Binding Ties explores the world of transitions of celebrated artist Catherine Opie – WhatsNew2Day

Oliver breastfeeding. Oliver at five, dressed in a tutu. Oliver at ten with his pet mouse in his waistcoat pocket, an exquisite re-enactment of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting Lady with an ermine from 1489.

These portraits of Oliver, the son of Catherine Opie, one of the world’s leading photographic artists, are among the highlights of Binding tiesthe first Australian retrospective of Opie’s work at Melbourne’s Heide Museum of Modern Art.

All three of Oliver’s portraits use the art historical tool to construct the identity of the sitter through allegory. Opie is an expert in bringing forward the antecedents of photography in the old masters or what we now call legacy media.

Catherine Opi. Oliver in a tutu (2004)
Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, London and Seoul, Author provided

Drama and emotion

In the large-scale oval portraits of Opie’s friends and artistic colleagues, painterly references are repeated photographically. Sharp contrast of light and shadow – the chiaroscuro effect made famous by Caravaggio – creates drama and an emotional effect.

In the magnificent Thelma and Duro (2017), an elderly African-American couple is royally lit in black space, their eyes staring out of the frame in opposite directions as if at odds with each other. Thelma’s fingertips press hard on Duro’s right hand, his left hand free to assume the manneristic poise of a renaissance prince.

In Rocco’s oval portrait (2012), we see the trail of transitional scars under “Tender Hearted,” the large breastplate tattoo that runs across the sitter’s chest. Rocco’s portrait visually mirrors the Opie self-portrait in which “Pervert” is carved into her skin, a scarring ritual that brings out the innate ability of the human epidermis to record changes over time.

Catherine Opi. Rocco (2012). printing pigment.
Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, London and Seoul, Author provided

Skin is featured in many of the Opie portraits, not so much as a metonym of race, but as a thing that records our difference from each other and from ourselves as we wear and harden our way through life. Whether it’s acne, stretch marks, and rosacea, or the piercings, tattoos, and facial hair we voluntarily clothe our nakedness in, Opie’s camera views scars as signs of human dignity revealed for shared but intimate concern.

For this reason, it’s best to flip through the didactic panels pointing us to symbolic meanings and just look at the people and scenes before us the way Opie would have come across them.

Catherine Opi. Self Portrait / Cutting (1993)
Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, London and Seoul, Author provided

Dikes, towing and transport trains

At the center of the exhibition are the iconic portraits Opie made of her queer community in San Francisco and Los Angeles in the 1990s. Photographed against her signature brightly colored backgrounds are leather dykes, drag performers and transgender friends, including her longtime collaborator Pig Pen.

Opie and her friends oppose normative sexuality, gender stereotypes and the binary gender categories. They use gestures, posture, clothing and decorations to construct ever-changing identities for her camera.

While it would be easy to view these works with the casualness of contemporary conceptions of queer sexuality and gender fluidity, these portraits were created in the 1990s, when AIDS primary cause of death for Americans aged 25 to 44.

Like the earlier work of Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin, Opie’s portraits played a leading role in granting freedom of choice to the gay community by enabling them to see themselves as they wanted to be seen.

History and iconography

It is widely believed that the most powerful portraits are created by photographers who know their subjects inside out.

While Opie’s photos of her friends and family support this theory, how do we explain the portraits of high school football players ranked among the most powerful in the Heide survey? These sweaty young athletes decked out in iron armor with exposed midriffs and budding six-packs aren’t obviously Opie’s fellow travelers, but they’re also all testimony to the ongoing transition.

Catherine Opi. kaine (2007)
Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, London and Seoul, Author provided

Other iconic inclusions are the three classic self-portraits that dominate the center gallery. Steeped in art historical references and Christian iconography, each portrait subverts the traditions it illustrates.

In Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994), Opie plays with the lavish codes of wealth and prestige by standing half-naked in front of the camera, her head covered with a leather BDSM hood. The ornate tattoo on her bleeding chest is stylistically linked to the decorative floral curtain behind her, while her strong arms display 23 surgical needles pinned through her skin like jewels.

In Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993), the artist’s back, also bleeding from a childish drawing etched into her skin, shows a stereotypical family scene in which the roles of mother and father are played by two mothers. Instead of celebrating rainbow familiesthe scarification records the deep sorrow Opie felt at the demise of her long-term relationship and with it her domestic hopes.

The following year we see her as Bo (1994), her moustachioed male alter ego. Then, exactly ten years later, her familial desires become reality in the double portrait of Opie breastfeeding her spotless son in Self-Portrait/Nursing (2004).

Catherine Opi. Self Portrait / Nursing (2004)
Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, London and Seoul, Author specified (no reuse)

A little bit of everything

The Heide exhibition has tried to capture Opie’s 40-year oeuvre by including a little bit of everything. There are seascapes with surfers from 2003 and more recent large-scale photographs of landmarks and sunsets, some of which are deliberately blurred.

There are several landscapes of a swamp (beware of the hidden owl) and three stop-motion animations that are political responses to global issues of the day.

None of these capture the aura of Opie’s portraits. Her gift is to photograph people. She has a way of lighting her subjects, making them shimmer, seem electric or serene, but always human. Since this is Opie’s first investigative show in Australia, a more in-depth approach focusing on continuity rather than novelty would have been warranted.

Catherine Opi. Untitled #7 (Swamps) 2019.
Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, London and Seoul

The most puzzling and unconvincing addition is The Modernist (2017), a grainy black-and-white 852-frame film that casts the now-middle-aged Pig Pen in the unappealing role of an arsonist hell-bent on destroying the modernist. architectural icons of LA. A strange exercise in ambivalence about artistic success, the film is at odds with Opie’s humble mastery of documentary photography and portraiture.

There is no doubt that Opie is a versatile performer. But given the amount of work that went unseen, the spaces devoted to the film, the surfers, and the animations could have been better used to show more shots from the oval portrait series or more domestic scenes with Opie’s family.

For not much more than the price of an Uber to and from Heide, you can purchase the artist’s monograph from the bookstore and discover the full breadth of the human photographic connections that have made her such a celebrated artist and record-keeper of life as transition. have made.