Paul Black: Generics and specificity appear to be a continual balancing act in your work. At once the art expresses a quality that homogenises the world but at the same time is specifically what it is, independent of that homogeny. A psychological amalgam between the icon in twentieth century visual culture and an anonymous pictographic fabrication of everyone and 'no-one'. How do you see this relationship functioning?
Julian Opie: Yeah, I think that balancing act is very key; I often change the things that are balancing. Often balancing the identity of the sitter and the abstraction of the sitter I was using - where I was using the generic and the standardized. Whereas in my latest work perhaps the balance is between that and recognising the thing at all, and when you're filming something of course you have the other element- which is of course the movement, which means you can abstract the image even more, because even if you have less lines, they're moving lines, so these can tell the story in a way the still line couldn't - through the particular way the lines move. These moving lines are now there in the work to provide basic information through a lot of footage that I'll now use to create works about walking forwards and backwards. That is one project. Another project is focused not on people at all, but I'm not sure what to call it, other than "landscape" – just using what it is that you see when you open your eyes'. In the past I've drawn a lot of what you'd "call" landscapes, again a similar kind of balance, that point where you don't really know if you're actually looking at anything but with enough information to do what a landscape picture does, which is to create space.
So I started out, about a decade ago, looking a lot at computer games. I was drawing pretty much two bands of colour, a green band and a blue band, just enough to create a "space". I spent a lot of time growing up in Cornwall and looking at the way the landscape works, and that is, that you do only see two or three colours, the sea, a hill, and the sky. Your brain breaks down this information into what is relevant.
PB: Your world seems dissected into these uncomplicated units, whereby each component is a signifier of something in the real world that only has a relevance in relation to the other elements in your art an example being the use of the three colours you just mentioned, and through this process you literally create a "working reality" through a "democracy" of objects.
JO: I don't agree with the term "Democracy of objects". I think there is a sense that I apply a kind of language to things, and that can make necessary finding a kind of communality about them. I think I may look at communality when I go about gathering information.
People often talk to me about "simplifying" things, being asked questions like that, where in fact it is the contrary. I shy away from the idea of "simplifying" as for me it seems the other way around. Having started from nothing, with a desire to make "something", having accepted that you are going to do that "something", you are automatically complicating things. Everything you do post "nothing" complicates things.
When people recognise a more complex form, like a body – they see what I do as a simplification – because they've got it in their head what that thing already is when they look at one of my figures. And I do that to a degree – I take a photo and then only draw some aspects available from the photograph, but I still don't see it as simplification – I see it as constructing out of the thing in front of me and I try to avoid putting in more than is necessary - as that seems, simply, a good rule to follow.
In the next article Julian Opie continues the explanation of his work
