Catherine Opie: Portraits and Landscapes by Wexner Center for the Arts

Catherine Opie Portraits and Landscapes

“….for a second I was at the receiving end of my very own glance, somewhat startling somewhat true….” In September 2014, Catherine Opie made a site visit to the Wexner Center, and we talked, among much else, about the extraordinarily vivid character of the works included in Portraits and Landscapes. This series of color photographs was first seen at Regen Projects in Los Angeles in 2013, then at Peder Lund Gallery in Norway last year, and is now presented in a third variation here. While Opie first gained wide acclaim in the early 1990s for the confident mastery she brought to the traditions of portrait photography, the images in this present series (all from 2012–14) are marked by a surpassingly theatrical, assertively painterly intent, with each face or figure suspended within the deepest shroud black. The individuals so emblematically represented in these works are unified by the status they share as being among Opie’s “friends and people that I admire,” bonded further now by having collaborated with the artist as she extended her visual aesthetic into a mode embracing and interrogating allegorical detail. 1 Less a departure from than a risk-taking progress within Opie’s practice, these recent portraits sharpen the dialogue always present in her work between the representation of individuals as members of a community (often a marginalized one) and the history of portraiture, particularly in the classical Western tradition. As abundant in both literal and symbolic detail as these portraits are, Opie has orchestrated their presentation here by interspersing among them landscape views in which identifying markers of any given location are precisely withheld. In such earlier series as those depicting Los Angeles freeways, suburban mini-malls, and ice-fishing houses on Minnesota lakes, Opie rendered her landscapes with an exacting environmental specificity, an approach that stands in radical contrast to the present series—all given as Untitled, and all taken near national parks in the American West.

As she noted of her method, “The detail is taken away by just racking the focus out in relationship to this green space of our experience of nature.” 2 When presented, as they are here, alongside the portraits made during the same years, the landscapes function as a rhetorical respite, a kind of time-out or palate cleanser; as Opie explains, “You need pauses in between really intense portraits; a moment to escape the face and the figure.” 3 Opie is characteristically forthright when discussing her work, and the reservoir of trust between her and those who sit before her camera is palpably communicated. Indeed, so marked is that bond I suggested to her that we survey, casually, some of these individuals to respond to their portraits. With her encouragement, I contacted a handful of them and requested that they push their thoughts into words for inclusion, in their unedited entirety, in this gallery guide. Those unsurprisingly generous responses, varied in tone and affect, all spring from the position so piercingly expressed in the epigraph above by the choreographer ELIZABETH STREB —the position of being on “the receiving end of my very own glance.” While most of the portraits in this series are of individuals posing alone, the value of community and connection are played out on another level, as filmmaker John Waters and visual artist Kara Walker articulate. JOHN WATERS: I collect contemporary art but have no desire to be IN it. I hate having my picture taken. I know this sounds ridiculous coming from someone as overexposed in the press as I am, but when I’m asked by a magazine editor, “Who would you like to photograph you?,” I always reply, “the one with the biggest

retouch budget!” But Cathy Opie is a whole different story. She’s an outsider who perversely became an insider. Being photographed by her is like being accepted by a biker gang, a sex cult, or a damaged mutual admiration society. She gave me a very Vincent Price look here and I didn’t have to tell her how I’ve secretly coveted his career since his death—she just knew it. Catherine Opie jumped off the edge of photography a long time ago, survived, came back up, and celebrated the plunge. I am happy, willing, and eager to be used by her. KARA WALKER: Well, I had a funny recollection while Cathy was shooting me. I had rescheduled our appointment by a few days. On Sept. 10 of 2013 I had a long frustrating night waiting for cops who never came—a livery cab driver had nearly totaled my parked car, right in front of my house in Brooklyn in the middle of the night, mere moments after I discovered I had broken a tooth. Hilarious, stupid mishaps that ultimately resulted in a tangle of dentist and car repair and insurance management. In the past, I told Cathy, I would have simply come in for my portrait the next day. I would have dragged my tired, toothless self, as it were, to keep our appointment. But instead I took a moment, gathered myself, chose a better day, and had a breezy time in the studio. It was a dark and cozy kind of shoot and I revealed to Cathy what I had not quite revealed to myself at that time. It’s a fact that so far in my brief history of notoriety, almost every portrait that has been done of me was fresh on the heels of some personal trauma, something that was only known to me at the time—a red-eyed sleepless night of distress, or illness, or an hour after a stupefying stressful legal proceeding. I once was covered head and shoulders with an unknown skin rash…and still, I allowed

On view May 16–August 2, 2015

him to do the portrait. Am I crazy? A masochist? Curious to see if the camera will reveal, steal, or heal the remains of my soul? There are a handful of images by well-known artists out there of me at my darkest, lowest points. Cathy’s manner and the resultant images show me feeling cool, collected, showing my muscles. Because I was speaking to her about this comic history of portraits, I felt a rush of ownership or at least fellowship—that we were going to endeavor to correct this past. Performance artist Ron Athey and tattoo artist Idexa Stern have been friends and collaborators with Opie since the 1990s, and it’s in part through their portraits that they’re able to retrieve those cherished, contested histories. IDEXA STERN: I used to be surprised

and a bit shocked about the directness of Cathy’s photography. It would take me years to look at my portraits that she took in my 20s. After being Cathy’s model for a couple of decades, I realize that with this portrait, that I look very much like I feel on the inside. Very much like when I tattoo people and bring their emotional life to the visible world. We have similar approaches in our different mediums, are great friends, and collaborate well. I love her!

RON ATHEY: Little Joy, Jr., with Opie, Divinity Fudge, Vaginal Davis, and myself, all at our peak 90s weight. Paired up OpieDiv, Ron-Vag, and staging fake fights, rough-housing, knocking the bar stool over, laughing too hard to be taken serious but a lot of critical mass.

2nd St. and 2nd Ave., World’s Largest Polaroid Machine, with Opie, Divinity, and myself, in the middle of a relentless

blizzard, each with a dedicated personal assistant, piles of props from the real thing, fresh color rolls and piles of props for the new thing, a room full of hands taking position to support the camera. Estate Project for Artists with AIDS: 13 images from my performance arsenal, restaged through the Opie Lens, blessed with the soft-focus Polaroid painterly quality, but still no punches pulled. Images run the gamut, I’m present in 10 of the 13. Divinity is solo in two, and in two with myself. In that setting becoming more minimal, they’ve also found a new poetic, one so strong that it’s survived the move to post-AIDS. Astute as Opie’s eye is, it’s no surprise that her fellow visual artists John Baldessari and Glenn Ligon should be just as bluntly pointed in their self-assessments. JOHN BALDESSARI: I saw the show in

which this was included at Regen Projects. It was on the same wall as a photo of a close friend, Lawrence Weiner. He had his shirt open to expose his chest hair. It’s a trick I’ll have to learn.

GLENN LIGON: I don’t like posing or

having my picture taken so Cathy had her work cut out for her. As difficult a process as it usually is for me, it is less taxing if someone I know is taking the picture. The hardness that settles on my face in front of strangers turns into a kind, placid resignation when sitting before a friend. To be sure, the skeptical curl of my upper lip is still there—that is a permanent feature, like a cleft chin—but it is a bit softened by the respect I have for Cathy as a photographer and the trust I put in her to do me right. When I look at the portrait I am reminded that I am part of something larger than myself: a community of artists, writers,

performers, acquaintances, and lovers, all vastly different from one another, leading very different lives but united for a brief moment by the shutter’s click. Opie’s aesthetic has always drawn deeply from and repaid a sense of community (an openhearted and curative replenishment)—and she does this, profoundly, as much from an ethic of inclusion as from a politics narrowly understood. Hers is a relentlessly diligent practice, and the close observer in the galleries benefits for a time from becoming a citizen coequal to those, as Ligon put it, “leading very different lives but united for a brief moment by the shutter’s click.”

BILL HORRIGAN Curator at Large 1.

Catherine Opie, quoted in Steve Appleford, “Catherine Opie's Documentary Photography Is on Display,” Los Angeles Times, January 27, 2013, http://articles.latimes. com/2013/jan/27/entertainment/la-et-cm-catherineopie-20130127.

Catherine Opie, quoted in Susannah Tantemsapya, “Catherine Opie on What’s in a Picture,” Whitewall Magazine, March 18, 2013.

Catherine Opie, interviewed by Yasmine Mohseni, “A Q&A with Catherine Opie about Her Bold New Body of Work at Regen Projects,” Blouin Artinfo, March 15, 2013.

All quotes from the artists were submitted to the author by e-mail, February–March 2015, and are copyright the artists. Visit wexarts.org/opie to view Opie’s portraits of the artists who replied. ABOVE FROM LEFT: John, 2013. Pigment print, 33 x 25 in. Kara, 2013. Pigment print, 33 x 25 in. Ron, 2013. Pigment print, 50 x 38 1/2 in. Elizabeth, 2013. Pigment print, 33 x 25 in. Glenn, 2013. Pigment print, 33 x 25 in. All images © Catherine Opie and courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

BIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Catherine Opie (b. 1961, Sandusky, Ohio) has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad, and her work was featured in several exhibitions at the Wexner Center, including More American Photographs (2013), organized by the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; Hard Targets (2010); and Visions from America: Photographs from the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1940– 2001, on view at the Belmont Building during the center’s renovation in 2004. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York organized a midcareer survey of Opie’s work in 2008, Catherine Opie: American Photographer. Opie has also had solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others. She has received accolades including the United States Artists Fellowship in 2006 and the Julius Shulman Institute Excellence in Photography Award in 2013. The artist received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Since 2001 Opie has been a professor of photography at the University of California, Los Angeles.

First and foremost, thanks go to Wexner Center Director Sherri Geldin, whose conversations with the artist led to this exhibition. Director of Exhibitions Management Jill Davis has overseen all aspects of the project in productive partnership with Senior Exhibition Designer Patrick Weber, Registrar Mark Van Fleet, and Curatorial Assistant Lucy Zimmerman. Thanks also to our colleagues in the center’s departments of design (Graphic Designer Brandon Ballog, who produced this gallery guide), marketing and communications (Publications Editor Ryan Shafer, Publication Manager Sylke Krell, Media and Public Relations Manager Erik Pepple, and Marketing and Media Assistant Jennifer Wray), education (Director Shelly Casto, Educator for University and Public Programs Amanda Potter, and Educator for Teacher and Docent Programs Tracie McCambridge), and development (Director Christy Rosenthal and colleagues). As always, we appreciate the efforts of our security team (Director Jason Working) and of our docents and volunteers.

ABOVE

REVERSE

Catherine Opie, 2012 Photo: Heather Rasmussen

Untitled #1, 2012. Pigment print, 40 x 60 in.

Untitled #9, 2013. Pigment print, 40 x 60 in. Collection of Tristin and Martin Mannion, Boston, MA

Heather Rasmussen, from Catherine Opie’s studio, has provided invaluable guidance, as have those at the artist’s Los Angeles gallery, Regen Projects: Shaun Caley Regen (President) and Jennifer Loh (Senior Director). Special thanks to the

generous lenders to this exhibition: Laura Donnelley, Alan Hergott and Curt Shepard, Marija Karan and Joel Lubin, Tristin and Martin Mannion, and Jamie McCourt.

Deep acknowledgments are extended as well to artists Ron Athey, John Baldessari, Glenn Ligon, Idexa Stern, Elizabeth Streb, Kara Walker, and John Waters, whose commentaries bring wit and affection to this project. Thanks most of all to Catherine Opie for sharing with us the fierce abundance of what she sees. Bill Horrigan Curator at Large

Catherine Opie: Portraits and Landscapes is organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts, and curated by Bill Horrigan, Wexner Center curator at large. Free and low-cost programs at the Wexner Center are presented with support from Huntington Bank and Cardinal Health Foundation. The Wexner Center receives general operating support from the Greater Columbus Arts Council, The Columbus Foundation, Nationwide Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council. Generous support is also provided by the Corporate Annual Fund of the Wexner Center Foundation and Wexner Center members.

Learn more about the exhibition and purchase tickets online wexarts.org/opie View a conversation with Opie and painter Jack Whitten moderated by art critic Tyler Green wexarts.org/media Become a member and enjoy free gallery admission wexarts.org/join

COVER Oliver and Mrs. Nibbles, 2012. Pigment print, 33 x 25 in. Collection of Alan Hergott and Curt Shepard

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