One image seems to sum up American photographer Catherine Opie’s first major UK exhibition. A tattooed, genderless person sits cross-legged on a stool in the show’s poster image, moustached, stick-thin in a singlet and big boots. This slight figure radiates a mixture of confidence and underlying anxiety that feels very redolent of today’s gender-fluid world. It’s a quality that will be familiar from a distance, though still mystifying to just about anyone over the age of 30. And it’s encountered again and again in a show that feels like an update on the social and physiological transformation of our species. That’s despite the fact that many of the images, including this one, taken in 1994, are over 30 years old.
Ohio-born, LA-based Catherine Opie, now 64, made her name with studies of marginal groups who have been little considered – “invisible”, as the earnest wall texts have it – in conventional art narratives, including surfers, high school footballers and the lesbian sub-cultures of southern California. If the first two groups feel like they’ve been well covered in popular culture, I doubt British gallery-goers will have had much exposure to Los Angeles’s “leather dyke” underground, with which Opie and many of her friends are associated. Images of this tightly knit milieu with its boots, piercings and explicit S&M overtones set the tone for the exhibition.
This being the National Portrait Gallery, however, much – perhaps slightly too much – is made of Opie’s “referencing” of great Renaissance and Baroque painters, such as Caravaggio and particularly Hans Holbein, whose portraits of the Tudors hang in the gallery immediately upstairs.
Opie’s breakthrough work “Being and Having” (1991), a group of closely cropped portraits of the artist and her friends sporting false moustaches and beards, is, on one level, just an excuse for clowning with theatrical props. Yet it’s disconcerting how easily and effectively these “women occupying masculine space”, as Opie describes them, fall into archetypal macho roles, with their fixed stares seeming to almost touch the camera lens. If it’s hard to believe that these stylish images can be over three decades old, it’s in the nature of things that what sub-cultures do today, the entertainment and advertising industries – if not quite all of the rest of us – will be picking up on tomorrow. The fact, flagged up in the wall text, that the images’ strong yellow backgrounds were inspired by Holbein, will be their least compelling aspect for most viewers.
“Dyke” (1993), a life-size image of the artist’s crop-headed friend Steak House (butch nicknames are de rigeur in this enclave), standing with her back to the camera, with the D-word tattooed prominently on her neck, would have packed a bigger punch without the po-faced and painfully obvious assertion that they are “realising derogatory language on the queer body as a proud affirmation” printed alongside.
Thankfully Opie’s images are strong enough to stand practically without explanation. She appears herself in a number of guises: as a nine-year-old posing as a muscle man, self-taken with her first Instamatic; as her butch alter-ego Bo, a homely moustached guy in a lumberjack shirt; and seen naked from the rear in “Self-Portrait/Bleeding” (1994), her back dripping with blood, after a family of stick figures, representing her longed-for ideal of a nuclear family, has been carved into it.
In the show’s final self-portrait “Self-Portrait/Nursing”, taken ten years later, she’s seen naked, with that ideal finally achieved. She’s seen breastfeeding her son Oliver, born in 1991 by intrauterine insemination, in an image of fleshy tenderness so finely observed it’s hard to believe Opie took it herself. It’s all too easy, however, to read the word “pervert”, carved into her chest in leftover scars from another earlier work. In her world there’s clearly nothing anomalous in performing dangerously self-abasing gestures, while craving relatively conventional domesticity.
If there seems little room or need in this world of co-opted masculinity for actual men, Opie’s portraits of surfers and footballers are compassionate, even overtly affectionate. Standing haplessly before her large format camera, shielded by their boards and absurd body armour, most of these young men appear acutely vulnerable. Yet Opie’s meticulous lighting gives their faces a glow almost of exaltation that the subjects themselves appear unaware of, framed against mundane backdrops of beaches and football fields.
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A room of starkly-lit portraits with black backgrounds, which the wall texts describe as “reframing the drama of baroque painting and creating the imagination of psychological space”, have none of the spiritual suggestiveness of great baroque masters such as Caravaggio. Opie simply shoots against a black velvet cloth, and the resulting images look like it. Yet her hyper-detailed portraits of the veteran conceptual artists Laurence Weiner and John Baldessari, both as wildly bearded as Old Testament prophets, have a sense of closely observed humanity that brings to mind a very different baroque artist – dare I say, Rembrandt?
If the idea of S&M-inspired photography creates an expectation of cold, even inhuman stylishness, the prevailing mood in Opie’s photography is one of warmth and emotional generosity. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons these images feel so contemporary. In a world of ever-increasing desperation and alienation, small acts of kindness and empathy feel ever more radical, even if they are carried out through the distancing medium of the camera lens.
‘Catherine Opie: To Be Seen’ is at the National Portrait Gallery from 5 March until 31 May
