Generic Topic Two

InTo the LoSt HeAd of DeNNiS

Dennis received his B.F.A. in 1965 from the School of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California, and then in 1967 he received his M.F.A. from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. He settled down in New York shortly after earning his degrees to work as an art teacher at the Long Island City Junior High School. However, Oppenheim would soon undergoe many shifts in his career. To begin, Oppenheim was soon inspired by the artist Marcel Duchamp, the father of Surrealism, and became an active part of the Earth Art movement in the 1960s.

Earth Art

The main idea behind Earth Art is to identify artwork outside "official art sites," repositioning it with in the reality of everyday life. Any site, anywhere in the world can- and must- be an art context.

Also, in this period, Minimalism (the elimination of the aesthetic and non-aesthetic element in a work of art) and Conceptualism (the elimination of the physical process, and sometimes of the object itself) became two major art movements that Dennis begins to respond to as well. Most of his works during this period were basically about deconstructing Minimalism.

In 1968, Dennis creates Landslide, one of the first earthworks. This piece was a series of digressing angled boards arranged on a slope next to the Long Island Expressway. Landslide is officially recognized by editorials by both TIME and LIFE magazines as an example of the new expression.

In 1969, Dennis then creates Annual Rings, the famous piece about physical contact, and a cornerstone of his Earth Art experience. In Annual Rings, he took the schemata of tree rings and reproduced it on the boundary between Canada and the United States. The boundary line would run between, pierce, go through the middle of the rings. What made this piece interesting to many was the location on a boundary.

Dennis enjoys success with his Earth Art works, but decides its time to move on to...

Body Art

By the late 1960s, Oppenheim began another major shift in his career. While he was walking around on land, he suddenly became aware of his body. Later as film and time sequences emerged, when the work was beginning to employ performance, there was a very natural transition to the body.

Body Art wasn't about theater or classical performance. Almost all the videotape and the documentation projects were done in seclusion, without an audience, in real time, with very little attention given to theatrical structuring. It was an attempt to capture a clinical, almost scientific observation of events as they unfold, fracture, fade out and exhaust. The human body becomes the art site itself.

For example, in Reading Position for the Second Degree Burn (1970), Oppenheim lays in the sun for five hours bare- chested, except for an open book laid upon his chest and stomach. His skin was sunburned, and Oppenheim relates this to the idea of painting. He wanted to reference painting, but to extend it, to see how to move ahead of it.

Body Art as an occupation had a relatively short life. It seemed to be an art that was burning itself up.

Surrogate Performers

Oppenheim begins another shift in his career, a step away from his own body, by substituting his body or someone else's body with another object-organic, and then inorganic.

In Untitled Performance (1974) at the Clocktower in New York, the genetic wroks and the body works, with their subtheme of danger and bodily death, converged with a menacing tone.The scenario: an organist dies and falls over the keyboard of his electric organ, the dying fall producing an odd chord hanging in the air. Meanwhile, the outside world does not intervene and the event transpires in its natural time. However, a substitution has occurred- the body of a dead German shepard dog lay over the keys and decomposed musically for a day. Here the theme of sacrifice was being gradually distanced thorugh a type of ancient ritual substitution. More about Oppenheim's uses of the substituted body can be seen on the next page: Dennis, the Puppeteer.

Machineworks

In the mid- 1970s, Dennis began to shift his career by eliminating the human face and figure in favor of mechanical elements. Oppenheim's works of the next five years or so- the Factories or machineworks and the Fireworks start the uses of machines as representations of his thought processes. Factories represent displays of thought processes that have cooled down and solidified enough to be looked at. The Fireworks show them heating up out of control.

Each of these shifts in Dennis Oppenheim's career have exhibited a strong and clear internal development. To this day, Dennis Oppenheim continues to develop his work in new and exciting ways.

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An ArTisT is BoRn

DeNNiS, the PuPPeTeeR

SenSoRy OvErLoaD

ChRoNoLoGY

DiGiTaL BiBLioGrAphY

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