Finding a Lavender Thread Even in Catherine Opie’s Landscapes
Catherine Opie joined the UCLA Department of Art faculty in 2001. One of the preeminent artists of her generation working with photography, Opie is known for her evocative images of contemporary America that have been featured in major museum exhibitions around the world. Opie has chosen a myriad of subjects throughout her career, including the S/M community, city buildings, domestic life, high school football players, surfers, and President Barack Obama’s first inauguration. At UCLA, Opie teaches graduate and undergraduate students in photography.
“Untitled #4 (Surfers)“ (2009). Opie's photographs suggest a kind of family through shared affinities like surfing.
(Image credit: Catherine Opie and Regen Projects, Lehmann Maupin, Thomas Dane Gallery, and Peder Lund)Poring over a new monograph of Catherine Opie’s diverse body of photographs, which was published during Gay Pride Month, I found myself wondering as a gay man if anything ties her renowned images of lesbians in the Bay Area to her pictures of freeways in Los Angeles, ice fishing houses in Minnesota, high school football games in Texas, and Elizabeth Taylor’s closets in Bel Air.
Is there such a thing as a gay or queer sensibility? And if so, is it the lavender thread running through an entire body of “straight” work by Opie, a lesbian who is the recently named chair of the department of art at the University of California, Los Angeles?
Being queer implies a disconnect with the traditional norms of heterosexuality. From an early age, a person whose libidinal impulses are out of sync with what has been stipulated as natural reads the world as a text that is written in a foreign language and needs to be decoded. The process of recognizing and assuming a more authentic identity doesn’t erase the sense of estrangement, although that willed creation of a true self also lies at the heart of a queer sensibility, twinned with the residual longing to fit in by pretending to be what one is not.
Of course, this incongruity between what one is and what one is expected or required to be is not uniquely the property of gay people. August Sander in the early 20th century made portraits of Germans from all walks of life who were trying to live within the constraints of their social roles. Building on the pioneering pictures of the lesbian Claude Cahun and the bisexual Diane Arbus, Gillian Wearing in our time has addressed the presentation of self through the wearing of masks. But to agree that these are universal human issues doesn’t deny that a queer person — and particularly a queer artist — will usually perceive them more pervasively, and with greater immediacy and urgency.
Beginning in the early ’90s, Opie made her name with a series of portraits of Bay Area lesbians who engaged in sadomasochistic practices, a community to which she belonged. The most talked-about photos were her self-portraits: Opie leather-hooded and stripped to the waist, with metal needles running up and down her arms and the word “pervert,” embellished by a leafy flourish, incised bloodily above her breasts; Opie nursing her son with the decade-old “pervert” scar still visible; and most poignantly, the earliest in the group — Opie’s naked back, carved with a childlike stick drawing of two women holding hands in front of a house and a cloud that is partly obscuring the sun.
These self-portraits are carefully composed, placing Opie against opulent, deeply colored cloth backdrops with foliage patterns that resonate with the designs of her cuttings. “I knew I had to use aesthetics to talk about my community at that point in time, that there needed to be a different way to enter it beyond a documentary style,” she said, in an interview in the monograph. “I was still documenting, but there’s a formality there.” — Arthur Lubow, Aug. 11, 2021
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the New York Times website.
HEADER IMAGE: In a photo Catherine Opie made on the set of her black-and-white film “The Modernist,” in 2016, the transgender protagonist played by Pig Pen prepares to torch the iconic midcentury Sheats-Goldstein Residence, designed by John Lautner. As Oscar Wilde wrote in a classic line, he is killing the thing he loves. (Image credit: Catherine Opie and Regen Projects, Lehmann Maupin, Thomas Dane Gallery, and Peder Lund)
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