“I seem to see the world as not very funny,” said renowned experimental artist Dennis Oppenheim at the CFA Cinema on Tuesday. “That is, unless I’m operating in a zone where funny becomes tragic.”
Over the course of his career, Oppenheim has explored the mediums of body art, performance video art and animatronics, along with minimalist, experimental and conceptual styles of sculpture. His pieces have been featured publically in countless cities around the world, as well as in the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and many others.
“His work is often hilarious, often nightmarish… often both in the same piece,” said Art Professor Jeffery Schiff, who introduced Oppenheim. “He expresses something about the sadomasochistic relationship we have with our materials as artists.”
Explaining the extreme minimalism of his early works, which he completed when he was still a graduate student at Stanford, Oppenheim said, “A lot of what we do [as artists] has to do with when we were born. When I finally emerged in graduate school, minimalism was so pervasive that if you lived in a loft in New York, you wouldn’t have anything on the walls, and probably just a mattress. It permeated your life.”
Departure from graduate school dovetailed with a departure from the space of the studio. Over time, his sculptures began to occupy the sides of hills, crop fields and frozen rivers.
“To show the energy in pre-existing objects, I would go around and claim them using a surveyor stake, a map, and a document,” he said. He would then create his image in the landscape and record his work through photography.
“What was a rather incidental move on the part of the artist to communicate a work through photography, erupted into what now is in some ways stronger than the position of the [physical] work at that time,” he said. “Conceptual photography has moved almost ahead of painting in terms of substance. Now it is so accepted and so strongly felt critically, but then it was just a method of documenting something you had done.”
He described his shift to performance video art as a “mysterious beckoning” that allowed him to exist as both the subject and object of his works. He showed a frame from his 16 mm short, “Compression Fern,” in which he squeezes a plant with his hands until it ceases to exist.
“This seemed to be the most advanced state in which you could picture yourself – as an instigator of actions,” he said. “It can be incredibly seductive as an artist, and can elicit numerous applications and an endless array of variations.”
A series of chaotic contraptions that conceptualize the inner workings of the brain marked Oppenheim’s return to sculpture in the late ’70s. These works used architectural images, distorted in various ways, to create the desired image of a mental mechanism.
“It’s like architecture with no hands,” Oppenheim said. “You hold the image of a generic house in your mind, and you throw a rock at this image and you shatter it. And then the shattering is married with the architecture. The house becomes made up of force lines, wedded with tidal waves and earthquakes. This is a building perpetrated through forces on the mental level.”
In the past few decades, Oppenheim has received larger and more demanding commissions for public outdoor sculpture. At the University of Freiburg, he constructed a three-part installation of a glass shelter metamorphosing into a winged insect, breaking through the glass wall of a university building, and finally hanging in the center of the building’s atrium.
In Valladolid, Spain, the site of one of Europe’s annual film festivals, he devised a sculpture he described as a “stage set” with ladders, pulleys and a house perched on top of a glass tower, perpetually on the brink of collapse.
“In my mind, most sculpture was an event that already happened,” he said. “I wanted to retain the energy of something almost ready to fall, in a work that seemed to be unfixed, having another scene to portray.”
Not all of Oppenheim’s pieces are meant to convey such strong artistic messages, however. Faced with a photo of his installation “Digestion,” which features five deer with kerosene-fueled flaming antlers, he paused pensively for a moment before saying, “Sometimes you just do things because you want to do them.”
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