Catherine Opie: Creating History through Art
To Catherine Opie, photographs have extreme power. Her series, The Modernist, consists of a film, made up of black and white image stills, stitched together to create a narrative about a local artist’s decision to set fire to three L.A.-area Modernist houses. The artist documents their crimes through the creation of a collage, partly out of the newspaper headlines announcing the arson. At the beginning of the film, before the artist burns anything down, I assumed this series was dealing with the California wildfires, the artist taking a newspaper clipping reading “California” and rewriting it to read “caliBURNia.” While the wildfires were an aspect of the piece, I realized by the end of the film that the key focal point is really the artist themself– “what role do artists hold,” in Opie’s words from her October 15th lecture at the College, “in a destructive, mercurial present-day?” In The Modernist, Opie seeks to invoke the power of images to invoke moral questions, represent, and ultimately create history.
The images employed by Opie in The Modernist create an ambiguous narrative that demands interpretation– forcing the viewer to think morally about what they are consuming and what it means to them. The images begin simply, showing an artist in their studio, killing time by looking in the mirror, drawing sketches, and beginning to paste a collage to their wall. As the film goes on, though, we learn that this artist seeks to do something more– they go to Lowes, buy a can of gasoline, and set fire to the Chemosphere. This was a wholly unexpected twist in my assumption of the direction the narrative was going, and my immediate response was a negative one– “we shouldn’t burn down other people’s homes”. As the artist set fire to each consecutive home, though, my attitude became less contrarian and more curious– why is the artist doing this? What does the burning of the homes represent? Do I believe in burning down homes? What about the homes of the rich? What motivation is great enough to justify this act? I have no answers for these questions, but thinking of them helped me to poke and prod at my own moral inclinations. The power of photography to invoke moral questions is thus embodied in The Modernist.
The images also center a queer artist, whose real name is Stosh Fila. By centering a member of the LGBTQ+ community, Opie seeks to invoke the power photography has to allow the audience to “be seen and see others like [themselves]”. Until recently, art featuring LGBTQ+ individuals did not often enter the mainstream. In pop culture as a whole, underrepresentation of the community has been an issue. In depicting the life of an LGBTQ+ artist, Opie allows audiences of the same identity the ability to see themselves in a work of art, and normalize the presence of LGBTQ+ people to society as a whole. Through forcing thought and upholding representation, images like those showcased in The Modernist have the power to shape society itself.
In his article, Nomos and Narrative, Robert Cover introduces the idea of nomos– “a normative universe” intrinsic to society, which shapes our ideas of “right and wrong, of lawful and unlawful, of valid and void” (Cover 4). Cover argues that nomoi shape law. I believe that this could be extended– nomos also shapes history. What communities view as moral and immoral fuels the choices, actions, and events that take place in history. When pieces like The Modernist challenge our preconceived notions of right and wrong, natural and unnatural, make us think about what we assume to be correct in society, they play the role of stretching and expanding nomoi. Catherine Opie’s work might inspire the next great LGBTQ+ artist, or motivate the next piece of policy to address the climate crisis. These are effects of art that have express impacts on the lives of regular people. The power of photography to make history is thus demonstrated in this series.
Catherine Opie’s exhibit certainly has the potential to challenge nomos for the better, and contribute to the production of new norms and narratives surrounding what art should look like and who it should focus on. Her goal, to answer the question of the role of the artist in the present day, is certainly achieved– perhaps not in a concrete way, but in how it exposes the audience to important questions and challenges their preconceived notions.
Bibliography
Cover, Robert. “The Supreme Court, 1982 Term — Foreword: Nomos and Narrative.” Harvard Law Review, vol. 97, no. 4, 1982.
Opie, Catherine. The Modernist. Film, 2018. Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson College.
Opie, Catherine and Cotton, Charlotte. “Catherine Opie: Artist Lecture.” 15 October 2024, Davidson College.
