for Opie's
drawings are disturbingly sensuous and reminiscent of strip-shows. Kiera or Sara in
Sara gets undressed. 3 or Sara dancing (2004), once captured in rigid paintings, are
brought to life by computer generation, and the elegance of their movements or
motion provokes a discreet erotic emotion in the viewer: 'Pop and realism, eroticism
and lack of passion, theatricality and intimacy - all these engage with each other, just
like aesthetic seeing and voyeuristic visual pleasure.' Some critics argue that
representations of sex in art nowadays have ceased to stir any emotions or desire in
the viewer because sex is flaunted at the face of the viewer, bridling his imagination.
Even though Opie unequivocally shows women undressing in languorous postures,
his nudes remain subtly erotic. And here lies the paradox that is at the core of his
works: they are suggestively erotic and provoke a certain emotion in the viewer
because of the very impersonality of the drawings and the distance that both the
artist and the viewer can take thanks to the intriguingly disengaged stylized graphic
language. Similarly, Opie's erotic Graves and the Remember Them series (2000 and
2001) may shock the viewer but also touch him. Opie pictures the world of the dead
as a mirror-image of the world of the living, and his treatment of death, a highly
emotional subject matter, may seem utterly impersonal, reminding us of how Pop
artists used low subject matter with no apparent critical treatment of it. But Opie's
graves are not all just any graves and the personal dimension in the title My
Grandfather's Grave (1997) cannot be denied.
When they are not recumbent statues, the characters that lie down in Opie's
drawings seem to be asleep. Do they dream at all? Do they reflect on the beauty of
their creator's works of art? Could they be mirror images of the state the viewer is in
when he looks at an artistic creation, half-dreaming and half-awake, a sort of
somnambulist sleep-walking out of his own self as he takes in the work of art (just as
when one reads a book and is carried on the wings of fiction), a viewer that would
reach the confines of impersonality, a disembodied self surrendering to the evocative
power of Opie's work, and reaching a sort of non-world in which the emotions that
overwhelm him when he starts understanding the work balance the impersonality
seen and felt at first?
Opie undresses the world in the same way as he undresses his standing figures. He
nearly asks the viewer to do the same and to look at his works with new eyes after a
sort of tabula rasa that would clear out the myriad of gaudy images, proliferating
signs, and over-brimming information taken in by the eye in the modern world.
Opie's seemingly empty characters are not the symbols of a humanity that is
spiritually bereft, although they may seem devoid of life at first. Through colours
and movement, Opie's crowds are not anonymous and not without a touch of
nostalgia, surfacing for instance in Maho's melancholy look in Maho, Gallery
Director. 2.
Opie recurrently states his 'desire to plunge into what seems to be real, realistic'
(Julian Opie, video). Ironically, in 'theEYE' video we can see his installations on
gallery walls reflecting his other works, in a sort of mise en abyme, as if his work was
physically a huge mirror with endless prismatic reflections in it. On the glossy
surfaces of the installations, we can also see the reflections of the silhouettes of 'real'
21
people (viewers) passing by, as if they were suddenly engulfed in this world of
fiction. Here one may think of Jeanette Winterson's transpersonality evoked by C.
Reynier during the second 'Impersonality and Emotion' Conference (2004). Opie's
drawings are not only im-personal, but trans-personal, crossing over or transgressing
the boundaries of the self to the other, thus destroying all categories (self/other,
subject/object, narrator/reader, writer/reader, artist/viewer).
When people look at art, Opie feels that they have a slight desire for 'if not answers,
at least a position' which he says he does not have clearly. 'These things are really
about looking at things and not about […] translating them into something else'
he says (Julian Opie, video). Nevertheless, they do appeal to the viewer's
imagination, opening it up, and the aim of this paper is not to try to enclose Opie's
work in the impersonality of a polished critical assessment, but rather an attempt to
apprehend the unity of his work combining the impersonality and emotions of a
thinker whose creations cannot exist without the viewer's gaze.
22
Excerpts from Julian Opie (J.O.)
Tate Gallery publication, 2004
Text by Mary Horlock,
Available Tate Publishing
www.tate.org.uk/publishing
ISBN 1-85437-470-2
Introduction
During one of the interviews around which this book is structured Julian Opie
described to me the first film that he made. It was a short piece of animation dating
from his second year at Goldsmiths College, and arose from his interest in life
drawing:
Whilst drawing, I saw how each image went through a series of transformations. So I
worked up a sequence of simple line portraits and I layered the drawings to animate
the image, pushing it through various changes. It was just a portrait of someone's
head but I turned it into an inventory of styles; so it would first be sharp-edged and
spiky, like a Futurist portrait, and then it went soft and classical, and then it would
become broken up and Cubist. It was as if a series of lenses had been put over
someone's face and these lenses were art-historical styles.1
This film and Opie's description of it provide insight into his project. From the outset
he has experimented with codes and conventions of representation, exploring the
power of images and their relationship to perception and recognition. Opie has
constructed his own language to reveal the ways in which we 'read' the world. The
subject of this first animation - picturing the human form through the canonical
styles of art history - shows how Opie's interest lies not in 'reality' but in how reality
is represented to us, an idea that recurs time and again. In a sense, Opie has always
been making representations of representations: paintings of paintings, models of
models, signs of signs. His art reflects the artifice that frames contemporary
experience.
This film also demonstrates the consistency of Opie's methodological approach. As
an animation, it came out of drawing, which has always been his focus. Line drawing
manifests a particular rigour and economy; it emphasises the essentials and this has
consistently distinguished Opie's work and given it immediacy. What we see in this
film is line drawing transformed into something else, into animation. Moving from
drawing into different media and developing (often simultaneously) many different
bodies of work, Opie is constantly on the move. Working in series, he has made his
drawings into films, sculptures in steel, wood or concrete, paintings, billboards, CD
covers, road signs and screensavers, discovering and defining multiple forms for a
single image or idea.
23
This early film, then, hints at what is to come in Opie's oeuvre: the mixing and remixing of high art, the juggling with strategies of representation, the working in
series and experimenting with new media, and all of this filtered through the
commonplace scenarios of everyday reality. It is through such means that Opie
makes us aware of the complex relationship between what we see and what we
know. This book traces the development and diversification of his artwork from the
early 1980s through to the present, and provides an opportunity for Opie to
comment on his work. He is extremely articulate about his projects and his way of
speaking is direct and matter-of-fact, qualities that are quite in keeping with his art.
A Pile of Old Masters 1983
MARY HORLOCK During the early 1980s you were making art about art. Why
choose to create new versions of Old Masters?
JULIAN OPIE Well, some years before this I was drawing canvases - stretched
canvases - so in a certain sense what attracted me was the object itself: the
rectangular shape with nails down the sides. Everyone can recognise it: it's an object
of shared language and it's a simple and funny thing. At art school I'd started
making copies of famous artworks - a series called 'Eat Dirt Art History' - where I'd
draw, say, an El Greco very loosely in pen and ink and write under-neath it 'Eat Dirt
El Greco'. I pinned these drawings around the school. It was an acknowledgement of
the hopeless position of the art student in light of art history, but also a rally call not
to feel overwhelmed by it.
MH It is quite irreverent. Were you trying to say that you could 'do' a Picasso or a
Mondrian?
JO It was a self-conscious time, and I was making self-conscious art objects. I
assumed that anyone looking at them would be mistrustful, and I wanted to address
this and defuse it. What A Pile of Old Masters was proposing was kind of
preposterous - that I could outdo art history. But I wasn't really challenging El Greco.
And I was also using this shared language of reference to give the work a legible
narrative.
MH And how did you select these particular images?
JO They're probably the artists and the paintings in the book I had closest to hand. It
was necessary that they were recognisable, and easy to copy.
24
MH Roy Lichtenstein painted his own versions of famous paintings. Did you see
any connection with Pop art?
JO Well, I would have been aware of Pop art. It was art, but it was outside academia.
It didn't feel like history. It felt modern and that was attractive. Generally art about
art was unpopular at that time, and those works you're talking about are not my
favourite Lichtensteins.
MH But you could say that Lichtenstein had a similarly irreverent attitude to art
history.
JO Yes, but Lichtenstein is much more serious-minded than you'd think. He used
humour like other people use colour. He saw that it was no longer possible to
consider certain images without irreverence. When you think how most people know
the famous works of art history through postcards, that's irreverent by its nature. I
could have drawn an apple and a pear, but drawing a Cézanne felt more honest:
what I really wanted to do was draw a Cézanne, or a Lichtenstein for that matter.
One of the possible thoughts when viewing this work is 'This is irreverent', but it's
also deeply reverent. I knew the first thing that people would think was 'Here's this
young artist who's just come in and thrown art history on the floor.' People knew I
was young, and I played along with that. The point is, I had a lot of fun drawing the
things that were supposed to be great - things that had become 'locked', unusable
because they were so admired. I wanted to reach into this, try it out. But these
paintings were things I admired very much.
MH In the centre of A Pile of Old Masters lies an overturned canvas with your
signature on it, so you're staking your claim.
JO The flourished signature is part of the whole self-consciousness - I was pleased
with myself, that I could do those things, but at the same time there's a double and
triple meaning. I was told I had to sign my works and I didn't feel at all comfortable
about it. So I found a way of working the signature into it.
MH The pieces aren't connected and so can be set up in different ways. Didn't you
want to dictate how it's installed?
JO It's a sculpture that relates to the space it's in. I have drawn up guidelines but
you cannot say definitively what will work where. At the Lisson, this was the only
work that had a relationship with the space. You approached it by going down a
small flight of stairs and saw it from a distance. I placed some of the paintings on the
floor and leaned some against the wall. At the Hayward Gallery [at Opie's solo show
in 1994] it was in the middle of a large, open space and I set it up differently: it was
more dispersed and flat.
25
MH When I think of painted steel sculpture, I think of Caro and the 'New
Generation' sculptors. Did you deliberately set yourself up against all that?
JO Yes. It was 'right' to use sheet steel, but 'wrong' that it was figurative. By this
time, Sir Anthony Caro and his 'school' were perceived as the establishment. I
admire the work but as a student it's useful to have something to rant against, and
this was an obvious target. Primarily I needed a material to translate the way that I
drew: welding could be almost as fast as drawing a line on a piece of paper, and it
enabled me to assemble things at a speed where I could think with the material. It
was also about the strength of steel. And it could defy gravity, so things were no
longer grounded.
MH A lot of the works are about movement. Even in A Pile of Old Masters there's a
sense that the canvases have been impulsively flung down.
JO There's a drawing by Hergé in the Tintin story The Seven Crystal Balls from
the 1960s, where a fireball comes down the chimney and all the books are pulled off
the bookshelves and spin around the library. I did copy that drawing of books flying,
and I think this work has an element of that. I used to draw in notebooks constantly,
refining ideas, and then make a lot of sculptures, some of which survived. I made
maybe fifteen sculptures involving canvases, some with brushes, some in a circle,
some tumbling out of a suitcase. This work, which had all the canvases on the floor,
needed to have actual paintings on them, whereas the ones that were spinning
around worked better if they were kept blank - an image would slow them down,
and if they were spinning you'd only see a blur. Making actual pictures here has a
function: it anchors them. It also makes some kind of sense - these famous paintings
have been thrown away. It leaves no questions unanswered. Blank canvases on the
floor would have been too ambiguous.
MH Staying with this idea of speed, did you paint quickly as well?
JO Yes, I was copying artists like Hals and Manet, who used a 'wet-on-wet' style.
This style of painting is about performance and energy. The look had to be slick. If
the painting didn't work out you had to wash it off and start all over again. I'd paint
the surface a background colour, then draw on top of that with highlights or
shadows with a very loose arm movement, cleaning the brush after every stroke.
Some of the paintings are better than others. The ones that were originally painted in
a similar 'wet' fashion worked best - the others I tend to bury under the pile.
People
The computer began to assume a central role in Opie's practice: it allowed him to
develop his systems in abstract space before realising them in actuality. His key
26
concepts were unchanged: the balancing of the generic and the specific, pitting
realism against representation, and the working through of serial forms. Computer
technology enabled Opie to develop new subjects whilst simultaneously expanding
and refining his symbolic vocabulary to a degree of perfection. Concordantly, his
installations became more multifarious in nature, translating his experience of
people, cities and landscapes into a universal language of signs, brightly coloured
and immaculately presented. Opie would select from and combine different bodies
of work. Opie sought a way of bringing people into his existing inventory of signs,
and this activity soon developed a momentum of its own. He approached the human
form by first selecting the most standardised representations he could find - looking
at signs and symbols in the real world, such as those used to indicate male and
female lavatories. He then combined this with a digital photograph of a real person.
He merged the two using a computer-drawing programme. 'I input the photograph
on the computer and drew over it with the sign, bending the lines enough so it was
still a sign, but also relating to the individual, combining the impersonal and the
personal.' Opie would refine the image by eye: getting back to a basic form but
keeping particularities that might reveal something about his model.
The first figures were elegant and laconic: little more than a blank circle floating
above a body that was essentially defined by an outline of clothes. Initially Opie's
motive had been to make anonymous 'passers-by' with which to populate his world a woman with a handbag over one shoulder, a man with his hands behind his back.
They looked like signs but were subtly enhanced, more suggestive, and fitted
seamlessly into his invented world. With each figure certain features - the choice of
clothes or the posture: a hand resting on a tilted hip, head up and arms crossed were consciously used to enrich the depictions. Thus, he never completely erased the
personalities of his models, and their particularities became more prominent through
the reduction of everything else. We expect a fundamental utilitarian correctness
from signs, but details like this are undermining. The figures are more ambiguous
and more alluring as a result. Characteristically, Opie tested out every option:
different models in different poses; different models in different poses and different
clothes (People 1997); the same model in different poses (7 positions 2000); the same
model in different clothes. He then denoted the differentiations through the titles and
would frequently refer to his subject by name (Gary t-shirt jeans 2000, Brigid trousers
top hands on hips 2000), thus maintaining a sense of individuality within the
multiplicity. But it is hard to know how to read these figures when viewed either
collectively or individually. Their serial forms prompt us to think about society and
how we relate to one another and resemble one another, and inevitably we have to
ask whether we are all reducible to predefined 'types'.
The desire to rationalise the human form has preoccupied artists for generations, but
Opie gave this a new twist with the stylised symmetry of his figures. It is the
incongruity between the soft and human, and the hard and artificial, that makes
them so troubling. This was most acute with the nudes. Echoing imagery that derives
from advertising brands or logos, Opie's nudes were drastically reduced: a simple
outline of torso and limbs, a circle for the head, two curved lines for breasts. Whereas
before, the clothes acted as a defining feature for each model, now there are simply
suggestive contours. The position that each figure assumes becomes focal: poses that
are familiar and recognisable, to which we can relate from our own experience (such
27
as Lying on back on elbows, knees up 2000 or Sitting hands around knees 2000). It is
intriguing to see something so particular and human captured in such a structured,
graphic language.
Portraits
After studying the figure in full length, Opie came to focus in on the heads of his
models, testing out the same technique: drawing over individual photographs on the
computer, reducing and abstract-ing the image:
The first drawings were very simple, but that gave me a language on which to build.
They started as black and white, with very pared-down parameters - the mouth was
just a straight line and so on - and bit by bit I adjusted it until it seemed like the right
balance between someone real and this generic form.
The portraits are graphic outlines: buttons as eyes, two dots for nostrils, a mouth
suggested by a long, upper line and a short, lower line, and eyebrows that are two
clean 'brushstrokes' leading away from the middle of the forehead. There is an
identifiable schema, and these features become part of a series of identikit variations,
returning to the concept of modularisation. Like the full-length figures, they are a
sign language. As the critic Tom Lubbock wrote:
They're portraits in the style of road signs, as if people who devised hair-pin bend
warnings had been asked to turn their language of fat, black lines to the fine
particularities of individual likeness - and had succeeded beautifully.17
The lack of particularity reinforces the idea of 'types'. This intrigued Opie:
I think the whole notion we carry of people as examples of types is very interesting . .
. There are some key famous people who become these types and I want to extend
that really so that everybody is a type if you draw them in the way that I do.18
He later added, 'I want it to be as if each person I draw were a multinational
company with a logo.'19 Each portrait carries the name and profession of the model
(Gary, popstar 1999; Max, businessman 2000). Possibly as a result, their features take
on a new resonance.
I liked adding their job titles. Sometimes it seemed to fit and sometimes it didn't; I
saw it as another way of classifying and identifying people. I also think it avoids the
feeling that I know them but you don't.
28
But despite the graphic reduction, individual likenesses are never lost, and Gary,
popstar is a good example. Opie drew him a number of times, with hair short or
long, with or without sunglasses and beads, but each time we know him instantly.
What becomes apparent is that each person, no matter how schematised, is still
distinct: the tilt of their head, the fall of their hair or the arch of their eyebrows
defines them; and their clothing and accessories are all treated individually. The
differences between each person appear much more pronounced when we see a
number together, and (as with the full-length figures) Opie has usually shown them
in groups.
Like his figures, Opie's portraits are executed in different sizes and formats. He
would always photograph and draw his models in various positions, and out of
these serial drawings he has also developed simple animations, using movements
such as nodding (Daniel Yes 1999) or shaking the head (Christine No 1999), blinking
or, later, walking. The incongruity of something so fugitive, fragile and human vies
with the production of these works, which is stylised, mechanical and impersonal.
Moreover, the actual experience of watching such simple gestures in perpetuity is
unexpectedly captivating.
Opie's people and portraits are all processed through objective observation and
technology, and then perfected by the artist's own hand and eye. But Opie's style is a
'non' style, as if a special computer programme could abstract and reduce reality to
quintessentials and fabricate them in multiple forms. This is part of the effect. The
reality is that Opie's labours are disguised in much the same way as his models are:
subjectivity contained within an impersonal, hard-edged syntax. This ambiguity is
very effective. When we look at representations of the human form we think of
ourselves, but Opie's people are blank reflections: the eyes in his portraits are empty
pools; the standing figures are faceless.
Landscape
Opie's general landscape views were scene-setters in the earlier installations, the
backdrop against which the narrative unfolded. Now made in varying sizes, they can
still offer a context for his standing figures. The computer has enabled Opie to distil
imagery from an ongoing archive of his own photographs along with other sources
as diverse as video games, illustrations on milk cartons, and paintings by John
Constable. Opie strips everything back to basic form, giving primacy to the generic.
The picture-book graphics and primary colours trigger different responses that vary
with the scale - whether the work is realised as a grand modern master or made into
a small souvenir.
More recently the slick, impersonal style of the computer-generated image has
become the foil for more personal subjects. Some views are accompanied by a written
list of sounds, and the results are evocative: 'crickets, voices, music' accompanies a
stylised nocturne of distant urban lights and a near full moon; 'waves, seagulls,
voices' frames a view of water dappled with sunlight. It is hard not to imagine
29
listening, conjuring the sounds we know intuitively from memory. Opie has also
used scrolling LED to relay a text and has employed actual sound. For example,
Waves, seagulls, voices exists as a painting or wallpaper with accompanying beach
noises. In each of these works, nature is framed by artifice; the two overlap and we
treat the artificial as if it were real.
The artist always manages to conjure a mood of reverie that softens the experience.
Opie might be suggesting that although everything can be reduced to a graphic
outline or a generic view, experience is always personal and specific. Looking is an
activity that involves the mental processing of pre-conceptions, associations and
ideas, and this is highly subjective. It is also dependent on memory, and what we
recollect is rarely accurate, rarely precise, yet from it we still create meaning. Opie
offers an incomplete narrative in each of his landscape views - and we are invited to
complete it.
Ongoing Multiple Possibilities
All of this work is now developed on computer before being defined in actuality. It is
only at the final stage of production that a drawing becomes a work, executed as
paintings in multifarious sizes, sculptures on metal, wood, or as concrete casts, as
wallpaper, animation, signs or billboards. Opie's work is a series of 'options' stored
on computer files that can be called up if and when required, and tailored to relate to
any space. The computer allows him to explore all the possibilities that each image
holds. A portrait head could be realised as a giant black and white wallpaper motif,
or as a colour portrait in four sizes, or even an animation, and a nude might work in
three sizes as a painting and in vinyl on wooden blocks or as vinyl applied directly to
the wall or glass.
The computer occupies a useful place that did not exist before, somewhere between a
final work and a thought. Before, I used to think, draw, and then make something.
But now I can think and draw on computer, continue to work it through, and I can
leave it there - it's not like a thought that dissipates - it can just stay in the computer
and be outputted when I've decided what to do with it. A drawing is inflexible by
comparison; you can't change its scale or its colour without destroying what you've
already done. When he fixes on an idea, Opie will work through all its possible
permutations. The computer has greatly enhanced this activity, but inevitably it has
become more difficult to visualise the full range of options available. Indeed, by 2001
Opie knew his repertoire had expanded beyond what any single exhibition could
present. When he was preparing for his solo show at the Lisson Gallery that year, he
realised that the only way to make a comprehensive presentation of his work was
through a publication. He took the bold step of adopting the style of a flimsy mailorder catalogue, offering a consumer's guide to his work with every genre and type
laid out and listed in a colourful assortment of typefaces typical of such brochures.
The actual exhibition offered 'samples' from this on-going production - nudes,
portraits and landscapes - with the catalogues stacked up in piles by the reception
desk, free for everyone to take.
30
KIERA WALKING 2002
It started as a project for a Jean Nouvel building in Tokyo, which was being built for
a big Japanese advertising company. I knew it would be a very busy place, with
people arriving from the underground, walking into the building, through the lobby,
and waiting for a short while before getting the lift up to their offices. There's a wall
of glass lifts that go up at high speed, looking out over Tokyo. It's very high tech and
I saw a lot of movement going on in there. I thought I could use this as a camouflage
for my work. What I wanted was to infiltrate the scene.
I was also really interested in LED screens, which they use a lot in Japan. I saw these
illuminated signs everywhere in Tokyo and Seoul - and the fact that I can't read them
makes them much more appealing; the movement and colour is all you see. It's
incredibly beautiful, like something in nature, like light on water. The city loses its
solidity and becomes a fluid thing, especially at night.
I'd been making drawings of people's faces, and creating various simple movements
by layering the drawings, making them blink and nod their heads. I'd also been
drawing people in full length, in different positions. Looking at many drawings
together, there was movement: flicking across them you get this simple animation.
After I'd seen the space, I knew I was going to make statues of people, and I tried to
think of a movement that would feel natural there and was simple enough to be
looped. Walking fitted the bill: it was simple and familiar. I decided to make three
people - three's a good number, the minimum number for a crowd - and I looked for
different types in order to create contrast between each.
I tried to use the language of the building; the floor was made of marble so I used
marble for the plinths. There are in fact little scrolling LEDs on the lifts. The choice of
technology tied my work to the surroundings. And other things happened. What
was interesting and unexpected here was how the glass and stainless steel created all
these multiple reflections. Every window shows reflections of the moving, lit figures;
they stand out from everything else. It animates the whole space in a way that I
hadn't really expected. That's the good thing about commissions: you're dealing with
new environments and unexpected things happen.
31
Kiera is a young artist. She's one of the people I call on to draw from time to time. It
turns out she has very long legs; I tried her in different outfits, and when she was
wearing a miniskirt and high heels her walk became much more particular. I
suppose she walked a bit like a catwalk model, but it was only after I'd filmed other
people that I noticed these nuances.
I made about thirty drawings for each person. I needed a man so I drew myself, and
then I thought I should use another woman, since it's easier for women to look
different from each other. The other woman, my wife, is wearing boots and walks in
a different way. So there were three very different-looking people, all striding
purposefully at different rates, and yet staying in the same place.
The actual movement turned out to be much more realistic than I expected. There's
nothing realistic about the image, but that doesn't matter, and, if anything, it
heightens the sense that the movement is realistic. The three people are not really to
be looked at but more looked through, or around; they're there to animate the
situation. When you do look at them you start to notice the lights, and how they
work, a bit like when you look at a stone sculpture and you notice the sparkle in the
stone, the grain of the marble. This is another level of looking, which is fine and
should work, but for me it's not the main thing. The main thing is the movement.
After I'd animated the drawings, I found I could use other technologies, and so I
used Kiera Walking on plasma screens. Plasma screens are quite common now;
they're used a lot for public information displays. But I like them because they're flat
and can be hung on the wall like a painting.
To see an animated image on something so high tech seems completely right;
because the image is quite like a sign, this suits one set of expectations, but then the
glass screen and rectangular shape fits the idea of a classical painting. Kiera Walking
also became a wall work: I had these drawings of Kiera, and if you flick between
them and look across them then you read the movement. I had an exhibition in a
gallery in Portugal where they had a long hallway. You could see all the way down
the length of it, but couldn't get any distance from it. I wallpapered every other
frame from the film along this wall, so she mimicked your movement down the hall.
And I'm now using Kiera and the other people for a project for the new Selfridges
store in Manchester, where they wanted a project to animate the whole building.
Using vinyl pictures on glass, all three people are depicted walking around the
building. The spaces are complicated, and at times the people meet, walk together,
and then head off in different directions.
32
It's a positive thing to see how these images could function in different ways, and I
do that with everything. I'm always juggling, turning one thing into another thing,
but keeping some elements constant. It would feel fraudulent to come up with
another image simply in order to avoid upsetting those people who want something
that's specifically for them, like a logo or a brand. For me, the project, the gallery
show, the commission, they're all opportunities to work and play out the ideas in
which I'm engaged and interested.
Zone of Transit: Considering a context for Opie's Work
Sometimes he wonders what zone of transit he himself was entering, sure that his
own withdrawal was symptomatic not of a dormant schizophrenia, but of a careful
preparation for a radically new environment, with its own internal landscape and
logic, where old categories of thought would be merely an encumbrance.27
Many critics perceive Opie's art as symptomatic of a state of alienation, highlighting
how in this world of advanced technologies we have grown estranged and distanced
from our own natures. Opie expresses frustration at this reading, not least because it
frequently falls foul of a kind of historical amnesia, ignoring the way in which artists
and writers from the seventeenth century onwards have used detachment as a tool to
explore how we relate to the world. Opie also questions why this state of
estrangement is generally portrayed in such negative terms, and points out that his
tone is never so despairing. Of course, there is no denying that the onset of
modernity did bring a growing sense of anxiety, and that many artists reflected this
in their work. On the continent, writers such as Baudelaire saw the city as the
catalyst for individual alienation, and described how metropolitan life, with its
anonymous crowds and newly scaled spaces, would overwhelm and alienate us. In
Britain, Dickens and Ruskin predicted that industrialisation would distance us from
nature and leave us spiritually bereft.
Skipping forward to the present, we accept the reality that is modern technological
and capitalist development (the shift from Metropolis to Megalopolis). Our world is
one of accelerated movement, overabundant information, virtual parameters of scale,
the proliferation of signs. As representations of reality supplant reality itself,
everyday experience is increasingly about a fast-paced flow of images. Artists like
Opie are trying to find a new way to deal with this.
When the anthropologist Marc Augé published Non-places - introduction to an
anthropology of supermodernity in 1995, transience was a key characteristic of the
world he described:
where people are born in the clinic and die in hospital, where transit points and
temporary abodes are proliferating … where a dense network of means of
transport which are also inhabited spaces is developing; where the habitué of
supermarkets, slot machines and credit cards communicates wordlessly through
33
gestures with an abstract, unmediated commerce; a world thus surrendered to
solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary, the ephemeral.28
Society is in flux, buffeted by a constant flow of information and of people. Our lives
are channelled through road, air and rail routes, around airports, service and
railways stations, dependent on invisible and interconnecting cable and wireless
networks. Augé believes that we do not yet know how to look at this world; it is in
fact a world that we read rather than look at, a world through which we pass at
speed. Speed drastically altered our perception of the landcape. In the early
twentieth century the Futurists pushed the celebration of modern technology to an
extreme, proclaiming a new aesthetic of speed.
Their leader Marinetti edged towards insanity, with his fantasy that the acceleration
of life would straighten meandering rivers and that someday the Danube would run
in a straight line at 300 kilometres an hour. The Futurists' romance with machines
and their remoteness from society resurfaced (albeit in a new guise) in the inter-war
'machine aesthetic' of the Bauhaus, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier.
Now Opie, much of whose art is inspired by the idea of travel and motion, has
updated this concept with his own evocation of car culture, Imagine you are driving.
Significantly, however, the emphasis has shifted. Opie presents us with an endless
sequence of images of the road ahead: we have less of a sense of the inspiring and
exhilarating pace of movement, and more an expression of the anonymity and
monotony of motorway travel. But the obsessiveness of the depiction is compelling.
We fix on the white lines marking the tarmac, propelled by the vanishing point
towards a horizon we never reach - drawn into a kind of spatial sublime. Opie
captures the real effects of driving, how the car both liberates and distances us from
the world - so that we pass through the landscape quickly and are closed off from
direct experience of it. The sights, sounds, tastes, temperatures and smells of the
material world are reduced to the two-dimensional view through a windscreen. Of
course, this view is a succinct metaphor for contemporary experience: seeing the
world through a screen. The technologies incorp-orated within the car reinforce the
artificiality of this experience: we find ourselves in a sealed, stable, weightless
environment. With our senses impov-erished and our bodies fragmented, we begin
to dream. This is what Opie feels. When we drive through the city, the streets and
buildings become the backdrop to our thoughts, virtual passages through which we
move, on the way to another place.
The signs and texts planted along the motorway tell us about the landscape through
which we are passing, making its features explicit. This fact might enable us to
relinquish the need to stop and really look, allowing us to retreat into reverie.
Because we are constantly on the move we are always in a state of distraction, having
to deal with a barrage of visual and social stimuli (signs, slogans, billboards, lights,
fumes, sirens). Have we learned to overlook subtlety and detail?
34
Opie's Cityscape 1998 is an audio recording of a journey through London by car. In
it, he and fellow artists Lisa Milroy, Richard Patterson and Fiona Rae recorded what
they saw en route, each of them focusing on a specific subject category. Opie listed
the brands of cars seen ('Honda', 'Fiat'), Patterson identified building types ('Shop',
'Bank', 'House'), whilst Rae read from posters and billboards ('Buy your specs here',
'North to Watford') and Milroy described people glimpsed along the way ('Man with
hat', 'Woman with handbag'). Read one way, the work shows that we are unable to
assimilate everything that surrounds us; that we reduce what we do see to the
essentials in order to negotiate our way. But there is a flipside: the abstract flow of
words can be as evocative as actual images. Listening to them, we conjure mental
images fairly effortlessly. The mind's eye can take over.
The philosopher Freddie Ayer was once asked which single thing he found most
evocative of Paris. The venerable logical positivist thought for a while and then
answered: 'A road sign with Paris written on it.'29
Opie often talks about how we 'read' images, and his language of signs has a fictional
functionality. He acknowledges that perception is increasingly about recognition,
and recognition is triggered by the most simple things. His imagery is perfunctory
but this is not a critique of how life is reduced to a surface and a symbol. Opie
accepts what is out there and attempts to create something new and meaningful with
it. In this enterprise, he is not alone.
Motorways allow us to escape mentally as much as physically, and the fact that most
video games are about driving seems to support this (interestingly, 'M25' is both a
video game and a brand of ecstasy). The weightless mobility of driving inspires
imaginative travel. In the writings of J.G. Ballard, the rediscovered literary hero of
current times, the sense of estrange-ment and uncertainty that came with new
technology and the onset of car culture is a pivotal theme. Novels such as Crash or
Concrete Island (first published in the early 1970s but now enjoying cult status) are
condemnations of automotive alienation yet also celebrations of technological
achievement. In Crash, the car becomes an extension of the human body,
surrounding the soft and vulnerable human skin with a shell of steel. Ballard relishes
the exultant sense of freedom and detachment that driving generates. He believes
that we must embrace this condition, and that only then can we learn what lies
beyond it. In this sense, Ballard and Opie think alike.
Motorway travel is no longer a novelty. However, the motorway has come to occupy
a prominent position in the collective psyche; its very ordinariness and neutrality
have allowed it to be interpreted as a potent psychological space. As Michael
Bracewell notes:
Increasingly, as the motorway features in the reclamation of shared and formative
memory for successive generations, so its initial cultural status as a non-place is
being exchanged for a new measure of significance.30
35
A re-assessment of the cultural status of roads and their hinterlands is under way,
made plain by the recent wave of publications such as Edward Platt's Leadville: A
Biography of the A40 (2000) and Iain Sinclair's London Orbital (2002). In the latter,
Sinclair attempts to walk around the vast stretch of urban settlement bounded by the
M25, the 120-mile road that encircles London. The resulting book is a dense and
complex meditation on urban sprawl, the effect of automobiles and modernity. It
reveals a side of London that is often ignored, merging history and memory, fact and
fiction. Significantly, when Chris Petit chose to make a film based on the book, he
drove around the M25, filming the view from his windscreen. He wanted to capture
the hallucinatory quality that driving can create, finding this to be the proper visual
equivalent to Sinclair's writing.
The service stations that line our motorways and punctuate our journeys - corporate,
neutral and standardised - have also been given a new frisson of significance. As
Augé observes:
most of those who pass by do not stop; but they may pass again, every summer or
several times a year, so that an abstract space, one they have regular occasion to read
rather than see, can become strangely familiar to them over time.31
Such spaces might summon the residue of childhood experience or provoke a
general sense of nostalgia. In his book, Always a Welcome - the glove compartment
history of the motorway service area 2000, David Lawrence sees the service station as
an 'ephemeral and ever-changing micro-landscape',32 a site of work, leisure and
social intercourse that now occupies a central position in our everyday lives. And so
the 'non-place' gains ground. Opie has already identified the potential romance of
such spaces. When asked to make a sculpture for Belsay Hall in Northumberland he
made Rest Area 2000, a supermodern sanctuary of steel and glass that brought
together elements of a Greek temple, an eighteenth-century folly and a petrol station
- a service area Utopia in a beautiful woodland setting. Bracewell concludes that this
new concentration on 'boring places' is connected to the emotional needs of a
generation now out of patience with post-modernism. He may be right.
When Augé writes of the 'non-place' the key location he has in mind is the airport.
From the artificial spaces of motorways and service stations we might make an easy
transition to the airport departure lounge. Aeroplanes ushered in a new age of
accelerated global travel, and like the motorway they were full of promise, once
emblematic of an idea of the future. The psychological implications of flight - a sense
of vertigo, feelings of disorientation - might worry some travellers, but this is
regularised in the modern airport through mechanical and highly controlled flow of
traffic. The anonymity of the airport - its brilliantly lit, multi-reflective interiors and
gleaming passageways - can induce a sense of generalised estrangement. Closed off
from climate change and the cycles of natural light, the airport is an optically static
environment in which we become physically desensitised. When reviewing one of
Opie's exhibitions the critic Andrew Graham-Dixon wrote:
36
Opie's work… knows the blend of pleasure and alienation that somewhere like
Heathrow can provide. Moving through an installation of Opie's is like moving
through a modern airport: it is to feel both pleasantly and unpleasantly removed
from reality, in a zone of transit where what you do or who you are has become both
threateningly and relievingly unimportant.33
That Opie wold then be commissioned to make work for Heathrow's Terminal 1
makes Graham-Dixon's words even more apt. Ballard lives in Shepperton, a suburb
close to Heathrow. He eulogises this airport for 'its transience, alienation and
discontinuities, and its unashamed response to the pressures of speed, disposability
and the instant impulse.'34 His narrator in Crash also lives near an airport, and the
novel is set in its concrete landscape. For Ballard, flight becomes a metaphor for
transcendence. At Heathrow:
We are no longer citizens with civic obligations, but passengers for whom all
destinations are theoretically open, our lightness of baggage mandated by the
system. Airports have become a new kind of discontinuous city, whose vast
populations, measured by annual passenger throughputs, are entirely transient,
purposeful and, for the most part, happy.
We are all aware of the dislocated nature of contemporary urban life and deal with
its discon-tinuities daily, but in the modern airport such tensions are defused, since
its 'instantly summoned village life span is long enough to calm us, and short enough
not to be a burden'. Augé agrees:
As soon as the passport or identity card has been checked, the passenger for the next
flight, freed from the weight of his luggage and everyday responsibilities rushes in to
the 'duty-free' spaces, not so much, perhaps, in order to buy at the best prices as to
experience the reality of this momentary availability, the unchallengeable position as
a passenger in the process of departing.35
Mobility is just one of the products now on offer at the modern airport. In response
to the demands of an ever-expanding consumer society most are being transformed
into vast shopping concourses. They nurture the passenger caught in limbo. The
shopping mall is another simulated world, located on the outskirts of the city, served
by the motorway and best reached by car. Sociologists note how peripheral areas
have given rise to multiplexes and retail outlets and are frequented by what they call
car-borne 'parkaholics', who seek the 'out-of-town' experience. The shopping centre
is a self-enclosed and self-regulating public arena - more condensed than the average
high street. With air conditioning and artificial lighting, the exterior is interiorised.
Multiple floors are connected by escalators, and our circulation is as directed and
controlled as the air flow. The shopping mall is a virtual world; we know it is a
37
fiction but we read it as reality. Bluewater in Kent is one such environment, visited
by over 26 million people each year, accessible via the M25 with parking spaces for
13,000 cars.
The American architect Eric Kuhne called it a new kind of city, a resort, whilst Iain
Sinclair has portrayed it as 'A one-night stopover, an oasis for migrants',36
comparing it to a Channel port like Dover or Folkestone, where one finds the same
'dizzy sense of impermanence'.
A new kind of transient England is coming into being. The motorway service station,
the shopping mall and the airport lounge could be seen as representative of this. We
increasingly inhabit artificial and transient environments, so it is hardly surprising
that in this digital age we can imagine ourselves as part of a community even when
our bodies might be separated by continents and we do not see each other very often.
We might only know each other through an electronic name, and we might
frequently create different identities for ourselves. It is hard to know where we are
and where we belong.
Augé sees the users of the contemporary landscape as people who are no longer
inhabitants in the traditional sense of the word - we are more like passers-by.
Because we are constantly moving we have no sense of belonging. We work and play
in virtual worlds, we multi-task, we drive (or are driven) everywhere. We need a
new language a grammar of some complexity, to describe the world - not as it used
to be, but as it is: 'a world of global computer and communication networks; of
distributed intelligence; of interactivity; of connec-tivity.'37 What we think of as
reality is a fiction that has been created for us, and by us. Artists like Opie are trying
to make sense of the world in these terms. His brand of fiction is direct and matterof-fact, but its latent content is far more complex and evocative.
We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to
invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task
is to invent reality. In the past we have always assumed that the external world
around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the
inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of
fantasy and the imagination. These roles, it seems to me, have been reversed. The
most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume
that it is a complete fiction - conversely, the one small node of reality left to us is
inside our own heads.38
Notes
1. All Opie quotations unless otherwise stated are from conversations held with the
author between 2002 and 2003.
38
2. Marco Livingstone, Pop Art - A Continuing History, London 1990, p.234.
3. Julian Opie quoted in Tate Gallery Catalogue of Acquisitions 1982-4, London 1986,
p.296.
4. Mel Ramsden and Michael Baldwin, 'Julian Opie's Sculpture', Julian Opie, ex. cat.
Lisson Gallery, London 1985, p.8.
5. Michael Craig-Martin, Young Blood, Riverside Studios, London, April-May 1983.
6. Andrew Graham-Dixon, Independent, London, 8 March 1988.
7. Richard Cork, 'In a Hurry', Listener, London, 2 May 1985, p.34.
8. Lynne Cooke, 'Julian Opie and Simon Linke: Two Young British Artists, Who Are
Also Good Friends, Speak About Their Work And Their Context Internationally',
Flash Art, No. 133, April 1987, p.37.
9. Lynne Cooke, documenta 8, Kassel 1987, Band 2, p.180'1.
10. Michael Newman, 'Undecidable Objects', Julian Opie, ex. cat. Lisson Gallery,
London 1988, n.p.
11. Ibid, n.p.
12. Kenneth Baker, OBJECTives, ex. cat. Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1990, p.190.
13. Ulrich Loock, Julian Opie, ex. cat. Kunsthalle Bern/Secession, Vienna 1991, n.p.
14. James Roberts, 'Tunnel Vision', frieze, issue 10, May 1992, p.31.
15. Liam Gillick, Art Monthly, no. 174, 1993-4, p.26.
16. Julian Opie quoted in Julian Opie, 9th Indian Triennale, British Council, New
Delhi 1997, p.17.
39
17. Tom Lubbock, 'Simple Pleasures', Independent, 25 September 2001, p.10.
18. Julian Opie interviewed by Gemma de Cruz, Habitat Art Club Booklet, Winter
2001, n.p.
19. Julian Opie, interviewed by Louisa Buck, 'Logo People', The Arts Newspaper,
no.111, vol.XII, February 2001, p.37.
20. Michael Craig-Martin in an interview with the author 26 November 2002.
21. Nicholas Logsdail in an interview with the author 12 December 2002.
22. Julian Opie quoted in Julian Opie, Gouverneurstuin, Assen 1997, p.37.
23. Richard Dorment, Daily Telegraph, 2 November 1994.
24. Julian Opie quoted in Julian Opie, 9th Indian Triennale, British Council, New
Delhi 1997, p.34.
25. Ibid., p.43.
26. Michael Craig-Martin, Minimalism, ex. cat. Tate Gallery Liverpool 1989, p.7.
27. J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World, London 1965, p.14.
28. Marc Aug, Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity,
London 1995, p.78.
29. Will Self, Grey Area, London 1996, p.91.
30. Michael Bracewell, The Nineties - When Surface Was Depth, London 2002, p.285.
31. Marc Aug, op, cit., p.98.
40
32. David Lawrence, Always a Welcome: the glove compartment history of the
motorway service area, London 1999, p.103.
33. Andrew Graham-Dixon, Independent, London, 9 November 1993, p.25.
34. J.G. Ballard in Airport, ed. Steven Bode and Jeremy Millar, Photographer's
Gallery, London 1997, pp.120-1 op. cit.
35. Marc Aug, op. cit., p.101.
36. Ian Sinclair, London Orbital, London 2002, pp.388'9.
37. John Thackera in Airport, op. cit., p.69.
38. J.G. Ballard, introduction to Crash, London 1995, pp.4'5.
41
Graphics International 2003
Line art.
Julian Opie finds more inspiration at HMV than in any art gallery - his artworks
regularly appear as book jackets and CD covers. Angharad Lewis went to meet this
very graphic artist.
He has been called mediochre, bland, master of the stick figure and portraitist of the
middle classes. You recognise his work even if you haven't got a clue who he is. As
well as exhibiting at the Tate Modern, Ikon in Birmingham, Baltic in Gateshead and
other galleries, his work filters into the world as posters, on CD Covers, book jackets
and the sides of buildings, even on road signs. In other words you see his art where
you would normally see graphic design. But Julian Opie is very definite about not
mixing terminology when it comes to mixing art and graphic design. His work sits in
a precarious place between the two that elicits derision and suspicion by turns: artists
think he is a graphic designer and graphic designers think he is an artist. Whether
these name tags are still relevant is debateable but Opie is explicit: "If you want
terms, then what is the point of mixing them up and even forgetting your terms and
doing whatever you feel like doing?" He argues. "It's not about what is good or bad,
most art is terrible, like most music - it's simply shout definitions."
But the points of diversion and congress between art and graphic design can be
tricky to negotiate. The graphic designer is paid to bring his or her creativity to
someone else's problems. The artists, however, sets out to explore a very personal set
of problems. Money changes hands down the line, certainly, but the emotional
transaction between the artist and the artwork is at a respectable distance from the
cash. That is the crucial difference in the perceived gulf between art and design,
Grubby Money. Some designers distance themselves from the subjugation of
creativity to balance sheet implied in their trade, because, culturally, graphic design
is lower down the food chain than art. Others would argue that art and graphic
design are growing closer together because they increasingly inhabit the same
worlds. Art is adapting itself to commercial media as graphic design sidles into the
gallery.
The idea that artists remain aloof from the sordid world of finance is something that
occupies Opie. "It is very constraining for artists that there is this myth of the artist
starving in the garret" he says "People have this idea that that is what makes real art.
I'm often jealous of graphic designers because they are not tied down by those kind
of constraints. The art main constraint is what looks good and whether it sells." As an
artist whose work has been widely reproduced as promotional material (most
famously for Blur's 2000 Best of album) creating work that looks good clearly has its
benefits but is it a primary concern? "It's not enough", Opie says.
42
But in many ways Opie creates art with the same expectations of his audience as a
graphic designer might have, tailored to compete with the wider visual world. Like a
graphic designer, his way of working is inspired by the way people process the
world. "There's a patterned or layered quality to what people bring to looking at art.
You expect a faster experience with graphics," he explains. "when I go into HMV and
look at CD covers, there's a better exhibition to be seen than in many galleries. There
is so little art around that has that kind of inventiveness and at the same time is very
passive and very easy, which is something that appeals to me."
It's quite shocking that an artist of his standing claims to find greater stimulation on
the shelves of a high street shop than in an art gallery. It's a reversal of the received
idea that you find the vanguard of visual culture in galleries and that this trickles
down to the commercial media like graphic design. Clearly the reality is more
complicated than this neat model, yet art stays at the top of the cultural tree. Graphic
design has to fend for itself outside such carefully controlled spaces as galleries,
buffeted by a world of other images and sights. This is where Opie's art is often
found and that is the key to unravelling its aesthetics.
Opie's art is about process, logic and efficiency. Like taking a computer apart to see
how it works, he unpicks the way people look at things. There is little emotion
involved and that is something he cultivates, obliterating evidence of his personal
engagement with the work through the use of computers.
Looking at an Opie picture is eminently comfortable compared to a lot of other
contemporary art. He is squeamish about what he calls "angst-ridden" art and insists
his instinct leads him down a different road. "If you think of Raymond Chandler" he
explains, "the way he writes is the way I'd like to make pictures. He doesn't sit there
and write about the way he feels, or what his observations on the world are. He
writes a detective story. It's a genre everybody knows and within that he can write
amazing descriptions. It's really only about language and that is where the beauty is the insight you get is about language and how language is used. I would hope to
make things where the personal-ness isn't in what I describe, it's in the way I go
about dealing with the world and depicting it."
Taking the familiar forms of road signs, computer game graphics, and information
graphics, Opie usurps the visual language of other mediums and filters his view of
the world through them. "I see myself more as a manipulator than an inventor," he
explains. " I'm not really that interested in inventing things from scratch. The way I
go about things is by mixing and comparing and referencing."
It would be easy to say that Opie distances himself from his work by using a
computer, but he also does so by using a visual style that the viewer already has an
existing relationship with. His road signs for example: we know how to read them so
there is no need to ask questions as to how to interpret them. By using this approach
Opie coerces the viewer to engage with the work. What Opie aims for is to tap into
43
an existing visual literacy in his viewer: not to facilitate the better understanding of
any particular message but to concentrate on the very methods we use in visual
reading.
It's a way of engaging with the viewer that Opie has been working towards
throughout his career, and his absorption with the way we look at the world comes
from questioning the value systems of representation. It emphasises the fact that an
image rendered in oils is a marginal part of our contemporary visual vocabulary. An
image in oils is effectively an outmoded visual term, like the word wireless as
opposed to the word internet. Opie's art chooses to talk in the most populist
language and that is perhaps its greatest affinity with graphic design. Using known
frameworks for his art, he taps into people's already developed sense of reading; to
what ends isn't clear. But that is beside the point for Opie, which is where you begin
to find yourself in a cul-de-sac with his work. Despite the fact that his work explores
interesting ideas about how we engage with the visual world, all the Conundrums
Opie poses have been ironed out to perfection by the time we get a look-in. It's like
sitting down to a cross word and finding someone else has filled out the answer.
When pushed on the cross-over between his work and graphic design, Opie insists
that he would not be able to follow through his ideas if he had to give up control of
any part of it to client concerns. The design work that he has done is on the periphery
of his main artistic practice and the design jobs are skimmed off from this. "maybe a
lot of graphic designers feel this way", he suggests " that they are busy in their heads
with a progression of ideas that's separate from any particular output" But ultimately
the two remain exclusive. So when advertising design makes claims for itself in the
art world Opie gets nervous. "It's a dangerous, slippery slope. I find Benetton
exhibiting their work in an art gallery close to offensive. The exhibition Absolut
Vision by Absolut Vodka I also recoiled at."
It seems that stepping outside the definitions is a perilous journey. Opie is suspicious
of it in others but does it himself. Perhaps to preserve the defining terms of art and
graphic design is to set the boundaries that integrity tests itself against. Although
graphic design is defined by its commerciality, its cultural value needs to be realised,
and although the definitions serve a valuable purpose the hierarchy is gradually
being challenged. Opie works from the stance that his art is his priority and if
someone wants to skim it for a design project, so be it. But the ideas he explores
would not be his were it not for the way graphic design has changed the way we see
and how the world looks.
44
The Painter of Modern Life.
Catalogue text for CAC Malaga museum show.
- 2003
I begin these lines on Julian Opie in the early hours of the morning on my laptop at
the Hotel Mencey in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, a fascinating 1940's hotel, a hotel that
could be in Singapore, a hotel like something out of a Somerset Maugham novel.
I stop writing. After a while my screensaver, downloaded from the Internet, starts
up: a narrative sequence by Opie himself from 2002, featuring views of a Formula
One race track and the faces of the drivers, Jacques, Olivier and Ryo, at times hidden
under their crash helmets, at others wearing caps with the Lucky Strike logo (Lucky
Strike sponsors the Honda team portrayed here and commissioned this particular
work of Opie's). This electronically reproduced artwork, freely available on the
Internet, which has kept me company in the most varied places for the last few
months now reminds me that CAC Malaga is beginning to send me signals that they
are awaiting the article I have promised to write for them about its author, that great
artist of our time that is Opie, whose work, so clear and clean, keeps us company in
so many places. I have brought a catalogue or two of his in my - light - luggage, in
the hope that this hotel will inspire me, guiding me towards an artist who is also a
wanderer, one who, as far back as 1985 (the year of his first institutional solo show
staged at no less a venue than the ICA in London) painted the image of luggage on to
steel, Project for Heathrow and who, ten years later, installed videos at London's
main airport showing idyllic British landscapes along with, in some transit corridors,
several light-filled murals which also featured landscapes, entitled Imagine you are
moving. Another series from the same period, entitled Imagine you are landing,
provided an aerial view.
Opie, the painter of modern life. There are not many artists today for whom I would
dare to appropriate (as the astute reader will note that I have here) the famous title
"Le peintre de la vie moderne", which Charles Baudelaire gave to his 1863 essay that
was published in three issues of Le Figaro on his friend, Constantin Guys, the painter
who matchlessly portrayed in outstandingly inspired works, the Paris of the Second
Empire. On the other hand, a title like "The photographer of modern life" would be
appropriate for several photographers today. Andreas Gursky, for example, would
be an excellent candidate. How many cities, how many neighbourhoods, how many
industrial and leisure centres, lead us to exclaim: "This is... Andreas Gursky!"
Our Opie world. How many times do we see such and such a place, such and such a
character, through his eyes: "This is... Julian Opie!"
45
Opie, or the multiplicity of supports. This is a key characteristic of his, one which
makes him a prototypical artist of our time. His images, so elemental in appearance,
though they may turn out to be amongst the most complex and sophisticated that
can be found on the international scene today, his paintings, his sculptures, which he
himself describes as "objects in an Ikea catalogue", his plasma screens, his artefacts, in
short; his products, assault us, not only in galleries and at art fairs or in the private
sphere, such as the screensavers I refer to at the beginning of this piece, but
everywhere along our urban routes as travellers and flaneurs at this point at the turn
of the century. On posters and calendars, on the cover of a CD by the group Blur The Best of Blur, EMI, 2000, on a U2 stage set, on lighted screens, on a huge glass
installation at Selfridges department store, on an advertising hoarding outside the
Tate Britain gallery, on the cover of Granta magazine, in supposed traffic signs
beside a railway line... The fact that Opie's website is very well designed - especially
compared to others that are so bad they are embarrassing - featuring not only photos
of paintings and sculptures but also animations and audio is another sign that he,
more than anyone, is an artist for today, a democratic artist, an artist with a "factory",
like Andy Warhol and others in the 60s. An artist who is beginning to be imitated all
over the place and I get the feeling that this is only just the start.
Opie's gift of ubiquity: never clearer than in his portraits of the members of Blur,
which we can see on the cover of the CD, on the side of double-decker buses, on bags
and T-shirts... and in his four paintings, installed in no less venerated and
quintessentially British an institution than the National Portrait Gallery.
It is clear to me that Opie's artistic universe is, to put it in the language of a "comicbook" critic, one of "clear line", if you will pardon the redundancy. Like another
recent "inmate" at CAC Malaga, the German artist Neo Rauch (see what I wrote
about him in the catalogue) Opie is also a great fan of Herge, a point that James
Roberts stressed in 1984, in his piece "Spam for Tea" for the retrospective at the
Hayward Gallery in London. What Opie admires about Herge is his ability to build
his stories and his narratives in a direct, detailed yet concise style. The British artist
has learned much about this style from his Belgian counterpart.
United by our passion, Opie and I spent half the dinner at his latest opening in
Braga, at Mario Sequeira's spectacular gallery talking about these things. We were
aided in this by the presence of his wife and, in a pushchair, a little one who had not
yet joined the fellowship of "young readers aged from 7 to 77", as the slogan ran.
Also the clean ultramarine blue of the provincial night, a night that brought to mind
some of the paintings the British artist had recently made of his journey to the North,
and which formed part of this exhibition. We talked about Herge's magic, his
narrative, his universal poetry. The Belgian artist is present in the form of several
cartoons from Tintin and The Seven Crystal Balls, on page 7 of the retrospective book
the Tate Modern devoted to Opie in 2004. I imagine due to the shared wish of the
editor, Mary Horlock and the artist himself, whom Horlock reports as saying that
one of his first ironic works of art about art was born in the early 1980's from one of
those cartoons, the one in which the lightning bolt comes down the chimney and
causes chaos in the library.
46
On that evening in Braga, in that charming Portuguese house where there is also a
fantastic large painting of a shadowy wood by Alex Katz, we also talked about a
certain clear line in British painting. A lineage in which we both agreed that the basic
landmarks are the recently deceased Patrick Caulfield - whom Christopher Finch, in
a study as early as 1971, saw as the London art scene's equivalent to Roy Lichtenstein
- and Michael Craig-Martin, a North American by birth and whom I included in the
IVAM programme at Centro del Carmen, now closed. Caulfield and Craig-Martin
are two artists that the work of Opie, the younger man (firstly a pupil at Goldsmiths
School of Art in the years 1979-1982 and later an assistant to Craig-Martin) has
helped in some way to be re-read, to relocate.
Herge, but also Hiroshige. Most appropriately, Mary Horlock placed a woodcut by
the latter in the margin of her text for the afore-mentioned book and we should
remember too that the author of The Blue Lotus also greatly admired Hiroshige, as
he did all the Japanese masters.
Opie has had several shows in Japan. Some talk of him in relation to manga comics
but, as this is a subject I know little about, I do not have a clear opinion on the
question. The series of paintings inspired by a family holiday in Bali in 2002 are also
very beautiful as is the animation on the same subject (see the artist's website) with
Balinese musical accompaniment. The most Blue Lotus of his entire work to date is
the portrait, produced in Bali that same year, of Komang, beach vendor with his
fantastic hat.
We discovered Craig-Martin exactly twenty years ago at a collective show in the
Palacio de Velazquez, in times of Carmen Gimenez, considering him one of the most
brilliant representatives of a new British sculpture that had considerable impact on
our own emerging artists at the time. Opie reached us two years later also as a
sculptor as his work at that time was exclusively in three dimensions. And, as occurs
in the case of his master, this work has very little to do with what he is doing now. In
the second half of the 1980's Opie seemed to us more than a post-minimalist, a neominimalist. The works forming the transition towards this second period possess
great spatial complexity and are executed in a distant mechanical, industrial manner
and from that moment on the artist's characteristic style. Soon this language was
refined, moving towards more elemental forms in the manner of a Donald Judd, a
Donald Judd with connotations, at times, of the industrial or architectural "objet
trouve". Opie presented works in this style at Documenta 8 in Kassel in 1987. This
was followed the next year by his little remembered first solo show in Spain, only his
ninth. The exhibition venue was a pioneering Madrid gallery, now closed, and whose
owner and director we also lost prematurely. This was Manolo Montenegro's gallery,
in Calle Argensola, a space we often return to in memory for it was here that we also
encountered the work of, amongst others, Washington Barcala (also deceased),
Victoria Civera, Maria Gomez, Anton Lamazares, Francisco Leiro, Eva Lootz,
Perejaume, Antonio Rojas, Soledad Sevilla, Susana Solano, Juan Usle...
47
From that period, Opie has conserved a certain taste for geometry and for Neo-Geo:
for example, for works by the likes of the now universally known Peter Halley and
Gerwald Rockenschaub, more of a secret.
Before becoming a neo-minimalist for a time, Opie had practiced ironic art, or "art
about art", somewhat similar to the way the Equipo Cronica group had experimented
with it in Spain two decades earlier. In his unusual paintings on steel and in his
parallel three-dimensional assemblies, also made from steel, such as his aptly titled
Eat Dirt Art History (1983, the year he gave his first solo show at the Lisson Gallery,
which signed him on and where he continues to work). There is an imaginary
museum, "totum revolutum", the books alluded to previously, put into disarray by
the lightning bolt in The Seven Crystal Balls, a eulogy to fragmentarism, quotations
in a deliberately crude style from famous paintings by Frans Hals, Ingres, Manet,
Monet, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Mondrian, Pollock, Rothko, his
compatriot David Hockney... Irreverent works, he would call them, though they are
at the same time profoundly reverent, since they are based on others he admires.
Books too, tumbling down, a little like those of Alicia Martan today in the painting
on oil entitled Incident in the Library II, 1983, or in the sculpture that Walter Konig
commissioned him to produce the following year for the front of his bookshop in
Cologne.
From this ironic art about art, which could hardly take him much further, to the
deliberate dryness of minimalism or neo-minimalism and from this to sharp profiles
and flat inks - but also the cordiality - of clear line and computer work: a peculiar,
highly heterodox way of reconciling, as Robert Indiana had done in some of his early
works and as Lichtenstein himself would later, the two faces of art in the 1960s, the
art of years long gone in which Opie had enjoyed the plenitude of childhood whilst I,
five years older, began to leave it behind. And always the precision, the precisionism,
as they used to call it in the United States in the 1920s. A cool line: from Clean
Abstraction (1983), passing through the neo-minimalist sculptures like those that
Montenegro showed here, or those in the Night Lights series, reminiscent in their use
of neon to the works of Dan Flavin and which culminated this stage in 1989, though
it was continued in some shelves in 1991, to the portraits of today. Always the same
economy of means, exactness, rigour: the qualities that Lichtenstein admired in
Fernand Leger.
Even in 1991, Opie was included in an interesting London exhibition exploring what
remained from the pop art period. The show, which took place at the Serpentine
Gallery, was entitled Objects for the Ideal Home: The Legacy of Pop Art. As I have
mentioned, the Hayward Gallery, where I saw Pop Art Revisited in 1969 and the
retrospective on Caulfield in 1999, exactly thirty years later had opened its doors to
Opie in 1994. More recently, Marco Livingstone, the leading expert in the field
included him in his critical review of Pop Art as "a continuing history".
Clear line, pop, and also more demotic things, more from everyday life: traffic signs,
signage in general - including airport signs - the graphic language of video games
and animated films like Toy Story, stereotypes from modern illustration and
48
advertising, illustration and advertising that Opie, as a good "post-pop" artist, likes
to parody, to simulate..
Opie City, the city of the painter of modern life: an urban landscape in the
background, before which are arranged his characters, architecture, a scene that owes
not a little to De Chirico, 21st-century version, and we know that Opie reveres the
author of the Piazze d'Italia. From his first city, that he revealed in Imagine you are
walking, his 1993 show at London's Hayward Gallery, inspired by his walks around
the East End, and with which he began his figurative period and his return to
painting - presaged by some very interesting paintings in 1991, representations in
comic-book style of some of his neo-minimalist pieces - the people were missing.
This city suddenly animated using a computer programme, a tool Opie would use
frequently from now on.
Architectures, their units: "the farm", "the castle", "the church", "the bungalow", "the
factory", "the office block", everything as in our childhood games, and Mary Horlock
points out that amongst his sources when he began to do buildings, is a German
miniature railway. Architectures, reduced to their minimum expression: a path from
minimalism to the works I have just mentioned and then to his sculptures of modern
buildings, for example those portrayed in You see an office building (1996), or My
brother's office (1997). His cars, immobile, turned into blocks
The Opie road, the Opie highway. Roadscapes, with a large dose of the driving video
games he likes so much. Daytime visions, night time visions in M40 (1993). Also from
1993: the series Imagine you are driving, or the road, seen from the driver's seat - a
precedent exists in the work of the American pop artist Allan d'Arcangelo - based on
photographs he took himself. Some of these photographs have been published: see,
for example, the margins of quite a few pages in the catalogue for his retrospective at
the Hayward Gallery where we find not only visions of roads but also of cities,
airports and railways and even the London Underground and its carriages. When
Imagine you are driving formed part of the above mentioned show at the Hayward
Gallery Opie added a sculpture inspired by Scalextric racetracks.
The Opie skies, the Opie fields. In order to evoke them in passing - this exhibition,
Fernando Frances assures me, is quite the opposite. One hundred per cent urban - an
image that is true as well as idyllic, sophisticated and artificial suffices me. For
example, insects children church bells (1999), a village, presumably Swiss, standing
amid green fields with its belltower, so Francis Jammes, so poetic... Autobiography is
sometimes mixed in: his aunt's sheep, his grandfather's grave... Everyday zoology:
the squirrel and other animals that have disappeared, the goat and other hungry
animals...
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Landscape seen from a car. On the Road painting, to cite Jack Kerouac's famous title
and one of our adolescent heroes. Titles as commentaries, evoking the sounds that
accompany a placid landscape. For example: cowbells tractor silence
Surrounded by landscape and silence, the Opie airport. For example: wind planes
silence (2000), competing with Fischli & Weiss's more conceptual, colder and
unfriendly airport. Just as Brian Eno has his Music for Airports, just as I myself once
wrote an "Airport Poem" inspired by the panels at Vienna Airport, Opie has his
Airport Paintings: a modern invitation to travel in this, our post-Baudelaire time.
The Opie sea, that sea (more Fleurs du mal: "Homme libre, toujours tu cheriras la
mer!") which ripples gently in his electronic landscapes, that sea plied by ships with
their lights, "ships that pass in the night", William Shakespeare, but also The
Shooting Star. Opie, always with his unmistakable graphic style, new wine in old
bottles, the eternal mystery of the sea, the melancholy of deserted northern beaches, a
stereotype once more but true, as true as the grey water in a London canal or the
Arve in Geneva, as true as his glass panels with fish, which turn the front of an
American museum into a giant fishbowl.
Opie's characters, his figures. In a world until then silent and in some way
metaphysical, a world which began with the paintings in 1991 and is documented in
the retrospective at the Hayward Gallery - and in which, as we can prove by looking
through the catalogue, there is not a single figure - schematic figures, their faces
reduced to a circle, first made their appearance in the 1990s. Since then, the presence
of figures in Opie's paintings has gone "in crescendo". The exhibition at CAC Malaga
revolves around the figure. At first, these were, we should stress once more,
schematic representations. Then, from 1998 onwards his first productions in this
genre, Ellen, arts administrator, and Paul, teacher, date back to this year - these
figures became specific characters, individuals from the artist's immediate
environment.
The portraits become multiplied "ad infinitum", mostly reduced merely to the head,
though there are also full-body renditions, outstandingly the nudes and figures in
the process of becoming naked, not forgetting the bathers. A fascinating community,
as real as life itself, in which Marco the student or Virginia the housewife or Bruce
the dancer are friends of Fiona the artist (in whom we recognise Fiona Rae, a fellow
artist and friend of Opie's), or of Monique the Businesswoman - Housewife or Tina
the programmer or Alex the model or Hugues the investor or Paul the baby
(brilliantly reduced, in one version, to the simple line, in black and white); in which
the guitarist (spectacular 2006 works: Steve plays guitar, and the series on Bryan
Adams), the youth icon by antonomasia from the 60s on, drags us all in with his
energetic riff; in which even the famous doll Barbie has a place; in which Kate the
model (in whom we recognise Kate Moss), Maho the gallery director, Mark the
writer and Stephanie the insurance broker share a wall; in which the exterior of Tate
Britain is the temporary home for monumental effigies - almost like leaders from
some people's democracy in Central Europe or the Far East - for Gary the pop star,
Dino the gallery owner, Bernadette the student, Keith the mechanic, Walter the
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publisher, Elena the schoolgirl... The particular and the universal. Playing within this
frame, this field, Opie achieves unique status for himself. The book which to date
best reflects his peculiar gaze with regard to the human face is Portraits (Codax,
2002). This large volume, with its superb, deliberately neutral, monotonous,
accumulative design, enables the reader to note both what distinguishes each
character and how the Opie style turns them practically into logos, into parts of a
whole. To analyse this style we should focus not only on the graphics, such an
important element for him, but also on his delicate, sophisticated use of colour:
highly nuanced, absolutely unmistakable plain colours: oranges, reds, pearl pinks,
sky blues, ochres, greys, greens, yellows, and always with the black of his drawing,
framing them..
At first, Opie's way of representing the human figure was inspired by traffic signs,
by signage, by schematic representations. Gradually though these figures become
more and more personalised. Kate is Kate Moss and the members of Blur are the
members of Blur and Bryan is Bryan Adams and each and every one of his subjects is
someone Opie has dealings with. Dino, Bijou, Kiera, Gary with his beads and his
sunglasses, the Opie aficionado, the fan of his work, becomes familiar with all these
characters, re-encountering them here and there. We should like to know more about
the life of jmb, graphic designer (2002), a title which reads just this way, all in lower
case, suggesting perhaps that the designer in question, the subject of a portrait
featuring enormous economy of means, might be from somewhere in Central Europe
(Switzerland?). Opie the portrait artist is situated in the frame between the person
and the personal, on the one hand taking into account these schematic
representations and on the other working with the computer on digital photographs
he himself takes of his subjects.
Particularly fascinating are Opie's women, whether housewives, businesswomen,
secretaries, employees, schoolgirls, students, collectors, writers, philosophers,
masseurs, or Sara dancing, or the model Bijou slowly taking off her clothes in the
animation Bijou gets undressed (2003). Baudelaire, once more, and his immortal
theory of the "passante", with Paris as the backdrop, that "passante" who, decades
later, would give rise to some of the finest urban scenes by Bonnard or ToulouseLautrec. Opie's "passantes" are electric, more ephemeral even than real: one strolls
languidly across the LED (light-emitting diode) panel, one blinks on the plasma
screen, whilst another's earrings shine as it shakes to the movement of her head.
"Passantes", we might add, that wear the most varied clothing - bright red plastic
raincoats, printed silk blouses, lingerie - which is of particular concern to this painter,
who knows, Baudelaire as always, the importance of such ephemeral art.
People (2000). Opie's people, his great family. The crowd, in painting or in poetry,
the feel of the great city, Poe's The Man of the Crowd, precisely his Baudelairian
reading in Le peintre de la vie moderne, the city of Jules Laforgue - artistically
paraphrased by Caulfield, by the way, in 1973, in a fantastic album of silkscreens and so on and so forth, towards the tentacular cities, towards the time of the avantgardes, towards the electric Montparnasse night filmed by Eugen Deslaw, towards
the Multitudes (Crowds) of Spain's own Antonio Saura. The crowd and in it,
isolated, specific figures, in Opie. For example: This is Kiera, Julian and Christine
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walking. With regard to his highly characteristic figures walking or taking off their
clothes, the result of a long working process in which drawing also plays a role,
Melitta Kliege appropriately mentions Muybridge's 19th-century picture sequences,
studies of movement.
As he approaches his fiftieth birthday, Opie really does seem to us the painter of our
modern life, a life in which the real and the virtual, the artificial and the authentic,
feelings and logos are all mixed. As the painter that, in days to come, we will mostly
identify with our time. The painter whose emblematic and omnipresent images,
often accompanied by his own texts, many of them travel notes, we will remember and our children will remember: he is nearly our age but they, strangely enough, see
him more as one of their own - as we remember, when we think about the 60s, those
of Roy Lichtenstein, those of Patrick Caulfield, those of Alex Katz and those of Andy
Warhol - these last two also masters of the portrait - and those of the French Haitian
artist Herve Telemaque, or those of the aforementioned Equipo Cronica... When
much of recent Spanish figurative art takes that direction - we remember, for
example, the Valencian artist Manuel Saez, or the Galician Vicente Blanco's
proposals, some animated, and also highly Tintinesque, though in a different way and when concomitances between his work and that of artists in neighbouring
Portugal, such as Jose Lourenaco, this show at CAC Malaga, sponsored by a
Valencian savings bank, Bancaja, whose collection includes several Opies, could
hardly be more timely.
I end this piece, in the early hours once more, and once again at the Mency in Santa
Cruz de Tenerife, in one of my favourite temporary homes just recently. Once again,
soon after I stop writing, the screensaver with the Formula One race track and
drivers starts up in the dark ultramarine blue, who gradually begins to clear, whilst
above can be heard the sound of propellers and - just like one of Opie's plasma
screens, though we could also be inside a flight simulation programme, a subject I
am told he is also interested in - the position lights of the first flight out of Los
Rodeos flash, the lights of a small propeller-driven airplane, that's right, a Binter or
Islas flight, carrying Tintin, Hiroshige... and several characters from Opie, including
"the pilot", "the hostess", "the businessman", "the business secretary", "the tourist",
and one cannot help but remember one of Opie's installations, dated 2000, is entitled,
simply, Tourist...
A small propeller-driven airplane taking off from one island to another, an airport; I
said it just a few lines ago about my own "Airport Poem": a modern invitation to the
journey. "This is... Julian Opie!"
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