Catherine Opie.

Zellen, Jody

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum | New York, New York

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Catherine Opie's mid-career photography survey at the Guggenheim (through January 7) is impressive, yet also seems very carefully handled. At nearly 200 exhibits this is hardly surprising, especially given their often controversial subject matter. What the museum gives us, instead, is a multi-level, vertiginous installation. Moreover, prompted by the show's subtitle, "American Photographer," it is easy to see these works in very grandiose terms. Posing as nodding acquaintances of seminal, largely American forbears (including, significantly, Walker Evan's 1938 "American Photographs" exhibition at MoMA and Robert Frank's 1958 book The Americans), not only do they point to photography's American roots, but to something like the equivalence between America and photography as a whole, bathing even the least image with a certain telling immediacy.

In Opie's case, the question of American-ness is especially problematical. From day one she has been openly queer, yet just as adamant that, while documenting lesbian communities, she is also interested in portraying the landscape around her. Both ambitions, in the museum context, are aimed at transcending the accepted categories, offering simultaneous portraits of mismatched people and places. Part of the reason for this apparent irreconcilability derives from a familiar, but ingenious device. Most of the photographs of places are devoid of people, while the portraits occur in controlled, minimal settings--either in the studio before colored backdrops, or in and around the homes of her subjects.

Often turning the camera on herself, Opie's self-portraits are among her most challenging, exposing an at once self-assured yet vulnerable woman. Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994) is a frontal nude of a leather-hooded Opie, with dozens of needles spiked through each arm--the word "Pervert" etched onto her chest in a floral script echoes the backdrop's leafy tapestry. There's raw longing in Self-Portrait/ Cutting (1998), a childlike drawing of two stick figures holding hands in front of a house that has been scratched into her back until it bled. Staged as an anxiety dream, it marks the beginning of Opie's search for a more settled existence. This turn toward uneasy renewal finds its apotheosis in Self-Portrait/Nursing (2004), realized when Opie became a mother. Compositionally similar to Self-Portrait/Pervert, it contrasts the purity of a nursing child with the artist's tattoos and still visibly scarred chest.

Whether one starts at the top or bottom of Guggenheim's spiral ramp, the wild extremities of Opie's work look back to these rather melancholy images, anchoring (or alienating further) her matter-of-fact investigations of the outside world. For this native Angeleno we're talking the L.A. freeway system, homes in Beverly Hills, mini-malls and surfers floating in a calm sea. Farther inland, we are treated to images of Wall Street, isolated icehouses surrounded by snow and intimate views of lesbian families Opie has visited on her travels, like Joanne, Betsy & Olivia, Bayside, New York (1998). These travelogue pictures stand in stark contrast to her portraits of friends, mostly gays and lesbians posing as their ideal selves--like Mike and Sky (1993) and Mitch (1994)--or playing sacrificial roles, as in Ron Athey/The Sick Man (from Deliverance) (2000).

All of these journals reveal the same strange mix of closeness and distance. It's as if Opie's dream of family and home was forever under siege, never quite possible, with traces of this impossibility quietly festering beneath the surface. When shown people in drag, like Divinity Fudge (1997) or Jerome Caja (1993), it's not that we see them for what they are or even aspire to be, but as stark affronts to history, sacrificial lambs for the slaughter. A far more banal, yet oddly self-conscious Opie peeps through in occasional snapshots of her immediate surroundings, such as the MySpace-y image of her son, Oliver in a Tutu (2004), or Christmas West Adams (2004) showing a rainbow flag imprinted with the words, "Say No to the Bush Agenda." It is no accident that we get to read this humble porch slogan inverted. For whether Opie's photography is ultimately queer or, as the Guggenheim cautiously asserts, somehow intrinsically American, what it shows is clearly NOT the America this country seems yet ready to embrace.