Julian Opie Interviews and Texts – from his own website Guardian Online – 2003

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

 
Augé 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.

 
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 matter-of-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.

 
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.

 
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.

 
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 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 "angst-ridden" 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."

 
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.

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!"

 
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.