Transcript of Julian Opie talking about his works to KBS.

When you see somebody from a distance, you don’t particularly take in every detail, you perhaps notice it’s a man or a woman, you notice whether they’re young or old. I’m trying to capture a sense of the general idea of a human being, rather than slowing the image down by putting all the details of the face. If I put all the details of the face, you’re going to look at her and start to think of her as a person. But this is not the focus of the picture; I want you to think about her movement, and about her presence.  So I find that by deciding to omit specific detail, this allows the image to have more speed, more impact. It also allows me to draw with more speed and impact.

The materials that I’m using here are designed for billboard animation, for window fronts. It’s computer-cut plastic sheets, so a great deal of detail becomes very complicated using this system. It’s more a system designed for impact. If you look around the city, you look at the word “SONY” at the top of a building; it doesn’t have a lot of detail. It doesn’t want it, it doesn’t need it, it wants to make an impact. So it keeps things simple and straightforward. When you come to detail you use new systems, and I do deal with that in different work within the exhibition. But here I’m focusing on movement and dynamic colour. It seems better to only have a certain amount of information. If people have detail, they might bring a story or a narrative to that picture. They might start to wonder what she’s like, is she pretty? I think your eye would focus on her head. My eye is focused on your head; your eye is focused on my head. If we go to the other side of the room then I start to see all of you, but I lose your skin quality, or your eyebrows. This is to do with distance and focus, which you see with cameras. So if you think of this piece as a camera shot from a long way away – you understand the movement and the position but not the details of their personality.

It’s not really that I have something to say, particularly. I can join in and interpret my own work with the critics, but really it’s a visual activity but like a song. I sit down and pluck at my guitar, so to speak, and write a song and if people like it, that’s great, if they don’t, maybe I’ll try to write another song. So here, I can tell you what I was doing but I can’t explain the work exactly, in the sense of giving you a verbal equivalent to what I really want to say.

This is a dancer called Caterina, she’s a professional ballet dancer and I came across her because I was doing a collaboration with the Royal Ballet, in London. I saw her dance in Covent Garden, and I thought her movements were fantastic. They had a dynamic quality and purposefulness to them – everything she did seemed to have a reason, not just to take a pose. Other ballet dancing is about serious, beautiful positions – but she seemed to be doing something, like there was some activity, a job she was doing but she didn’t know what the job was. So I asked her to come to the studio and to bring eight different outfits to wear. We looked at the outfits lying on the sofa and we put together these clothes with the beads. And I got her to do the dance, eight times in all these different outfits and also with no clothes on.

I filmed her with a high-powered video camera, which takes something like fifty frames per second. Very high definition so I could go through this for hours and hours, finding a really dynamic moment. Going forwards and backwards to find a moment where she is really making the most of her body. I can’t dance, so I’m particularly impressed by these positions.

I took a frame and then I put this photograph onto the computer and, with an architectural tool, I drew over it – pulling and pushing until I got it to seem like it has the same quality as she does. As you can see, I don’t put in all the detail because I want to focus on the dynamic movement that she’s got. The more detail you put in, the slower the image. By keeping it very simple, it allows the piece to read very fast. I suppose you can think of it again, as music on a guitar. If you keep it simple you can maybe dance to the song.

I’m interested in the way that she describes this rectangle. I wanted to make something that looks like a painting, and I thought the figure decides the rectangle, or maybe the rectangle describes the figure. In this exhibition, all of the rectangles hold the same person in the same scale. But if she does one thing, the painting is smaller, if she does another, the painting is big. I like the idea that she is present, deciding how this exhibition will look just by her different movements. She even comes out of the painting and onto the floor and starts to dance around the room in these kind of quasi-sculptures. They are supposed to look a little bit like Baroque statues that would be made in stone or marble, but I’ve made them using a contemporary advertising display technique. Where you might see the word ‘Coca-Cola’ written on the top of a building in 3-Dimensional writing, I’ve used the same technique.

Here, we are doing something very simple: having a chat. Yet, look at all this stuff – we’ve got cars out there, we’ve got cable structures across here, we’ve got a massive video camera; three people working on it. How complicated is that? If you want to make anything in the world you have to concentrate, you need help, you need finances, you need time, and you need practice. If you want to make something that really works, it requires a lot of input, a lot of focus. I put in as little focus and time as possible – obviously I don’t want to waste my time, I’m busy and I’ve got things I’d like to do. I don’t think I put more into this work than I need to. With an object of this scale, I think that I’ve found the most efficient method to have a big object of colour. If you want a large area of colour, you can go into any art studio and discuss it with all the assistants – it’s a real challenge. Because anything that you try to do presents back immense problems: if you try to roll on the paint you get hairs and bubbles, by hand you can see the marks where your brush was, you try to get a big sheet of wood and it starts to bend when the weather is wet. Making anything, even a simple pot or a picture, might seem very straightforward. But use a pen in the wrong way and it goes through the paper. You start to make the paper very big, so what do you do? You put it on the wall, but the wall breaks when you put some nails in it. Making things in this world is our job, your job and my job, and it’s a complicated activity. But it’s kind of behind the scenes; I don’t think people need to worry too much about this. What they’re presented with is pretty fast and I want it to have no activity, no suggestion that there was a pause. Just in the same way that when you watch a film, you don’t want to see a microphone at the top of the screen. We all know there’s a microphone there, and a cable hidden here, but we do not want to focus on the microphone or the cable, you want to focus on the conversation. In the same way I don’t want you to focus on the way that I made this, I want that to be in the background. At the same time, it’s kind of important too; the way that I make this has references to the rest of the world. It’s like the stuff you see on the street; as you come up here you see signs, you see shops, you see Coca-Cola machines, you see the sticker in the window with my name and my picture. And with the same technology inside, is a painting – which hangs on the wall and looks like a painting – but it isn’t really a painting. This discussion is a discussion on many levels, about Caterina, about painting, about an object on a wall, about colour, about movement.

I think making an exhibition is a theatrical production. In a sense that when people come through this gallery, I can imagine that they might walk around like this, then go upstairs to see more work and then leave. During that period, they’re mine in a way. A film unravels – I want to show them one thing, and another and each of these works should somehow add to the experience. If I show upstairs the same way I show downstairs, there is a gap in between the stairs and that doesn’t work. I find that making an exhibition where there is a sense of story makes it easier to compose a display that you can engage with. I could easily make an exhibition with completely varied work, but I find that creating some narrative between the works can give the exhibition more of an impact and more interest, and holds people’s attention better than if you put in unrelated work from different series.

I drew Caterina partly knowing that I was going to have this exhibition. I knew the space, I’d already been here and I thought it would be really good to play out something all round the walls so that as you look in the space, you see Caterina’s whole side dancing, covering this wall. So to some degree, the work is made with an exhibit in mind. I think of these spaces as an extension of my work. It’s not just a place to sell your work or a place to put a few things I made recently; it’s an opportunity to make a show and to extend my projects.

I put together this project with this dancer, and with this opportunity I can play out the project in a dramatic way that would make more of that project than if I had had no exhibition. I like to use the opportunity of an exhibition to develop my ideas and to go further than I’d go if I had just stayed in my studio and did one picture, and then another picture and then another picture. At the same time, some works in this exhibit are not Caterina, but that was all the works I had of her and that’s probably enough. I thought it might be nice to give a different angle to the works, to show some other kind of work. I made this sculpture a year ago – it has a relationship with this work without being actually directly related. Outside the exhibition is some more work I made – I often make work outdoors, so it’s always nice to take the exhibition out into the world. It feels like everything is not just to be looked at in here, but you can go outside and see more.