One of the few concepts to stick with me from my long-ago days as a student of statistics goes by the name of " regression to the mean. " It’s not about what happens when you don’t get enough sleep. The idea is that extremes tend not to beget extremes. Exceedingly tall parents in all likelihood will have shorter kids; violently cold winters will be followed by more temperate ones. On average, numbers " regress " back to their averages or means.
I was reminded of that so-called regression, the attenuation of extremes that takes place (mostly without anybody’s noticing) throughout the natural world, while looking at Julian Opie’s work at the Barbara Krakow Gallery. Opie is the kinder, gentler heir to Andy Warhol — appropriator of commercial imagery, manufacturer of portraits, the consummate self-effacer who is forever removing any sign in the artwork that it’s been touched by human hands.
Opie’s pared-down, populist æsthetic suggests Warhol on Zoloft. Whereas the father (granddad?) of Pop created brightly colored portraits of the rich and famous, Opie elects for nearly colorless portraits of minimal detail (few have noses, none sport ears) of unknown folks who appear to have been flattened by a steamroller. Warhol’s images imply a film animator on LSD with their repeated, static, identical forms — his grids of Mao and Marilyn and Mick — charged by molten, saturated, unpredictable colors. Opie’s portraits imply a newspaper cartoonist who’s a teetotaler to boot — naive forms that never quite repeat themselves rendered in washed-out hues that seem barely beyond the gray scale.
Alas, portraits play a secondary role in his current exhibit. The artist has embarked on a new visual venture, and the results at their best prove quietly captivating, almost hypnotic. He has taken to the road, and his latest work is a literal road show — highways, empty of vehicles, billboards, or pedestrians, stretching into similarly empty expanses of undifferentiated fields and forests and skies. The most successful of these meditative, unprepossessing roadscapes turn out to be the largest. Framed under glass in glossy white boxes that heighten their sense of the infinite, they measure in at almost four by five feet. Their size combines with their simplicity and their forthrightness (Opie is direct but too ironic to be called earnest) to make you feel as if you were in the picture.
The process by which these images are created — they begin as photographs that are scanned, stripped down, colored in, and then printed out digitally — is in no way suggested by how they look. They look like paintings, unreal photorealism. Each frame walks a tightrope between exactitude and dreaminess. In " I dreamt I was driving my car (motorway), " the white lines that divide the highway appear as precise as stenciled boxes, only to disappear into faraway recesses of puffy, unidentifiable shapes. I think this work’s capacity to draw viewers into any number of reveries stems from Opie’s having figured out our simultaneous need for verisimilitude and flights of fancy — actual places rendered fantastic. We’re someplace real, and we’re invited to dream.
The least successful works in the show — they’re relegated to a separate, smaller room — are attempts to combine the roads with the portraits. These diptychs are vertically shaped pieces with wide-angle V-shaped and mostly black automobile racetracks dominating the left side of the frame. The right side is given over to a square, expressionless, frontal view of a racecar driver’s bare or capped or helmeted head. Compared with the " I dreamt I was driving " series, these feel forced, didactic. The portraits don’t even bear any relation to the racetracks with which they’ve been paired. You could mix and match any face with any track, replace the guy in the helmet with the guy in the cap, and it would make no difference. They’re arbitrary.
I learned that the idea of coupling the drivers with the racetracks they run on originated as a commercial assignment. In fact, advertising logos for the cigarette company and the motor-oil manufacturer who commissioned the original work can still be seen on some of the pictures. Opie’s effort to reclaim art from the advertisement backfires; it’s as if he were trying to make a symphony out of a jingle. Now, instead of a full-fledged commercial, we’ve got a peekaboo version of the same. They feel coy, vaguely dishonest. Selling a product turns out to have greater integrity than pretending not to.
THE KRAKOW GALLERY, one of Boston’s and this country’s outstanding venues for contemporary art, has been routinely pairing its solo exhibits with what’s billed as " Print Publisher’s Spotlight, " a moving feast of typically experimental prints by small groups of talented artists. This month’s mini-smorgasbord comes courtesy of the printmaking establishment of Dieu Donné Papermill. Mel Bochner’s tongue-in-cheek Language is not transparent is a three-by-two-foot stretch of paper on which the title is repeated a dozen or so times and they’re all crowded together in the center of the frame. Each time " Language is not transparent " appears, it’s in a different shade of gray; the result is that words look transparent.
Also included is a dramatic silhouette by Melvin Edwards that looks like a back-lit human heart festooned with heavy chains and a lock. As for Jonathan Seliger’s Fresh, it’s a technical feat if not a culinary delight. Seliger has re-created what looks like an actual Table Talk pie — package as well as comestible — entirely out of paper. Would that it transcended being a scrumptious one-liner. And Michelle Stuart’s #10838 Milkweed looks like something you might see near the glass flowers at Harvard’s Peabody Museum — a grid that suggests a water-absorption study of 36 murky circles at whose centers lie a solitary milkweed seed. It feels like a cross between Eadweard Muybridge and one of those pamphlets about the warning signs of melanoma — a surprising wresting of dynamism from a pedestrian, static image.
Not to be missed in yet another space at the Krakow — the director’s office, no less — is a different kind of grid, a floor-to-ceiling quilt of 12 separately framed black-and-white photographs that depict the backsides of a dozen different faux Tudor houses. Each house stands two stories tall with an A-shaped roof; their exoskeletons, various patterns of exposed wooden beams against white stucco surfaces, make the composite look like some weird scarification ritual.
The husband-and-wife photography team of Bernd and Hilla Becher could have taken these shots for a home-insurance company — they’re that uniform. When you scrutinize them, they become a powerful comment on the human need for originality — the wood patterns differ, but the houses are all alike. It’s as if the artists were saying that distinctness itself is a commodity.
