All those old things have a moral value.
-Charles Baudelaire
Evidence exists of ‘collectors’ or ‘collecting’ from as early as the 4th and 5th century BC. Collecting as an activity started with the Greek and Hellenistic ages where objects from previous ages were admired for their own sake rather than for religious or civic significance. It was during the Roman period though that collecting really came to the fore with the plundering of Greek cities and booty brought back by triumphant armies. Rich Romans collected the Greek objects and, where they could not afford an original, a copy was made. Romans made their names as collectors, including Gaius Verres, Lucullus and Pompey, not to forget Julius Caesar, of whom we still talk as men of great culture, regardless of their virtue. The Middle-Ages saw very few art collections but there was a renewed interest in collecting again in the Renaissance and the Medici family empire, but also the Gonzaga family of Mantua, the Montefeltro’s of Urbino, and Este’s in Ferrara. As with their Roman predecessors, modern readers will be familiar, at last by reputation, of the splendorous collections they had amassed.
Perhaps the most significant historic collection in the UK was that of Charles I after the purchase of the magnificent Gonzaga collection for £80,000 which was shipped from Mantua to England in 1627. It was subsequently dispersed during the Civil War after he was decapitated and was the subject of a major exhibition staged at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2018. Major collections were the plaything of the royals and aristocrats though during the 18th century, many started donating their collection to the public. One such donation in 1737 by Maria Ludovica, the last of the Medici’s, established the Uffizi Collection in Florence.
In the 19th century, wealthy industrialists took the baton from the aristocrats which saw the likes of Helen Clay Frick, JP Morgan, and Andrew Mellon start their legendary collections in America. A discernible shift in art collecting habits occurred in the late 19th and 20th centuries where a successful collection was dependant on shrewd artistic judgement. Victor Chocquet, for example, a minor French government official, was a staunch defender of the Impressionists and spent much of his earnings on works by Renoir and Cézanne. He was mocked by his peers though most of the works he acquired currently reside in major museums across America.
It was in the Renaissance, along with the revival of art and learning supposedly lost since ancient Greece and Rome, that key notions of visual art and the role of the artist were re-established. The idea of the great individual artist attaining ‘fame’ took hold, a goal to which any artist should strive. Perceiving that fame, audiences became interested in the artist as a person beyond the art. Though the art speaks for itself, the art going public started to revere the artists as a figure of interest. Still now, questions of methods and motivations of creation are regularly posed, demanding the artist reveal even more of himself and about his private life. Another such example is the popularisation of artist studio tours which have a voyeuristic dimension. To expose one’s private collection, as Julian Opie has done in this exhibition, is to reveal an aspect of his life heretofore unknown. As Damien Hirst explains: “I think of a collection as being like a map of a person’s life, like the flotsam and jetsam washed up on the beach of somebody’s existence”.[1]
Works Collected / Collected Works brings together over 160 items that artist Julian Opie has bought and kept throughout his career. Many of the items he bought relatively recently, and they mostly reside in the upper floors of his East London studio, readily available for him to be looked at, admired, held, and contemplated. But what can one learn from the collection beyond the curiosity of the famous? To view the collection, one is immediately struck by the eclectic nature of the works which span from antiquity to Contemporary Art, from the Americas to Southeast Asia. Opie’s interests are not limited to the production of his contemporaries, nor is it limited to geographical bounds, probably helped by the fact that he exhibits internationally. The collection speaks of a man well-travelled.
On closer observation, one can start to see links between the works in the collection and Opie’s own works. For example, Walking in New York 6., 2019, where Opie has carved his walking figures into stone. He then painted it in acrylic rendering the work in a softer finish than those that utilise plastics. Placed by his Egyptian stone hieroglyph, one can see how the ancient work might have inspired the artist to use stone. Moreover, the reduced figures on the surface, turned sideways and suspended mid-step are seemingly a modern adaptation of the Egyptian hieroglyph figures. The connections are abundant. The recent series of works that use beads such as Lucia, beads, 2021, was inspired by the collection’s beaded sun hats of Kenyah Dayak, Borneo Island, Indonesia. Opie concedes that on occasion, where he struggled to find a technical solution to create a certain output, such as with the beaded works, a solution was found in his collection. His collection, therefore, is useful to the artist beyond the aesthetic. It is a trove of ideas and answers, of techniques and skills.
Opie’s exploration of art history was prevalent in his work from the start of his career. One of the first works Opie produced while he was still a student at Goldsmiths, was Eat Dirt, Art History, 1983, involving him copying famous paintings and displaying them heaped, discarded on the floor. His aim was to comment of the “hopeless position of the art student in light of art history”.[2] There is a sense of resolution from this initial work when considering the collection. While he might have found the weight of art history overwhelming, through acquiring and studying pieces in the privacy of his studio, Opie found a way of utilising art history for his own means.
Opie’s collection is diverse, though he would shy away from referring to himself as an expert on any of the objects, though he has acquired some knowledge of the objects in his possession, well beyond the knowledge of a lay person.
As in the exhibition, the objects are laid out in his studio by type, groupings that are reflected in the show. The Japanese woodcut prints of Utamaro and Hiroshige live side by side, while the Egyptian sculptures and sarcophagi have a dedicated room. The Indonesian beaded baby carriers are lined up and fastened to the wall. Side by side, one can observe the diversity of pattern and colours. Even the armoured helmets are positioned near his skiing helmets, denoting a more playful side to Opie’s classification. He speaks candidly of the ‘cutsie-kitsch’ of his manga film stills and in admiration of Auguste Edouart, the 19th century silhouette artist. To delve into the collection, one can discover not just where interest lies as an artist, but also what interests Opie as a hobbyist.
Collecting as a hobby started as a fashion fad in the 1850’s but became popularised in the United States and the United Kingdom mid-century. Though collecting as an activity did exist earlier, it was often collections of natural items such as seashells or fossils. As aforementioned, artistic objects were generally unaffordable to those less than aristocratic. As a hobby, collecting is closely associated to industrialisation and the increase in manufactured goods. The prevalent availability of objects and the increase in leisure time in tandem with the labour hours decrease in the 1900’s, opened the scope for hobbies to emerge, and so collecting came to the fore.
Collecting was considered a productive pastime. One that stimulated the mind though disconnected from work. It required the collector to develop a special knowledge on a subject and when in a community, one might be satisfyingly noted for having achieved a ‘good collection’. Classification separates the collector from the hoarder and ascribes on the collection a usefulness and, often, value. American artist Joseph Cornell collected outside the bounds of classification so his collection of pipes, glasses, marbles, post cards and ephemera had no real economy until reassembled into a work of art.
The notion of artist as collector is not a recent development unique to our times. The practice of collecting, hoarding, or assembling is bountiful in art history: Rembrandt hoarded seashells, musical instruments, and weaponry, while Matisse collected works of fellow artists such as Cézanne. Andy Warhol, in a celebration of kitsch and, it would seem, in honour of his notoriously sweet tooth, kept a large collection of ever more elaborate cookie jars. Robert Rauschenberg busied himself sifting through junk shops acquiring piles of items that would often find their way into his art. There are numerous modes of collecting and the influence a collection will assert on the artist varies. When the art and the collection are presented side by side, it can reveal new aspects of the art and how it is produced.
In many instances, as with the aforementioned Rauschenberg, the collection becomes part of the art, as with the works of Damien Hirst, for example, whose collected sea shells, pill boxes, butterflies, cigarette butts and fish specimens have been displayed in a cabinet and form the basis of this line of artistic exploration. Mark Dion is another such artist who uses taxonomy in its more traditional form to explore prevalent ideologies and institutional influence over our collective understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. The selection process, organisation and assemblage of the collected items, and the mode of display, offers the artist the opportunity to express their creative voice. In both cases, however, the collection is predetermined, assembled as an act for the purpose of display. Opie’s collection is not amassed as a tool kit full of raw materials to create artworks, but as objects that have absorbed him and that have, subsequently, acted as a source of inspiration for new avenues of creation and subject matter.
And what subject matter has fascinated Opie more than that of the portrait? Reduced to but a few strokes and colour, Opie is the great portraitist of the 21st century. His constant exploration of the human face is ever present in the collection in almost every form imaginable, from of 17th century Old Master painting to Manga film stills, Greek sculpture to the expressive looks of Tau Tau ancestor figures. By amassing such a range of human faces, Opie has created a study of the possibility in human form. As Walter Benjamin explains “what is decisive in collecting is that the object is detached from all its original functions in order to enter into the closest conceivable relation to things of the same kind”.[3] In this case, the relation is the human face.
In his essay, Ami Barak notes that “the visual identity of all [Opie’s] work is immediate, the impact is direct and the images he makes play skilfully with the idea of stripping down, of reducing to the essential, making a loud and clear declaration of a tempered post-minimal aesthetics that still retains its power of attraction”.[4] Yet, what is more impactful than the glaring simplified faces of the Tau Tau, collectively staring, communicating through time? Their faces, reduced to but a few chips of the chisel, their forms at once unique and simultaneously indistinguishable from the crowd. The impact of the stripped back face is one discovered by civilisations past. What Opie achieves is to bring the tradition to the 21st century, representing an age-old theme to a contemporary audience.
And what of Opie’s portraits? What can we learn about the 21st century audiences that revere them so, perhaps more than the portraits to be found in his collection such as the miniatures of John Smart? Or portrait paintings of William Aikman? or the Greek and Egyptian busts? Consider the portraits in the exhibition such as Valeria 1, 2018. The image is of a woman peering sideways. She has a long noble neck and earrings cupped behind her neat hair. Far from being an idealised image, such as those from the Medieval period, she is a living person. Yet her face is constructed by the most minimal of strokes. Her posture seems determined, almost defiant, but she lacks detail, including a nose. The surface of her face is pristine, as is her hair and the background which is relentlessly monotone. Through Opie’s interpretation, Valeria has become a symbol of herself. Her face, reduced to a construct, an architype. Even the title of the work is limited in vocabulary.
As Opie explains: “We all live these combined roles as numbered citizens and individual centres of the universe and I wanted to find a way to draw the resulting combination that people really are.”[5] This echoes the philosophy of Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World where ‘numbered citizens’ all look sanitised and engineered to happily fit inside a frame. And Opie is ruthless in his editing, often axing hands, necks, and feet to fit into this clinical view of the world. The process is mechanical as it is a product of machines, quite literally drawn on a computer. Though his subjects always look serene in his works, they are frozen, eternally still. Where there is motion, as with the video works such as Coloured runners 3, 2020, the movement is constant, the figure condemned to an eternal run.
In Brave New World, Mustapha Mond rationalises the absence of God to the Savage: “Call it the fault of civilization. God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.”[6] As with Huxley’s world, Opie’s world is steeped in terror of what a philosophical conclusion to our existence might look like as we strive for perfection.
In both the book and Opie’s art, the hand of man is the author of the mechanical output. It is coolly self-inflicted. In Opie’s words “I feel this goes back to the sense that this is not so much an interpretive, personal style of drawing but an automatic system of transferring information through a grid of technical and cultural processes and references that anyone can undertake. Could it be done by machine? Like face recognition software? Perhaps - but for now at least I think it needs a human’s ability to edit, cross reference and judge, to differentiate between form and accident of lighting, to edit what is telling and personal.”[7]
In his book A History of the World in 100 Objects, Neil MacGregor writes that “it is, as we know, the victors who write history… Those who are on the losing side, those whose societies are conquered or destroyed, often have only their things to tell their stories. [Civilizations] can speak to us now of their past achievements most powerfully through the objects they made: a history told through things gives them back a voice.”[8] Opie’s success as an artist, and fame, means his works are present in major museums internationally, it would be interesting to know how we might be judged by future civilizations analysing his art to glean a better understanding of who we were.
[1] https://www.damienhirst.com/texts/2015/wunderkammer
[2] https://www.myartbroker.com/artist/julian-opie/the-life-times-of-julian-opie/
[3] Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades. Harvard University Press, 2002. p. 2014
[4] Barak, Ami. Julian Opie and The Ingenious Deconstruction of The Image Of The Other. 2010. p.1 (http://www.julianopieshop.co.uk/texts/julian-opie-and-ingenious-deconstruction-image-other-2010)
[5] Julian Opie in Julian Opie: Collected Works, The Holburne Museum and The Bowes Museum, 2014
[6] Brave New World, Brave New World. London: Chatto & Windus, 1932. Chapter xvii
[7] Julian Opie in Julian Opie: Fosun Foundation, Fosun Foundation, 2017. p14
[8] MacGregor, Neil. A History of the World in 100 Objects. Penguine Books, 2012. p. xvi