In the second part of our interview with the iconic British artist Julian Opie (read the first part here), we talk about the language of reality and the construction of social identity...

Dazed Digital: Why do you think people consider the blank anonymity in your work to be a communication of alienation?
Julian Opie: I do think it's funny this thing about alienation. When I show work in different countries, I get quite a different take, but it’s certainly the case in England that the general feedback, at least from the press, is this discussion of alienation and of the coldness of modern life – this notion that we’re all locked away in a Kafka-esque type of loneliness, and that it’s all very bleak. In America what gets written tends to be much more about art history, much more about who’s affecting who, and about whether this comes from pop -– so there it’s seen in very historical, cultural terms. In Japan I get a much more upbeat, celebratory type of response. People are like, ‘Yeah it's great, it's modern, it's all part of the rushing modern world!'

DD: As your career has progressed your representations of humanity have gone out into the public domain the world over, and are in fact standing among many of the representations of humanity you have appropriated, is that exciting for you?
JO: We talk of the public domain but for me that is art’s home. I don’t actually really track where my work is – I mean, I don’t sit out there and watch people looking at it, but I feel that until it’s out there and interacting with other people it doesn’t really exist. The real point of it is to get it out there and to see what other people make of it.

DD: To me your work seems to speak a lot about the common aspects of being human, and in it’s neutrality it feels quite a reassuring evocation of the real…
JO: I actually think the real is reassuring. I think that newspapers are disturbing partly because they don’t clarify anything  – they simply throw a lot of disturbing information at one. I don’t actually read newspapers, I don’t feel it’s real enough, it’s all too distant and confusing and unengaged. In a way, I feel more akin to the sort of village person who would only know about five miles in every direction, but perhaps that’s enough, it’s the same in the end.

DD: One of the things I really wanted to ask you about was archetypes, classifications and types in your work. Do you see humanity as a sort of collection of types and reflect that, or are you saying that people consciously try to fit within certain constructed ideas about what a person should be?
JO: I used to travel on the underground and I would look at the people sitting on the seats opposite and enjoy seeing each one as a completely classic – you can look at almost anybody, perhaps everybody, and think that they are perfect, that they’re a classic. When I first started drawing people in a more simplistic way, my idea was that one should really try and draw everybody, and that each person would be a type – so that each person could be like a kind of mega-logo for a huge corporation, which would seem to kind of wrap up lots of information but also that each individual would be like that – so you, my daughter or my wife could be a kind of corporate logo, all of us could. And I think from everybody’s individual point of view that is a bit the case. I may just be an individual, but from my own point of view I’m pretty central, and everybody’s view of the world is presumably the same – it all centres in on them as a kind of focal point of perspective, so that they are both a classic and a massive type in each case. I think that when we negotiate on top of them and we negotiate the world, it's necessary to understand both those roles.

DD: In what sense?
JO: I find it necessary to understand myself both as a member of society with a passport,  following certain rules, and also as a completely confused stranger who has little idea of what it means to be human or why I’m here – that confusion of suddenly finding that you exist in the world, and that every morning you wake up and take this reality and put it on like a suit; you kind of close yourself with this reality because you have to. But one knows from times of disturbance in life and from stories of brainwashing and mental collapse that the suit you put on every day can collapse, and you can be left as a raw existence, and that’s called being mad. It’s extremely uncomfortable if you have a glimpse of what it's like to lose that social identity, and yet, it’s also very important that you don’t lose sight of the social identity that you have chosen to take on. I suppose I’m sort of poking at psychoanalysis here – the subconscious and the conscious. I don’t know very much about these things but instinctively, through art, I have come to think about them and study them. That’s why I think my works just largely moved towards people. I don’t really draw very much else now, except landscapes and I think that landscape is sort of the opposite, and therefore the same – it’s like me on the inside looking out. So there’s the thing, which is a body, which is positive and thrusting and procreating. And then there’s the passive, negative space, which is the thing that you move into. They’re a bit like male and female and a bit the same. I find it easier to clearly put these things into pictures. Trying to make a picture that perhaps suggests you look at it this way – that reality is a language, something that we’ve learnt that we can be poetic with. I think the danger of photography is that it sort of suggests that there is this kind of reality out there that’s solid and rigid that we’re not really connected to. I see what we see and what we experience as much more like a language. It’s easier to understand if one thinks of it more like a language, something which is a tool built from what we share and call reality but very much to do with culture and our own view on things, something therefore open to interpretation and to being shared.

DD: So how do you think the human animal is coping with this accelerated notion of the real that we live within now; this fast-paced artifice of reality?
JO: I don’t know, I have different moods. I guess you must too. You know sometimes I think that it’s cool, and that I can deal with it – I mean you can take the view that you’re here for a short time and don’t really have any idea of what it means or what it’s about, but that it's really an extraordinary thing to be involved in, and if you’re lucky – and you get away without extreme pain or miserable death or enslavement – it's kind of great. Another view is that it hurts and it’s too confusing and it’s very difficult to make any kind of sense of. I suppose I probably spend most of my time in between those two states. My therapist says I hide in working and I don’t like it when she says that. I don’t see it as hiding. I do spend an awful lot of my time either looking at art or making my own art and I see it as kind of going out into the world, but at the same time it’s an area that I feel quite safe in – I know how to do it. I think if I didn’t know how to make art I would feel much more confused by the world, Part of making art for me is the processing of my experience and the way that it feels to be alive and what it looks like out there. So that processing to me is really essential. I mean even after a couple of weeks of not doing it, I begin to feel shakier about who I am and what I’m doing and what it's worth getting engaged in.

DD:  It’s great when you can use that kind of process to deal with life…
JO: Absolutely. I find that my own activity is a fabulous way of processing the world and I think that for me it’s quite an essential activity. My dad always said he would do his job even if he wasn’t paid, and I’d do this if I wasn’t paid. It’s almost a bad habit. But I think that engaging the creativity of others has a similar quality to it. So, even if I couldn’t draw, the older I get the more I find that just looking at pictures and listening to music, and to some degree reading, provide a similar way of allowing one to process the world, to feel like you’re alive and like you’re existing in a way that makes some kind of sense.