Andrew Graham-Dixon talks to sculptor Julian Opie about the relevance of Pop Art to young artists working today.
AG-D: Is Pop Art still a major influence on contemporary art? Can we talk about a Pop Art tradition?
JO: One problem is that art historians see Pop Art as having some kind of existence, as if you could go and point at it. But you can't. It's a number of artists who made some art, and maybe some critics who talked about it, and some people who responded to it. But it doesn't exist as a separate thing, in my mind. One has certain relationships to certain of those artists, but to drag them out of context, away from Duchamp, away from Picabia, away from Picasso, is meaningless. Pop Art doesn't have that separateness.
I sometimes feel that I don't quite know what Pop Art is, that it isn't as solid as the label implies. But I always come back to Warhol, and especially the Warhol of the mid-1960s. I'm sure it's Pop, and it says something very clear.
I think of Rosenquist too. The classic images of Pop are maybe Warhol's Elvises and Marilyns, but surely Rosenquist's F-111 painting too, where he was also playing with those sorts of images, and in a very filmic way . . .
The great obsession of art in the 1980s seemed to be the idea that everything is a fake, a simulation, experienced through the media. But it was all there already in Warhol. Isn't Warhol's the shadow that an awful lot of young artists are still trying to get clear of? I remember going to show after show in the later 1980s, and seeing work by so many touted younger artists - especially American artists, Jeff Koons being the most conspicuous example...
