One of the Key Figures of American Conceptual Art. Dennis Oppenheim: Land and Body comprises 16 Land and Body works from the 1960s and '70s including video and three-dimensional installations, mechanised sculptures and large photo and text pieces, which document key works.
An exhibition of works by one of the key figures of
American Conceptual Art opens to the public at the Irish
Museum of Modern Art.
Dennis
Oppenheim: Land and Body comprises 16 Land and Body
works from the 1960s and '70s including video and
three-dimensional installations, mechanised sculptures and
large photo and text pieces, which document key works. A
video programme of 65 other works provides an essential
context for the exhibition within Oppenheim's overall
oeuvre. The exhibition is the most extensive showing of
the artist's work in Ireland to date.
Dennis Oppenheim: Land and Body features many of the
revolutionary ideas which Oppenheim, and a small group of
other young artists, introduced to the art world of the
1960s and '70s. A time of great social and political change
in the USA and beyond. Chief among these for Oppenheim
was his rejection of the conventional gallery space by
locating artworks in the real world of the landscape - be it
urban or rural. Other defining principles included
reconnecting something by radically altering its scale,
using quasi-scientific methods for the creation of art and
making the work's configuration or duration subject to
climatic or other natural forces. 'Landslide', 1968, involved
arranging angled boards around a slope of the Long Island
Expressway or, as Oppenheim charaterised it, activating a
pre-existing landscape. For 'Gallery Transplant', 1969,
Oppenheim marked out the exact dimensions of a gallery in
the snow, which then disappeared with the arrival of
spring.
In 1970 Oppenheim described his attitude to traditional art
spaces: To me a piece of sculpture inside a room is a
disruption of interior space. It's a protrusion, an
unnecessary addition to what could be a sufficient space
in itself...At the point I began to think very seriously about
place, the physical terrain. And this led me to question the
confines of the gallery space and to start working mostly
in an outdoor context but still referring back to the gallery
site and taking some stimulus from that outside again. The
exhibition illustrates the extraordinary cohesive
development and diversity of Oppenheim's work, more
especially the transition from Land to Body art in the early
1970s. This period saw the artist's focus of interest move
from the macrocosm to microcosm, from the earth to the
body and its endangerment and to the body as a means of
accessing the mind. In 'Reading Position for Second Degree
Burn', 1970, Oppenheim lay in the sun for five hours
bare-chested except for an open book on his chest. He
described the piece as having its roots in a notion of
colour change. I allowed myself to be painted, my skin
became pigment.
The show also includes Oppenheim's surrogate performers
- the mechanical puppets which represented the artist's
attempted withdrawl from the use of his own body as an
endangered art material. 'In Theme for a Major Hit', 1974,
a two-foot-high puppet is seen prepeatedly performing
strange, contorted movements. The Oppenheim face on
the puppet suggest that the artist, despite the myth of
autonomy, is constantly manipulated by external forces.
Born in Electric City, Washington, in 1938, Dennis
Oppenheim lived in Honolulu and California before moving to
New York in 1966, where he continues to live and work. He
executed his first earthwork in 1967 and had his first
one-person show in New York in 1968 followed by
showings in Paris, Bern and Finsterwolde, the Netherlands,
in 1969, and at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1972. Since
then he has created Earth works and Body works and also
monumental fireworks, throughout Europe and North
America. In recent years he has had one-person shows in
Washington, Mexico City, Venice, Geneva and Barcelona
and participated in group shows at the Whitney Museum,
New York, the Pompidou Centre, Paris, and the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Irish Museum of Modern Art,
Dublin, IE