An interview with Julian Opie in connection with his exhibition at Kivik Art Centre, Sweden.

As is often the case with these things, it’s all been a lot of work, very fast, to get the project done in time, but we’re excited to see it. I came here a few months back to see the site and to talk with Sune about what projects might be possible. I’ve known about the place for a long time now, but that was my first visit there so it was a question of spending a bit of time looking around the area and thinking about what might make sense. I was particularly impressed by some of the mortuary sites that we saw, as well as some prehistoric mortuary sites and some more recent graveyards. We investigated the stones that were local stones used both by sculptors and by cemeteries, and I’ve been involved in this project of drawing ballet dancers for a while, and so I merged the two projects for this site here, so we’ll have to go and see how that worked out.

I tend to work in projects, so once I get involved in something it tends to provide a whole range of solutions and activities for the things that I’m doing – museum shows or gallery shows or just studio work. I’ve been working with a British choreographer with the Royal Ballet in London for a while, over the last year or so. I made a stage set for him and in return he provided me with his ballet dancers, choreographed with various dances. One ballet dancer in particular is a Spanish woman called Caterina, she’s been the model for a whole range of paintings. I recently showed the paintings in Korea.

Apparently this stone is fairly local, and has been used for a long time now. It’s quite a hard stone to work with, but rather beautiful and has been used by sculptors for quite a while, but also by what we call ‘monumental masons’ in English. These are sculptures made for cemeteries; so tomb stones and statues that you would find in cemeteries have used this same stone, and I like this crossover between architecture and art which you often find in graveyards. There’s obviously no real need for architecture there, but there’s a relationship between the architecture and the tombs, and statuary. Monumental statuary has been an inspiration for a long time in various ways.

Q: How local is the stone?

It’s from a quarry forty kilometres away, so it’s a very dense and rather beautifully soft black stone. When you carve into it – or rather when you sand blast it, because we’re not carving we’re sandblasting into the surface, not very deep – it’s enough to create a lighter colour and therefore you can draw or write on the stone. It’s a system that has been used by the Egyptians onwards. It’s one of the most basic ways of producing a drawing – to scratch into a smooth surface of a rock and reveal a lighter, rougher colour. It allows you to draw and, unlike a lot of my work, it’s incredibly permanent and extremely heavy in every sense. It's heavy with meaning and atmosphere, but it’s also physically very heavy so I like to contrast this with Caterina who’s extremely springy – much springier than I will ever be – like most ballet dancers she is up on her toes a lot of the time, she seems to defy gravity and her movements are very strong and flexible but she’s a lightweight person. The contrast between this heavy black stone and its deathly connotations and the liveliness of a ballet dancer's movements I think can create a nice dichotomy, a kind of dynamic situation.

Q: Where did you make these pieces?

We worked on them here, it’s a relatively standardised system now. I believe what happens is that I make drawings of Caterina (I’ll use that computer drawing for a number of different projects, for instance I might make some paintings with those drawings too) and I can then email them to the fabricator here in Sweden and they use a computer-guided knife to cut sheets of rubber which they lay on the stone. They then use sand shot from a gun to cut away the stone where the rubber isn’t, and when you take the rubber away, you’re left with a shallow engraving as it were, in the stone. It’s similar to engraving methods which use acid because they’re using the natural action of sand on the stone. So it’s all been made here under the supervision of Sune Nordgren, with whom I’ve worked with in the past. I worked with him when he was running the Baltic Museum.

Q: Have you done this kind of work before?

I have, yes but on a rather smaller scale and much less dynamically, so I’m happy with this new project. I feel it’s the most dynamic thing I’ve done, but I worked with a woman called Shahnoza who’s a pole dancer from Soho – well she’s from Iran, but she works in Soho, London — and a year or two ago, I did this quite large project using the idea of pole dancing and the gravity defying quality it can have. I was working in Japan with some stonemasons who make gravestones, and they’re very highly skilled, as craft often is in Japan, so I learnt a bit about the whole process there. It’s a different kind of stone, it’s rather more, well some people might say more vulgar or glamorous, it’s highly polished black granite so it’s a very deep black. It is glamorous and it’s high gloss, whereas the stone here is much more moody and more classic looking because it’s not high gloss. But the works here are quite a lot bigger and they’re a lot more complicated. The works I made in Japan, which have been shown here and there, had just three pieces that joined together. Whereas the sculptures here, because of the quality of Caterina and her lively movements, are much more complicated; they’re made up of four or five blocks of stone, rather precariously balanced on top of each other.

Q: How many sculptures like this are there?

There’s three works and each work is divided into something like five pieces of stone of different sizes. They’re balanced a little bit like children’s playing blocks, and so there’s an element of jigsaw puzzle about it. In fact there was a plan at one point to make an invitation card that would be a jigsaw puzzle; you would fit the pieces together so you could, if you were strong enough, lift the pieces down and reassemble them in a way where Caterina was mixed up, but you can only assemble them in this way. I like that when you look at it, you’re not sure if the stones are piled in order to depict Caterina, or if Caterina is posed in order to follow the pattern of the stones, so there’s a question about those two things.

Q: Would you say your work has changed a lot over the years?

I actually think my work has stayed quite stable, in a sense. During the eighties, when I was much younger, my work seemed to go quite rapidly through different phases of quite different groups of work which you could categorise in very different feeling, but since the mid to late nineties I’ve really focussed in on two main bodies of work: landscape images, of which I’ve done quite a few of Sweden and Norway as it happens, and the figure. It’s only recently, in the last few years, where I’ve started to actually make some works that combine the two in some way. For example,  paintings where the people are physically in a landscape. I’m somebody, who, as Sune will know, is quite flexible; I like to see what the world will throw at me and then to respond to that. I think there’s an element of complacency sometimes, in that artists make art in their studio and show it in museums, but studios are a recent invention and museums are an even more recent invention. Before museums there were academies, and before academies there were palaces and churches, and before that there were graveyards and cave walls. Artists have always had to use what is available and I take that as a challenge and something exciting. For me, a CD cover, and the history of CD covers and HMV and Virgin megastores, are relevant venues for art as much as a national museum or a commercial gallery. One always has to be careful with everything. I’m always very careful about advertising; I never do any, and I’m not interested in commercial projects in that sense, but I think that working for a little CD cover is a really great place in our culture for images to be and to be looked a,  and the internet is a challenge too as to how to make that a useful venue for art. I’m just working on a new website at the moment, which should be out soon, where I tried to confront that challenge. I haven’t used music so much recently but there was a period for me where it became quite useful. I actually got Bryan Adams and Saint Etienne to write bits of music, which I incorporated into some of my works at the time. One of the works I’m showing here is of Bryan Adams, the guitarist, and he wrote me this piece of music in return for doing a portrait of him. The picture plays his music so it has both picture and sound. I like this idea that one takes on movement, perhaps sound, and all that’s possible with technology, not just a still image – artists of the past couldn’t really go beyond that, unless they had a three-piece orchestra playing in front of the painting, which happened on occasion, and the theatre of course often did this kind of thing. But now, with computers and iPods and so on, one can combine these things into a single work so I often do that. I make a lot of my work with computers. I recently have been commissioning musicians, not perhaps such famous ones, but someone who worked for me recently who put out a CD recently called John Bishop. There was another one is currently on tour with Lou Reid – he’s more of a session writer and musician but he’s very good, Rupert Christie he’s called. He writes music for some of the films, so it continues and I’m very interested in it. Wayne McGregor, the choreographer I’ve collaborated with, commissioned some musicians so there’s a kind of sense of conglomeration and as one gets older, one of the advantages is that you get to know more people, and people get to know you, and people come to you more with these ideas. Somebody came to me with this idea of working with Wayne McGregor and although it makes me nervous because there’s always that danger that the pop star decides they can always make paintings, and it’s not always a good idea, or make movies, but it is a great resource. I would never have imagined when I was at art school that the Royal Ballet would come to me and ask if I’d like to use their dancers, or that somebody with a stone factory would come to me and say ‘here, here’s my stone factory. What would you like to do?’ These are fantastic resources and life is short so I tend to grab them and see what I can do with them and take that challenge. But I haven’t worked with Blur since then, although the National Portrait Gallery in London bought the four paintings of the members of Blur and there’s a poster in the London underground of Alex, the bassist and one of the main members of Blur. He had an autobiography recently, which had the picture on the cover, and it was a huge bestseller, so the works have had a bit of a re-birth through that. But wherever I go, if I go to Korea or anywhere, people always ask me about the Blur cover. I never expected it to have quite such an impact, but the world of music is so much more pervasive and international than the world of art. The world of art is such a small thing, although that’s changed a bit over the last ten years, it still is such a small coverage, and world – which is okay, but the world of music is still so much more huge, and it still takes me by surprise just how many people know about that CD cover.

Q: Who are you collaborating with for the dancer project?

He’s called Wayne McGregor and he’s heralded as one of the rising stars. He’s fantastic. I’m not a great dance expert, I’ve never really watched much contemporary dance, I’m much more interested in music and art on the whole, I always have been. So I didn’t really see the point of it much, but Wayne has changed my opinion entirely. I think there’s something very basic about just the human body and he really pushes it way beyond traditional ballet whilst still holding onto the language of ballet and I like that. There’s a language there that you can recognise and I tend to work in that way too, where I use traditional and contemporary languages but I don’t invent them, I use them and see where you can push them. I think perhaps in some similar way, he takes the conventional language of ballet but pushes it, and mixes it with natural movements and it's very powerful, very purposeful, quite sexual often, in a very bodily sense, and I think he’s really inspiring. So having his dancers available means that I can take the things I was doing before with normal people and really push it, and see where it can go, which has been good. I think that these works here, for me, are the liveliest works that I have done. I think combining the powers of Wayne McGregor and Caterina and whatever powers of drawing I have, has collaborated into something which has perhaps more power than if I had relied on just my own, so that’s a nice thing about collaboration.