Dennis Oppenheim – Parallel Stress, ten minute performance piece, 1970
Intended partly as a protest against the minimalist fixation on the essence of the object, this piece tested the capacity of the artist’s body to suspend itself from fingertips and toes between two masonry walls. The performance repeated the same position on the stomach in the notch between two gravel hills. Photographs were taken at the greatest stress position prior to collapse.
From his Minimalist earthworks created in remote places in the 1960s to Pop-Surrealist public sculptures for urban settings in the 1990s and 2000s, Dennis Oppenheim was dedicated to the proposition that art should be open to the world rather than cloistered in galleries and museums. So it is appropriate that he should be this year’s featured artist at the Storm King Art Center in the Hudson Valley, where sculptures by Alexander Calder, Sol LeWitt, Louise Nevelson, Alice Aycock and scores of other artists dot the beautiful, 500-acre landscape of hills, fields and forest.
The Museum of Contemp. Art Tokyo (MOT) shows his work in a separate room, a smart gesture. (Thanks to Mario A )
Buildings Poking Their Eyes Out
1997 2’ x 16’ x 5’
A: One Eye Out, B: Two Eyes Out, C: Four Eyes Out
Corrugated fiberglass, rolled galvanized metal, wax, fiberboard, pigments
Photo: Erma Estwick
Dennis Oppenheim (Previous post has many links to interviews, his bio etc)
His works branch in a number of directions, partly because they provide so little information. They are almost violent, almost failing, almost private.. In one sense, they are metaphor without specifc reference -“they point to” psychological strata existing outside of ordinary language. They betray thier own desriptions. – Alan Sondheim – Individuals: Post Movement Art in America
Received this sad news via Alan Sondheim.
Dennis Oppenheim just died; he was one of the most amazing artists I’ve ever
known… A really sad day –
Roberta Smith (NYtimes) in her obit informs us that he was once married to Alice Aycock in the 80’s.
His career might almost be defined as a series of sidelong glances at the doings of artists like Vito Acconci, Mr. Smithson, Bruce Nauman, Alice Aycock (to whom he was married in the early 1980s) and Claes Oldenburg.
In Hawaii Dennis became a developer and was successful as an entrepreneur in the early 60’s.
(Thanks to Hal Lum for this information and a link to – An interview of Dennis Oppenheim conducted 1995 July- Aug, by Suzaan Boettger, for the Archives of American Art.)
And I think that my state was a state of mind that I harbored as a graduate student at Stanford, was one that is not unfamiliar today and found in lots of young people. The feeling was that art is what you don’t know. Everything else is art history.
Sol LeWitt was dealing with his systematic units of and his grids, and there was already a ray of material out there that one could think about. Smithson was extremely catalytic because he was writing about the real world. His writing was enormously catalytic, I think, at that time. I found that very exciting. There was also an article by Michael Freed, talking about minimalism approach in theatricality, which seemed interesting at the time, too.
B: Did you ever read a lot?
DO: Not a great deal. Not as much as many people. What I found is that it got me too excited. I mean, stuff that I liked — it overly stimulated me. Like if I would read James Joyce, or if I would read or , or even poets like Charles or even people like Dylan Thomas who are odd, or even contemporary poets like Ted Hughes. And then books like — I like this Austrian guy who made . His name is Bernhardt. Thomas Bernhardt, who was influenced by Becker. And then some of the French structural writing. French and , and some of the stuff by American writers. Yes, Beckett would drive me crazy. I can’t even read him now. He’s so good — so good.
A fond farewell to Barbara Rose, the great art historian, art critic, nurturer of talent, Spainophile, and walking Britannica of 20th century art—she died on Friday at age 84. RIP
Through her practice, Rose helped define the major art movements of the latter half of the twentieth century, while consistently advocating for painting, a medium which many at the time claimed was dead. Exploring postwar art and its contradictions, she wrote about culture with an authority informed by her close friendships with two generations of artists in New York and abroad. She will also be remembered as the critic who championed Minimalism during the 1970s and a great promoter of art made by women.
Throughout her career, Rose continually worked to advance the art careers of women. In 1971, she wrote the first major monograph on Helen Frankenthaler and, in 1983, she organized the first museum retrospective of Lee Krasner’s work. She also furnished the text for definitive monographs on Magdalena Abakanowicz, Nancy Graves, Beverly Pepper and Niki de Saint Phalle.
In October 1965, Rose published the essay “ABC Art” in Art in America magazine, in which she described the fundamental characteristics of minimal art. In her essay, Rose considered the diverse roots of minimalism in the work of Kasimir Malevich and Marcel Duchamp as well as the choreography of Merce Cunningham, the art criticism of Clement Greenberg, the philosophy of Wittgenstein, and the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet. In examining the historical roots of minimal art in 1960s America, Rose drew a distinction between Malevich’s “search for the transcendental, universal, absolute” and Duchamp’s “blanket denial of the existence of absolute values”.[17] Rose further argued in “ABC Art” that minimalist sculpture was at its best when it was inhospitable to its audience: “difficult, hostile, awkward and oversize”.[18]
Rose grouped some 1960s artists as closer to Malevich, some as closer to Duchamp, and some as between the two; she argued that the work of some minimalists constituted a “synthesis” of Malevich and Duchamp.[13] Closer to Malevich were Walter Darby Bannard, Larry Zox, Robert Huot, Lyman Kipp, Richard Tuttle, Jan Evans, Ronald Bladen, Anne Truitt. Closer to Duchamp were Richard Artschwager and Andy Warhol. Between Malevich and Duchamp she placed Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Dan Flavin. Her conclusion was that minimal art is both transcendental and negative:
The art I have been talking about is obviously a negative art of denial and renunciation. Such protracted asceticism is normally the activity of contemplatives or mystics…Like the mystic, in their work these artists deny the ego and the individual personality, seeking to evoke, it would seem, the semihypnotic state of blank unconsciousness.[19]
She also contrasted minimal art with Pop Art:
…if Pop Art is the reflection of our environment, perhaps the art I have been describing is its antidote, even if it is a hard one to swallow.[20]
Rose is also credited with having popularize the term Neo-Dada.
Germano Celant, the towering Italian critic, curator, and art historian whose wide-ranging writing, exhibition-making, and scholarship altered the trajectory of contemporary art and made him a leading voice in the field, has died in Milan at eighty years old due to complications from Covid-19. The author of hundreds of books, essays, and articles that coincided with as many large-scale shows, Celant is most closely affiliated with Arte Povera, a term he coined in 1967 for the association of avant-garde artists who made meaning from mundane materials and challenged art’s symbolic function, formal conventions, and commodity status in postwar Italian culture. (
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