Research 008 Opie

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Henning M. Lederer | MA Digital Arts FT | +44 (0)7551 960 327 | www.led-r-r.net

Sel-Negotiated Unit // MSN 2 // Research 008 // Julian Opie

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Julian Opie

I am always reerring to the world, to things that seem poignant to me and then try to synthesize

or make my version o these things. Not with individual, specic objects but more as an example o

something. So anything you can think o: a house, a trac light, a tram, a car, all o these things are one

example o the system. When you get to it, you read the largest system as well. Obviously when you are

looking at a car, you are not only reading a Ford Escort, theres millions variations, dierent colors. Youcan have a relationship with this one object. But by looking at it, you have this wider relationship, which

is then connected to other things. This somehow seems to me a more real type o object. On the one

hand I wanted to go urther with this, on the other hand I was rustrated about the relationship between

works and exhibitions. I still want to go urther, not making the exhibition separate rom the work. Not to

make site-specic installations. Thinking o someone arriving at the show and realizing that this only exists

because o the situation seems slightly wrong to me. I want something which has some elements o that

but is not completely like that.So I try to build not just one work that you can see as one possibility of a

system, but a whole system of works.


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Julian Opie is one o the most signicant artists o his

generation whose artistic preoccupation has investigated

the idea o representation and the means by which images

are perceived and understood. Throughout his practice,

Opie has developed his own reductive ormal language

which seeks to refect, not reality itsel, but rather the way

in which reality is represented: his distinctive language o

discipline and ormal consistency which is employed in his

current portrait and landscape work.

Drawing rom infuences as diverse as billboard signs,

classical portraiture and sculpture, to classical Japanese

woodblock prints, Opie paints using a variety o media

and technologies which enable him to make three-

dimensional explorations o his subjects.

Julian Opie lives and works in London.

[http://www.lissongallery.com]


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His invented spaces, made up o elements that seem amiliar but are in act imaginative compressions,

are designed to disconcert and re-orientate the viewer into the discovery o new territory. Some o the

territory is conceptual (is it real space or space I think know?); some is ideal (a dream landscape, with

the vivacity o the pop-up book); but most o all it is a ertile plain, where the romance o the past (all

those archetypal European building-types) meets the technologies o the present. In Opies hands, these

combine into new worlds o abulous suggestion, the illusion sustained by our knowledge o the world as

seen through the monitor, the screen, and rom endless visual reproductions.

[Andrea Rose]


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Walk into the picture

Walk into the picture. Like a contemporary Alice walk through the rame o the computer screen and

move between the buildings and cars, towards the distant hills and trees. The road that stretches ahead is

not empty, because you are driving along it.

Like a lm rolling beore your eyes it is with a sense o passage, o passing through, that one views Julian

Opies work This vision is quintessentially modem: one o the images passing beore you, whether on a TV

screen, or through the windscreen o a moving car. There is an equivalence between anything you might

see, so that the curve o the road ahead carries the same degree o signicance as the arch o a gothic

roo or a sheep in a eld. They are all tokens o a visual currency; amiliar elements o the same code.

The immaculate suraces o Julian Opies sculptures reer directly to technological methods o abrication

and to an age in which modes o reproduction - by generic cloning or by computer simulation - bear more

relevance than means o production. It is no longer relevant to try to distinguish between the original,

authentic or real and the virtual, copy or twin. We now admit the virtual in to our lives as wholly real. Our

children accept a Tamagotchi, a computer-generated creature that needs to be ed and played with in

order to be kept alive, as readily as a pet cat or dog. Opies sculptures have an independent authority; they

are not simple representations o, nor merely signs or an absent original.


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The generic orm o, or example,

a car, reduced to the essential

visual elements o car-ness, does

not require interpretation but

registers instantly in the mind

as car. Our comprehension is

not hindered by lack o detail or

the two-dimensionality o the

painting. The three-dimensionality

o the sculpture occupies space

in the same way that an idea

occupies our thoughts. The

slippage between reality and

representation exists exactly in this

interplay o dimensions. The use

o the archetype or generic ormencourages the viewer to engage with the work in a sense o play - a detachment not o alienation but

or the purposes o investigation and understanding. The titles o the works oten suggest philosophical

propositions - Imagine you are driving, or example - reinorcing the presence o an obliquely suggested

narrative or puzzle which is never unravelled or explained. The non-place o the modem white cube art

gallery or the transit lounge o an international airport give the work a space akin to a blank computer

screen or the neutral ground o pure logic.

All the elements o the exhibition as it is

rst shown in New Delhi will be dierently

congured or each venue o the tour,

according to the possibilities suggested by

every new space. This interchangeability is

central to Opies conception o the work

The individual sculptures unction like

components o the binary code o computer

technology or the DNA code o genetics:

each one a quantity o inormation to be

manipulated by the artist and processed by

the viewer. Opie firts with amiliar domesticmodular systems in the construction o his

sculptures: buildings are made up o boxes

that recall childrens building blocks like Lego.

Sales catalogues or the Swedish urnishing store IKEA were one o the models or the design o this

catalogue - again playing with standard elements and modular systems which can be combined in

an innite number o ways according to the taste o the individual and the size o their home. In this

Opie catalogue you will nd all the variations o tree, oce block, animal and car available, alongside

suggestions or ways to install them.

[Caroline Douglas, London 1997]

Documents

Research 008 Opie