Julian Opie talks to The Korea Herald about his work.

Recently, the work has become much more complicated in the way that it’s drawn. If you see some of the pictures, the dress on the girl in the silver dress took me five days to draw. Every day I went to work and I just drew her dress. It’s like knitting or something, all day long. People have begun to ask me a little less about this question of simplification because there’s nothing very simple about five days on a dress! But it surprises me that people ask this question so much. If you look at other art, art from the 18th and 17th century, no one asks why they’ve simplified the faces. But if you look closely, many of them are painted in about half an hour. There’s not much there, there are simply a lot of tricks and clever ways to do things. Even the lace around the neck was done with a lot of brush strokes but in a systematic way, not so dissimilar I think, to the way that I am trying to draw.

There is obviously something about the way that I present things that is suggestive to people that they are simplified. But I think it’s the other way round: I’ve started with nothing, and I’ve slowly added what I feel I understand, what is logical, starting with these simple symbols for human beings. I wanted to draw people so I looked for a language that existed in the world that people would recognise and understand, which would stand for people. I focused on these signs you have for lavatory doors (male and female), which obviously have to be recognised, as people speaking different languages, from different parts of the world urgently need to know which door to go into.  No time to mess around!

I took these symbols and I superimposed them onto an image of my partner at the time, and I manipulated the lavatory door symbol (which was just a black circle and a dress and two legs) until it fitted her shape. Then I added her handbag and the tilt of her head, and to my surprise it looked exactly like her! It looked like her but maybe from one hundred metres away. The kind of thing you see in a park- “Is that my friend? Yeah it is!” Because you know how they stand, you know the feeling of them, the way they sit, the way they hold their head. And bit-by-bit, over the years, I’ve tried to see what I could add in but retain that sense of recognition, that feeling of presence that you get when your brain fills in the information.

The danger is to put so much in that the viewer’s brain cuts out. And I think the danger with a photograph, often, is that your brain doesn’t really engage because it doesn’t need to. There’s so much information there, there’s no need for the drawing or the interpretation in your mind to function. Whereas by leaving out her neck and her head, and leaving her almost like the shadow of a person, there’s the possibility that she can be more realistic. There’s something very alive about a shadow, or somebody moving or disappearing into the next room. You can feel their presence with a shiver. Whereas a completely detailed diagram of them wouldn’t particularly give you that same measure of reality.

Over the years I’ve played out what it’s possible to do with these figures that I’ve invented a way of drawing. It’s also weird for me that I go on the internet and there are sites where you can send your photograph in and they will draw your portrait in my style. I clearly must have found something that is usable, by people other than me. There’s a shop down the road from me that said you can have your portrait done in Warhol style, Liechtenstein style and Opie style. I walked in and said, “What are you doing? You can’t do this!” and they said “Sorry we thought you were dead.” To be honest I felt amused and rather pleased, but I also had a satisfying sense of indignant self-righteous anger; how dare they? I guess anybody who gets ripped off feels that mixture of pride – that anyone would bother to rip you off – and also outrage, that they would cheat you, in a way.

Generally I don’t mind. The only thing I mind is when it’s more famous than I am! There was a TV show in London that “stole” my style, as it were. On this chat show, they did very bad portraits of their guests, and put them up behind them. That annoyed me: one, because so many people saw it, more than they see my work. Two, because they were so bad! So people thought it was my work, but they thought it was bad. That felt really unfair, that I had to suffer because of their poor quality. I tried very hard to stop them doing it, but in the end you can’t fight TV.

When I was a teenager I used to stand in front of the mirror and with a felt tip pen, draw myself and then step away and see this image, which in a way was cheating. You’re supposed to just draw whilst looking at someone. But what does that mean? Why is it cheating to use something; we use our eyes, is that cheating? We use a pen, is that cheating? We use a camera, is that cheating? At what point do we feel like you’re using tools to draw with? With the mirror or the digital camera or the computer. Tools whereby I can draw in a better and more controlled way.

When I see art that I like, I feel a sense of engagement and energy and happiness. When I come out, I feel like I want to do it, I want to engage in the world in a new way. I guess I feel that when I hear really exciting music too. It suggests to me that the world is full of possibilities and that we can exist. Not just float, but actually do something about it, engage with it. I can only hope that maybe one could be able to give that as well as receive it. Certainly, that’s what I get from looking at art that I really enjoy.

So if anybody feels that, they can use that to go out and look at the world. A friend of mine said he was on the motorway with his girlfriend and looked in the mirror of his car and saw the motorway behind and they both laughed because they said it was like my painting. If reality can start to be somehow made more present – that sounds too pompous! For me reality becomes more real when I’ve done something with it. I’ve made some work using birdsong, and now when I hear birdsong I listen much more.  I learnt how to listen to birds because I worked with it. I think for an artist making work, it’s like learning about the world; it’s like practising the world. Practising how to look, how to be, and that’s what I would hope might come out of the process. There is certainly no “message”. I’m not saying, “you should dress like this, you should dance like this”, there is no hidden political agenda, as far as I can understand. I just investigate my ideas and go about the activity of drawing. 

Not everybody likes my paintings, I can assure you. The weird thing about making art is that you don’t really meet your audience, it’s not like being a musician, where you feel the response of your audience, people tell me it’s an amazing experience. You get it a little bit when you give a lecture; you feel what it’s like to have a hundred people all listening. I have to admit; I don’t like it that much! But it does give you a certain buzz. Whereas when you make art, you don’t get that much feedback. I don’t come here every day; I don’t see the people walking around. I talk to a few journalists, I meet the people at the gallery, my family might see it, I see some reviews, that’s about it. It’s not a big feedback industry.

Generally, at least in England, I get bad reviews. So if you took all of your self-esteem from your journalists, you would be in a bad state. So the activity is not really about receiving a reaction, it’s more about an imaginary conversation with yourself, with the world, and with people who might see your work, or an individual who might be looking. But I’m more interested really in trying to make a work that is right, is working. That’s my aim. Not really to please someone or to interest someone or to amuse someone. It’s more about the work itself. My battle is to get that particular painting to work. And it’s usually a fight against failure. There’s nearly always a point in every project where the damn thing is just not working, and it’s at that point where you start to get desperate, and you start to make moves that are not the ones you already made. It becomes something new, something interesting. Or it fails completely, and you dump it.

I remember my father putting a sheet of carbon paper behind what he was typing, to make another copy. And now if you want to make copies of anything, you press a button and you can have as many as you want. You can have it on high quality photographic paper or you can have archive links. The whole notion of rarity and preciousness of an image has completely dissolved in ten, fifteen years. And one reaction to that explosion might be to turn away from it and try to find a way of making images that denied that and defied that. Something that could only be seen when you look at the individual thing, and there’s only one of them. The other way to deal with it is perhaps a more kind of Warholian approach just to jump into the pool and see what you can do with all of these new possibilities of mass-reproduction, and mass-production generally. Well I don’t mass-produce my work so you can’t see my work in subways all over the world. I’m very careful and I control all of the ways in which my work is visible.

I think what we felt in the eighties was that if you knew a painting by Titian or Michelangelo, it was more likely you would know it from the postcard or the book, than from the real thing. There was this increasing gap between the real thing which was just one in the Prado or the Ufitsi, and then millions that were everywhere else. There was a kind of uncomfortable-ness with this in the eighties, progressing with discussions of postmodernism and “What does this mean?” the forest of images. I think has affected not just the way I produce work but the way I make work, the way I draw work. The way that I draw has a relationship to these kinds of mass images that are out there.

I’m interested in the images you see on motorway signs; I’m interested in the images you see on CD covers or in the gas station on advertising billboards. Not just the images, but also the display systems. I’m interested in the LED displays you see on the motorway or in advertising. I’m interested in vinyl that you see on billboards. All of these are different systems for making representation so it’s a complicated question not just to do with where the artist decides to put their work; it’s also what your work looks like and how it can be read. I have done projects in underground stations and I have done projects on CD covers.

But I still (where possible) try to differentiate between posters and magazines and newspapers where I’ll put an image that can be used generally for advertising usually, for information. I think a website, or a magazine advert is different from my work. That is presented as information about my work; it’s not an artwork in itself. Whereas if I do a project in the underground station in Tokyo, which I did. Then I specifically choose the images to fit the underground station. It’s a whole project. And if I do a project on a CD cover then I’m very careful that the shape of the CD is part of the whole artwork. It’s not just by chance that it’s square and divided into four and has four faces on it.

Galleries and museums have only been in existence for a hundred and fifty years. Before that artists would show their work in palaces or in churches. Artists always have to work with what is out there, what is available. I think it is valid and interesting to use CD covers as a possibility (if it suits your work), as it is to use a gallery or a museum. What you draw is one thing, how you draw it, is another, and where you put it is a third. So when you make an artwork you’re orchestrating these three elements. So if I put a work in the middle of the river, in the middle of Prague, it has to be the right artwork, presented in the right way. If you put the wrong thing out there it’s going to be stupid. So when I put works in this art gallery, part of the meaning of them is that they’re in an art gallery.

I don’t work in such an exactly controlled way that I know create work with a gallery in mind, it’s more of a moving, sliding operation. I know roughly where my works will go; they will either go in a museum or a gallery or somewhere in the street. And so those three possibilities are constantly there and then I have the projects that I want to make. I look at what people want and what people ask me to do and I move the things around and if somebody asks me to do something strange then I’ll think about something I’m doing and I’ll move something across.

If somebody wants to do a t-shirt with me, if somebody wants to do a CD cover or wants me to make a national monument in the middle of town, I’ll take the projects that I’m working with and I’ll adapt them and transform them into the correct positions. So if somebody says, “Can you do me a project on the front of this university?” I don’t start from scratch. I don’t think, “What can I do?” I think, “OK, of all the things that I’m working on, what would be the most useful project for this position?” And then I start to make some changes, so like different scale. I think of the possibilities of the situation. What possibilities does a CD cover offer? A gallery offers white walls and a dedicated quiet space that looks like a gallery. That’s a very particular situation that is quite useful.

We can only understand the world in what we already know. So the way that you understand something strange is what it looks like, it looks like a table perhaps. Maybe it’s a table maybe it isn’t a table but you need the previous experience to understand the new thing. Therefore, people are always looking for precedent in order to understand the next thing. I love Andy Warhol, I think he’s one of the greatest artists ever and I really enjoy looking at his work and I admire it and I’ve learnt a lot from it. But I don’t feel more connected to his work than a whole list of other people who I’m interested in and inspired by, although he is one of the greatest recent artists or artists at all.

You make your work using the energy, the inventions of other people as a kind of way of being taught by them but it doesn’t make you them.  That’s what culture is; it’s one generation taking on what they’ve learnt, what they’ve enjoyed and what they’ve hated from previous generations and seeing what they can do with it. But I think it’s a bit ungenerous to saddle each generation with being the representative of the previous generation. Just like it would be unfair to Warhol to say, “You’re the next Ferdinand Leger”.

Also there’s a lot about Warhol in the public mind that is very particular about his personality and I’m clearly nothing like that. I don’t run an exciting factory that’s the middle of the social world of London or anything like that. It would be misleading to see me in those terms. There are a lot of ideas about society that I think Warhol was interested in like celebrity for instance. I’ve touched upon occasionally because it has come my way but it’s never been something that I’ve sought out. It’s not part of the work in a major way.