JIM OVELMEN
Facsimiles of Animation Practice into Contemporary Art:
Fractured Expectations and Sidetrippin'

PART 2

 

JULIAN OPIE

British Artist, JULIAN OPIE, born 1958 and attending Goldsmith School of Art, achieved early success just out of Art School when he was picked-up by Lisson Gallery in London. Opie’s early work showed a humorous slant and sarcastic attitude toward art history and hierarchies of art practice. As a young artist during the 80’s, he borrowed from “non-art” conventions by pillaging mainstream culture. He was doing what Warhol, Oldenburg and Lichtenstein were doing, but blending pop with minimalism. (ala early Jeff Koons). An anti-authoritarian and anti-specialist mood informed the attitude of the 80’s, and ecouraged artists to trash systems of knowledge and fragment boundaries between art and everyday life. This was the nest of Opie. (here)

His first solo show at Lisson rode highly upon minimalism, (here) yet with an arguably irreverent attitude. Opie was using minimalism as just another pictoral style. (?) Critics worried about his slickness and irony, and accused his work of being pictoral.

Opie has since claimed that he has a style, and it is called a “non-style” …. Like Warhol, Opie explored the convergence of art and pop-culture, modalities of visual representation with ironically simple painting, drawing and sculpture…homing in on the mundane and what culture would deem: dreadfully boring. His work in the ‘80s dedicated to this kind of symbolic minimalism and cross-fed into his sculpture.(here)

Into the 90’s, Opies work more and more suggested narrative and animation
IMAGINE YOU ARE WALKING 1993, a sequence of stills, as if you are walking through a labyrinth. IMAGINE YOU ARE DRIVING offers paintings as animation stills, snapshots of everyday experience. Like Kentrdige, Opie arrives at animation by creeping slowly toward its language. Yet he could not be more different that Kentridge in attitude toward his subjects.

Since 1993, the computer took on greater and greater importance in his work into the late 90’s. Can this be considered a sidetrack away from painting? From ’94 on, the computer assumed a central role in Opie's practice, developing abstract space and realizing it perfectly; pitting realism of everyday life against representation. The lines in his drawings were now entirely rendered by the computer.

Opie sought a way to bring people into his existing inventory of signs, simplified cars, and building forms. Like all of his other “subjects" he selected the most standardized representation of the form he could -international symbol-forms of people. Yet, he still wanted to create a portrait; this was an experiment to combine the impersonal and the personal.

 His first exploration of figures are elegant and laconic, maifested as paintings and sculptures. The figures seem accurate, yet all-but completely null of personality. (here) Unexpectedly, reduction makes certain details more prominent. Because we expect correctness and usefulness in road-signs, we especially expect the curious details to be left out too. Opie said: “I want it to be as if each person I draw were a multi-national company with a logo”. There is a kind of cleansing of identity, (whether ironic or not) that seems polar opposite in treatment compared to Kentridge. Opie said about his portraits: “I think the whole notion we carry of people as ‘examples’ or ‘types’ is interesting". From a perspective like Kentridge's, might that also be demeaning? (here)

Opie’s portraits often are titled with the name of the person and their profession. Subjectivity is contained within an impersonal hard-edged aesthetic.(here) –Mary Horlak

From 2000 and beyond, Opie's LED and plasma-screen animations expanded upon his digital portraits by literally putting them in motion. Through 2003, there has been an expansion of Opie’s work internationally of these publicly installed walkers in urban centers. The animation looks utilitarian following his ongoing interest in road-signs, yet, like his portraits, the walking animations come off as surprising believable human locomotion, and are instantly recognizable. As crude as they are, we feel that there is a human prescence there. (here)

When installed in public settings, especially outdoors, the animated walkers and dancers seem to slightly mock the actual people walking around them(here) Their movements seem to be based on the slink of runway models, thin, young, and elegant. Often there is a sexuality dripping from the full body poses, and some are downright erotic. Yet, this very exhibitionism sometimes allows the public an equal opportunity to mock the animations back! (here)

This feeling of figurative presence in animation and its social effect on actual people is probably the most interesting part of this series of work, and truly allows his work to fit the “breathing life into” definition. These animation can "breath life" back into live people, or, othertimes, out-stare them.

Indeed, from the knee-jerk entertainment-expectation, Opie arguably could be accused of making the world most boring animation. (here)