Catherine Opie - 'I'm asking us to contemplate, quite honestly, what’s happening to our world'
Art professor Catherine Opie's new book by Phaidon follows Opie's career through her depictions of desolate L.A. freeways, domestic Southern California homes, and spookily empty downtowns.
"In Phaidon's new Catherine Opie book, the curator Helen Molesworth writes that “I’d like to think that if I lived in the future, I could be a connoisseur of a Catherine Opie photograph.”
Catherine Opie - Pig Pen (1993) What does she mean? Well, “connoisseurs were not simply the people who could identify the finer things in life,” she explains, “they were people who knew enough to say, ‘I think that might be a Caravaggio,’ and possessed the skills to back up that sort of claim.”
So how would Molesworth spot an Opie original, and how would she back up the claim? Again, she elaborates: “I’ve been looking at her pictures since the early 1990s, marveling at the desolate Los Angeles freeways, the blank stillness of the domestic exteriors of Southern California, the spooky emptiness of corporate America’s downtowns.”
“Then came the infinite landscapes," the curator writes, "reaching edge to edge in every photo, the ocean, the football field, the great lakes, each dotted with individuals, almost always rendered anonymous, in pursuit of a perfect wave, a touchdown, a fish. There was, in other words, the figure and the ground, the cosmic and the molecular, the empty and the full.”
The empty and the full, the figure and the land mass, the outsider and his or her group, who, in turn, make up the patchwork of American society. Is this what sets Opie apart?
Here, the LA-based fine art photographer discusses two very different works that lie at either end of this signature continuum, which nevertheless, seem to be reconciled in quite similar artistic outcomes. Both are launched today as Phaidon collector's edition prints.
There’s her portrait of her friend and long-standing subject and collaborator, Pigpen. The pair have known each other and pretty much been pals for as long as Opie has been photographing seriously. Pigpen appears in Opie's first film, The Modernist, which follows Pig Pen as they set fire to modernist architectural icons in Los Angeles: the angular Sheats-Goldstein Residence and the Chemosphere. After these torchings, Pig Pen creates collages that commemorate their crimes.
'Muse’ is the wrong word to describe this relationship, as Opie explains; the strength of friendship is more important, as is the passing of time that enables her to watch her friend’s body change, and feel their bond deepen."— Artspace Editors, Jun. 3, 2021
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Artspace website.
Read more about Catherine Opie.
Stay engaged. Use #UCLAarts to stay connected.
