Catherine Opie: You've Come a Long Way, Baby, and So Have We
Bill Kouwenhoven
With this magnificent mid-career retrospective at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, Catherine Opie (47) takes us on a whirlwind photographic tour of the changes in American social norms over the past twenty or so years. The almost 200 works of this show make up a journey at once very private and very “out” that spans the gamut of the Culture Wars from the mid-1980s until today and, in its examination through portraiture and self-portraiture, moves from the personal as political to a broader form of acceptance and norming of Queer culture in America.
From her earliest works, The Master Plan (1986-87) and the ground-breaking Being and Having (1991), to her latest works Icehouses (2001), Surfers (2003), and In and Around Home (2004-), she has been concerned with aspects of the performative and of community. Opie grew up in the white-bread suburbs of America in Sandusky, Ohio. As a young girl she became fascinated by photography, wrote a book report on the American documentary photographer of child labourers, Lewis Hine, and announced at age nine to her parents that she wanted to be a social documentary photographer. Encouraged by them, she started ravenously photographing her world and her surroundings. As she grew older, she was an adventurous tomboy who had crushes on girls at a time when it was all but impossible, especially in small town America, to talk about Lesbianism. The Seventies, though rocked by Vietnam, Civil Rights, and the Women’s Movement, represented the highpoint of a Norman Rockwell-esque “normalcy” in middle class America where corporate advertising subverted political images of change and turned them into marketing slogans. “You’ve come a long way, Baby” was a mid-1970s slogan for Virginia Slims cigarettes featuring Cheryl Tiegs that riffed off of slogans about the political progress that women had made since the early days of the century.
To escape, she moved to Rancho Bernardo near San Diego, California, and then to San Francisco where she studied under photographer Larry Sultan, the likes of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Robert Frank at the San Francisco Art Institute while immersing herself in the Bay area’s very open Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender communities especially the drag, leather, and S&M scenes. Moving between San Francisco where she received her BFA (1985) to CalArts in Valencia where she graduated in 1988 with a MFA, she photographed both the architectural world of the California dream and the height of the Queer movement in San Francisco. Her coming of age, and coming out as a Lesbian, took place as AIDs ravaged the community and killed many of her friends.
The portraits and self-portraits Opie made at this time were stunningly dramatic and radical. Being and Having takes its name from a phrase in French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s argument that “men have phalluses, women are the phallus.” Women therefore are the instrument of power exchange. For Lesbians, this often became a game of role playing and performance to establish a Lesbian “Queer identity.” In other words, in the context of Being and Having as well as in her later Portraits series (1993-1997), one performs an identity in all its manifestations. Some in her Portraits series are also undergoing female to male transformations and thus literally are writing the texts of their lives onto a new corpus. The people in Opie’s portraits, embody new roles—in the case of Being and Having headshots of women with male facial hair applied enacting their “out” personas: Opie with dark hair and mustache as “Bo,” a mid-western used aluminum siding dealer, others with their drag names ”Chief,” ”Ingin,” “Whitey,” “Oso Bad,” et al., shot closely cropped against a bright yellow background and mounted in a wooden frame with their names in cursive on a little name tag. Portraits consisted of iconic, formally posed images of women in drag, some full frame, some half frame shot against brightly coloured backdrops. The members of what she called her “Royal Family” face the camera directly, their postures emphatic if not directly confrontational. The photographs reflect the classical portraiture of the painter Hans Holbein, and photographic portraits of August Sander and, equally importantly, Robert Mapplethorpe and Andreas Serrano whose taboo breaking imagery made them lightning rods for conservative criticism during the Culture Wars of the 1980s.
Opie’s political stance during this period is marked by her willingness to present almost transgressive images of people in the Queer community with their body modifications, their tattoos and their piercings and the attributes of an S&M lifestyle. This reflected a split in the Gay and Lesbian communities with one side demanding “normalcy” and acceptance from the mainstream, and the other, asserting their right to be as different as they wanted to be under the mantra, “We’re here, we’re Queer. Get over it!” As Opie describes it in the accompanying catalogue, “The leather scene was about community for me, and I was inspired by all these people who were giving themselves the freedom to image themselves however they saw fit.”
As she created the Portraits, Opie also embarked on a particularly assertive series of self-portraits and portraiture designed to re-appropriate and re-inscribe the names she and her friends were called. This assertiveness found its way into tattoos and cuttings as in the image of the short haired woman shot half-frame from the back with the word “DYKE” tattooed in gothic script into the nape of her neck. Another image from 1993, Self-Portrait/Cutting shows Opie with a child-like drawing of an ideal home where two stick-figure women stand holding hands in front of a house under a friendly cloud with birds flying over newly etched into the skin of her back. Blood pearls and drips and contrasts with the deep, almost Mantegna green backdrop. Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994) shows Opie in a S&M mask, with evenly spaced needles inserted into her arms and the word, “Pervert,” floridly inscribed into the flesh above her breasts. It is a disturbing image, yet it re-appropriates the power of the word thrown against her by making it her own as a label she proudly wears. “We’re here, we’re Queer. Get over it!” A later picture, Self-Portrait/Nursing (2004) shows Opie nursing her two year old baby, Oliver. Arranged as a traditional Madonna and child against a flowery red backdrop, the scars spelling out “Pervert” have all but faded. This time facing the camera unmasked, Opie now seems to have moved beyond the Culture Wars and the need for assertive confrontation.
Opie has moved from confrontational portraiture of a community asserting itself through other aspects of community and the architecture of community with its outward manifestations, buildings and freeways. A series of works from the mid 1990s documented with a banquet camera the concrete arteries that hold together Southern California where she commuted from Los Angeles to a job in nearby Irvine. Other images, of houses in Bel Air and Beverly Hills photographed with a central perspective, depict facades whereby it is impossible to see what is going on behind the closed doors and windows and so hide whatever variant of the American Dream might be concealed. Another project in the 1990s was an Ed Ruscha like series of mini-malls in Los Angeles that reveal the changes in communities across LA by the language of the advertising—Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Mexican, Anglo, etc. Shot like the freeways very early on Sunday mornings, the images are devoid of the people who make up the communities leaving only their textural traces—not unlike the tattoos that assert affiliations in her earlier pictures. Other bodies of architectural work included portraits of iconic American cities, New York, St. Louis, and Chicago, each photographed as emblems of a particular aspect of American society.
Unlike many of her friends, Opie chose not to become a full-time member of the West Coast Leather Dyke scene and moved to broader horizons, her explorations of communities took her out of LA and onto the road. In the series Domestic (1995-1998), she explored Lesbians living together as couples or groups across small town America in ways they could never have done when she was a child in Sandusky, Ohio. She writes, “It’s about creating communities and household systems everywhere in this country. Gender specificity and sexual preference can be ignored. I wanted to create a visual language of people living together, images about domestic space. I wanted to talk about community and family and not make it into ‘we’re normal’, which drives me crazy. I am interested in the difference of their households.” As ever, Opie is testing notions of community and difference and presents a series of images that range from Hollywood couples floating in pools to groups living in Oklahoma and North Carolina. Interesting though they may be, they have the feel of a reportage commissioned by the New York Times Sunday Magazine in their quiet matter-of-factness. It is a statement of how far America has changed to say, flat out, that these pictures look really normal and domestic. It is her signature cicatrice come true.
In 1999 and 2000 Opie produced a series of portraits for the Estate Project for Artists with AIDs, a New York Charity. The work was shot on the largest Polaroid camera in existence and dedicated to her friend the performance artist Ron Athey, another victim of the Culture Wars. These highly theatrical images evoke a medieval passion play and mark a brief return to Opie’s previous concerns of Queer communities, this time exploring the language of Queer homosexuality that Opie considers “a truly encompassing language that passes through any gender classification.”
By the early 2000s Opie returned to new explorations of community removed from her previous works. With her images from Minnesota, Icehouses (2001) and Surfers (2003) Opie explored the sense of time, waiting for a fish or waiting for a wave, that held these people together in the frame for weeks or hours at a time, day in and day out. The images are very quiet, yet she likens their act of waiting to her own act of waiting for the moment to take the picture and the waiting for the next stage of S&M role-playing and the rush of euphoria after something happens.
The birth of her child, Oliver, in 2004, led Opie to explore a range of relationships involving children, formally photographed against coloured backdrops, and her own domestic environment in Los Angeles where she shares a house with her partner, Julie Burleigh. In and Around Home (2004) was shot during the presidential campaign literally in and around their home in predominantly African-American, South Central Los Angeles. Beyond the interior of family life, there are architectural shots of the neighbourhood and the interactions with their neighbours, parades and memorials. There are also a series of images shot with a normal Polaroid of key moments and figures of the campaign and media events surrounding it: Bush, Pope John Paul II, Donald Rumsfeld, Terry Schiavo, and Dan Rather, among others. It is a strange mix but one that depicts the constant flux of American society. The series culminates of a backlit picture of Oliver, then going through a phase of dressing up, in a pink tutu standing on a chair in the bathroom. It is a portrait of the changes Catherine Opie has witnessed in the past twenty-odd years.
This is a show that seems to be the work of several photographers, yet with the title, Catherine Opie: American Photographer, Guggenheim curator Jennifer Blessing is asserting that Opie is the author of all of this work. She is not presented as a Queer artist, a feminist artist, or even a Californian artist, but as one of us Americans. The images here show the transitions in American society and in Opie herself. You’ve come a long way, Baby, indeed, and so have we. The title just might be also an allusion to another transgressive transformer of American art, Patti Smith who declared “I haven’t fucked much with the past, but I’ve fucked plenty with the future… in heart, I am an American artist, and I have no guilt.” The same could be said for Catherine Opie.
The show, Catherine Opie: American Photographer, is accompanied by an exhaustive catalogue: Catherine Opie: American Photographer by Dorothy Allison, Jennifer Blessing, Nat Trotman, and Russell Ferguson, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum: New York 2008, Soft Cover, 304 pages, $65.00, ISBN-10: 0892073756.
26 September 2008 - 7 January 2009,
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
New York, NY
Publication Date: 
