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.
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 icecreams, 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.

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.
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.
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 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 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.
------------------

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 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.
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 twentyfour 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

10

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 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 lowslung 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

11

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.
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.

12

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 computerguided 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.
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 closeup. 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 half-length 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.

13

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 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 (d.), 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)

15

correspondence between signifier and signified. Opie achieves

detachment in the same way as Pop artists did 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
look-alikes 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

16

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 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 CraigMartin'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

17

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 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 hairband 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

18

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
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 impersonal, 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.

19

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.
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

20

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).
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, halfdreaming 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?

21

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' 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 re-mixing 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 Czanne felt more honest: what I really wanted to do was
draw a Czanne, 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 Herg 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

26

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 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

27

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 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 hairpin 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.

28

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.
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

29

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 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

30

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 mail-order 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.

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.

31

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.

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

32

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.

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

33

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 Aug 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 habitu of supermarkets, slot machines and credit cards
communicates wordlessly through 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. Aug 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

34

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?
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

35

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
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 Aug 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'

36

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 Aug 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:
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

37

are defused, since its 'instantly summoned village life span is long enough
to calm us, and short enough not to be a burden'. Aug 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 carborne '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 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.
Aug 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.

38

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.
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.

39

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.
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.

40

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.
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

42

good clearly has its benefits but is it a primary concern? "It's not enough",
Opie says.
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 "angstridden" 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."

43

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 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 doubledecker 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 "comic-book" 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,

46

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.
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 CraigMartin, 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

47

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...
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,

48

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 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,

49

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...
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

50

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
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 Toulouse-Lautrec. 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

51

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 avant-gardes, 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 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...

52

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!"

53