Whitney Curator Chrissie Iles in Conversation with Dennis Oppenheim

Oppenheim at MoMA

This past Sunday, August 1st, The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today opened to the public at New York City's Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition, curated by Roxana Marcoci, brings together over 300 photographs, magazines, and journals, by more than 100 artists, from the dawn of modernism to the present. The broad collection of work surveys the ways in which photography at once informs and challenges the meaning of what sculpture is.

The exhibition includes two early Oppenheim photographic documentations of Land Art (Annual Rings, 1968) and Body Art (Parallel Stress, 1970) as part of "The Performing Body as Sculptural Object," utilizing the role of photography in the intersection of performance and sculpture as context.


Annual Rings, which is part of the Metropolitan Museum's permanent collection, captures the juxtaposition of man-made national and temporal boundaries through a schemata of tree growth rings enlarged and transposed into the snow. The rings overlap and intersect the U.S.A./Canadian border, crossing both political boundaries and time zones and thus questioning these ordering systems .
Parallel Stress documents a ten minute performance from May 1970. The photographs capture Oppenheim's greatest stress position prior to collapse while positioned suspended on a masonry-block wall and collapsed concrete pier between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, and then the position resumed at an abandoned sump on Long Island. Parallel Stress is on loan for the exhibition from the artist.

"The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today" will be at the Museum of Modern Art from August 1st to November 2nd.

Oppenheim on Show, July 2010

This Thursday, July 1st, Off the Wall Part 1: Thirty Performative Actions will open to the public at New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibition focuses on actions which displace the site of the artwork from an object to the body, acting in relation to, or directly onto, the physical space of the gallery.

The exhibition, curated by Chrissie Iles, includes Dennis Oppenheim's 1973 installation Echo which fills the the gallery walls with the image of a hand slapping the wall onto which it is projected accompanied by its sound, reverberating through the wall. The reverberating sound:

"suggests the phenomena of a sound passing through a solid. In this way it carries the physical reality of this act through this barrier to the other side into a space unavailable to sight." DO

First shown at MOCA San Francisco in 1973, Echo is now part of the Whitney's permanent collection.

The following day, Friday, July 2nd, another Oppenheim piece will be included in an exhibition opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Material Interchange for Joe Stranard, Aspen, Colorado (1970) will be on exhibit as part of Between Here and There: Passages in Contemporary Photography, which runs through February 13th of next year.

"Off the Wall Part 1: Thirty Performative Actions" will be at the Whitney Museum of American Art from July 1st to September 19th.
"Between Here and There: Passages in Contemporary Photography" will be at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from July 2nd to February 13th.

The DKS interviews Dennis Oppenheim Part 1

Oppenheim Starts Summer 2010 in Italy

It’s easy to see why the Italian art world and public alike are smitten with Dennis Oppenheim. The bold, innovative nature of Dennis’s work resonates with a public who counts among its possessions countless art historical landmarks, from Rome’s Trevi Fountain to Florence’s Baptistery doors. A contemporary Oppenheim piece seems to bridge the gap from old to new. As the artist himself states, “in Italy more than in any other country, contemporary art is regenerated through its constant relation to history and memory.”

We are therefore proud to begin the summer of 2010 in Italy, marking Dennis’ eighth Italian solo exhibition in the past decade. “Material Interchange” opens at Bergamo’s Galleria Fumagalli on Saturday June 5, 2010. The exhibition, curated by Alberto Fiz, will feature a selection of seminal Land Art and Body Art documentations, including the installations Theme for a Major Hit (1974), a work comprised of artist surrogates, and Gingerbread Man, the infamous 1971 performance piece. Fiz, who also curated last summer’s show at the Scolacium Archeological Park, plans to highlight the way the work “tests the limits of art and architecture.” Oppenheim will be in attendance opening night, with a reception starting at 6:30 pm. The show runs until November 20^th.

Last year two concurrent exhibitions in the Southern city of Catazaro paid homage to the growth of Oppenheim’s work. A selection of recent sculptures and installations were exhibited in the aforementioned Fiz show at Scolacium Archeological Park and also the nearby MARCA Museum of Catazaro. Oppenheim’s work found an ideal home in the Park in particular, which specializes in the fusion of contemporary art and archeology. The setting exemplified Oppenheim’s historic value and provided the most public setting for Oppenheim’s work in Italy since the 1997 Venice Biennale.

Germano Celant, Director of the ‘97 Biennale, personally curated the collection of Oppenheim’s work for the prestigious Venice art show, which featured over forty pieces and surveyed a full decade of Oppenheim’s career. The exhibition embodied the pioneering nature of Oppenheim’s art by choosing an abandoned industrial space in neighboring Marghera as opposed to a traditional Venice gallery or museum space. The Biennale also marked the debut of Device to Root out Evil, the show-stopping flipped church that became a focal point and drew rave reviews during the Biennale, only later to be met with controversy when seeking a permanent home. The Biennale’s inclusion of Device to Root out Evil represented a significant shift in Oppenheim’s focus towards public projects.

“Material Interchange” will be at Galleria Fumagalli from June 5th to November 20th.

Journey Home Arrives at the Central Station in Grand Rapids

A large group gathered outside the Rapid Transit system's Central Station in Grand Rapids, Michigan last Friday July 17th for the public dedication of Dennis Oppenheim's recently installed sculpture Journey Home. The artist spoke to the group briefly describing the work.

He said, Journey Home is a spiraling 24-foot high circular form of rolled steel tubing clad with perforated metal, colored acrylic and slotted sandblasted Lexan. The form originates as a point in space, which journeys in a spiral configuration to the shape of a house.

The work was commissioned by the Interurban Transit Partnership and constructed by La Paloma Fine Art, an art fabrication company based in Sun Valley, California.

Dennis Oppenheim is one of the leading artists in the field of sculpture with a career spanning over forty years. He has concentrated on public art since the 1980s. Other public projects to be completed in 2009 are Garden of Evidence for Scottsdale, Arizona; Arriving Home for Chicago; Still Dancing for Toronto; Pathways to Everywhere for Calgary; Radiant Fountain for Houston; and Paintbrush Gateway for Las Vegas.

A book on Oppenheim's recent projects titled: Public Projects was just published by Charta, Milan. Included are essays by artists Vito Acconci and Liam Gillick and scholars, Aaron Betsky and Aaron Levy. It is available from Distributed Art Publishers.

Events this week

Hello all,

The book signing at the Parrish Art Museum in East Hampton is coming up this Thursday July 23rd. Hope to see you out there.

I also presented my sculpture, Journey Home, last Friday July 17th in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The sculpture was installed outside the Central Station bus depot. Check out the Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Grand-Rapids-MI/The-Rapid-Transit-Authority-for-the-Grand-Rapids-metro-area/43516312373
I will be doing another update on this sculpture.

There are also other book signing events coming up at Clic Gallery in East Hampton and at Storefront in New York City. Stay up to date with events by following my blog and e-blast newsletters.