A Conversation With Julian Opie
The Great British Artist Discusses His Work And Practice
Sep 20, 2008
Julian Opie is well known for what has often been described as generic and benign fabrications. Filling his space with die-cut colored vinyl shapes reading as an interaction between painting and sculpture, video works of pictographic reductions, and landscapes imbued with nominal, almost anodyne forms.
On an initial reading, anonymity, neutrality, and synthesized systems are Opie’s elements. This is a language of discipline and through that is expressed a formal consistency. This consistency suggests perhaps the conceptuality of a common human condition through objectivity and also the feeling (personally) of being disturbed by Opie’s work. This is probably due to a suggestion to the viewer of also being "reduced" as part of this equation.
Opie gives his works titles that suggest emotional possibilities. They appear to give the viewers the opportunity to project themselves into the work, to imprint themselves on forms within the artist’s structures. It could be said that one reason for this modus operandi is to create "blanks" to be filled (or "re-surfaced") by this superimposition, as we travel through his environs.
In fact, principles of temporality are aspects that you don't expect to find in seemingly iconic works of this nature. There may be a form of it to be found in Warhol's repetition of 20th-century icons in prints of Monroe and Elvis, but that is merely representation instead of an actual process between object and viewer. But as you read the work it appears to behave more and more like the world it embodies. We live with anonymity on a daily basis, connect and disconnect as "bodies" rather than "identities" or "personalities" and seem to exist in an ever increasing "synthesised system", where interaction becomes almost sprawling global connections of an endless journey that mirrors this form of temporal journey, in much the same way as many of Opie’s "constructions".
It has been said that simplicity itself is a complex form to use in art. Therefore what appears simplistic in the accomplishment of a basic form is in fact a quite elaborate cognitive process for this artist, with that in mind I set about my conversation with this well-known British icon, of muted icons.
In the next article Paul Black has a discussion with Julian Opie
