After the 2016 presidential election, the artist Catherine Opie began cutting up magazines and collecting images of political import: photographs of guns, senators, baby seals on shrinking ice caps. Today, in her studio in downtown Los Angeles, which occupies 5,000 square feet of a former brewery, a free-standing glossy black monitor plays these images as part of an animated collage. As digitized cutouts of ocean scenes and architectural landmarks inch upward on the screen, Opie explains, they illustrate a dire consequence of our rising seas: “Buildings are going to go underwater.”
In the artist’s exhibition “Rhetorical Landscapes,” which will open at Los Angeles’s Regen Projects in February, a new series of stop-motion animations like this one will address the issue of climate change, along with gun control, immigration and other themes of global urgency. In reference to what she calls our “screen-driven culture,” the moving collages will play on upright monitors that resemble human-size smartphone screens while printed photographs of the Okefenokee swamps of Georgia and Florida hang on the gallery’s walls. “It’s a portrait, to a certain extent, of American ideology,” Opie says. “The swamp is part of this rhetoric that the current administration has adapted — but they’re very peaceful, amazing ecosystems that you don’t really need to drain.”
[Sign up here for the T List newsletter, a weekly roundup of what T Magazine editors are noticing and coveting now.]
Opie, who is featured in “Great Women Artists,” a new book published by Phaidon with the support of the Kering luxury group — with whom she has also collaborated on a series of limited-edition prints that will be sold to benefit the nonprofit organization Promundo — has used photography as a form of political engagement since the late ’80s. Her landmark 1991 series “Being and Having,” for example, which comprises close-up portraits of lesbian friends wearing fake costume-shop mustaches, challenged gender as a performance and social construct long before those ideas had entered the mainstream.
While she has long made work that feels ahead of its time, in this digital age, she notes, our engagement with politics and photographs is prone to more rapid shifts. “Six or seven years ago, I asked my class what a meme was, and I was so embarrassed,” says Opie, who has taught photography at the University of California, Los Angeles, for almost two decades. She hopes to continue teaching for a few more years, offering guidance to students who increasingly question photography’s place in an image-saturated world. To their uncertainty in the face of growing political tumult, she also offers reassurance. “I’ve lived long enough, being born in 1961, through an enormous amount of different politics,” she says. “I keep reminding them that this is when great art is made. This is when you get to use your voice.”
Over the last three decades, Opie’s body of work has included images of highways, landscapes, small towns and domestic spaces. Still, she’s best known for her portraits, piercing depictions of subjects that have been marked as “other.” It’s a space that Opie knows intimately. “I’m proud to be a woman, a feminist, a dyke, a mom,” she says. “I like the complication of being called sir every day and having a slight mustache. I like the kinds of fray that I’ve inhabited, all this time. I like the fluidity of my own identity. It makes sense that this kind of categorization takes place; I’ve actually created niches of conversations within those categories.” Below, Opie answers T’s artist questionnaire.
What is your day like? How much do you sleep, and what’s your work schedule?
I’ve always been really disciplined because I’ve never not had a day job. I prefer going to bed around midnight and getting up at around 8 or so. I have to drink two cups of coffee before my mind is working. And then I have breakfast, and if I’m not teaching, I come to the studio. If I am teaching, I’m usually prepping for my class. I usually teach Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then I’m in the studio Thursday, Friday, and there’s the travel schedule in between. When I’m in the studio, mainly I’m working on ideas that I’ve already photographed, unless I’m making portraits. So it’s editing, or answering an enormous amount of email. I’m a nine-to-fiver, and I get home at 6 because my son’s coming home from school then. Then we usually do family dinner. We pretty much try to eat together for the most part most days of the week. Sunday is reserved for family time with my daughter and grandson.
How many hours of creative work do you do in a day?
Twenty-four.
What’s the first piece of art you ever made?
My first self-portrait, when I was 9, making muscles. I grew up with art in the house. My uncle is a painter. My aunt is a sculptor. My dad owned a craft company, so art wasn’t foreign to me. I knew that if I wanted to make photographs, it was a cool thing to do.
What’s the worst studio you ever had?
No studio. Not having a studio for an artist is really hard. In the beginning, when my portraits were all shot in my living room in Silver Lake, I was constantly shuffling things around if I wanted to shoot. It wasn’t big enough. Even in my old 500-square-foot studio, even though it was a real studio, I would hit the wall at one point, literally and physically, because I couldn’t back up anymore.
What’s the first work you ever sold? For how much?
“Being and Having,” the mustache portraits. They sold for $600.
When you start a new piece, where do you begin?
It’s usually thought about within my mind. Then there are times where I’m just going off and exploring with the camera.
How do you know when you’re done?
My portraits on black — I’ve been making them since 2012 — but I’m not done with them. The black space is still doing this thing for me that I’m really enjoying. One of the things about photography that I’ve always loved and vacillated between is that within the bodies of work is that place of discovery. That’s what it is to keep making images with a camera. As for portrait sessions themselves, I don’t think anybody’s really that comfortable with having their portrait taken. I don’t really push people to the extent of being tortured. Having strobes in your face is a pretty unpleasant experience. I’m very fast, and I give a lot of directions. I know what I’m after.
How many assistants do you have?
Just one full time. Heather makes the final prints for all the exhibitions and does an enormous amount of emailing and scheduling for me. We’ve been working together for six years now, and I basically couldn’t live without her. She’s really amazing at getting all this other stuff done that I would never think of getting done.
What music do you play when you’re making art?
Not a whole lot. It’s pretty silent when I’m making art.
When did you first feel comfortable saying you’re a professional artist?
I like to think that you’re continually a student of it all, actually, but I guess probably when the Whitney Biennial happened in 1995, and I started to be in museums, I felt like I was doing something on a different scale. For a while, I found that it was actually easier to just say, “I’m a photographer.” Before, I would say to people that I’m an artist, and then they would go, “Oh, are you a painter?” I would be like, “No, I’m a photographer,” and then they would question whether or not photography was art.
Is there a meal you eat on repeat when you’re working?
There’s a great restaurant here called EdiBol. I get this bowl with really good pickled vegetables and pork in it, and the most amazing pankoed fried egg. It’s at least once or twice a week that I order.
What’s the weirdest object in your studio?
A Garfield stuffed animal that I’ve had as a kid that just lives on the shelf there, and there’s a third-place trophy from the ’70s when I was on a bowling league in Ohio. I’m actually incredibly nostalgic. Objects hold a lot of memories for me.
What are you reading right now?
I recently finished “The Overstory” by Richard Powers. I couldn’t pick up another book for two and a half months because it was still in my head. It’s a brilliantly researched piece of fiction about a deep, deep love for the forest.
What is the last thing that made you cry?
In March, my mother-in-law passed away. That was the last deep kind of grief and loss. But every day, my wife, Julie ,and I get misty thinking about our son, Oliver, leaving in a year for college. People will be like, “Oh my God, Oliver’s going to college. Are you so excited?” Yeah, we’re really excited for him, but it’s going to be really different for us. We really like him; parents might love their children, but they might not like them.
What do you usually wear when you work?
Jeans and black T-shirts.
Do you exercise?
I’m a swimmer. I’m a walker. I’m a tennis player.
If you have windows, what do they look out on?
The front window looks out onto the sidewalk where there are planters. When artists come over, that’s where they smoke.
What do you pay for rent?
A dollar per square foot.
What is your worst habit?
Wanting to smoke.
What embarrasses you?
Being a larger person means going to restaurants sometimes, scanning the chairs and realizing you’re not going to fit.
What is your favorite artwork by someone else?
I really like a certain openness and vulnerability within portraits. If I were on a desert island, I’d take Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein, Alice Neel’s portrait of Warhol, then anything Hans Holbein ever painted. I’ve spent a long time looking at people and trying to make portraits more linked to painting to a certain extent than actual photography. That Gertrude Stein portrait by Picasso, whenever I visit the Museum of Modern Art, I can just sit in front of it for a really long time. It changes every time I see it, because it changes in terms of even my own emotional state.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Janelle Zara is a freelance journalist specializing in art, design and architecture. @janellezara
Source: Read Full Article