Dennis Oppenheim

Dennis Oppenheim, Tooth and Nail: Film and Video 1970-74

Over the last four decades Dennis Oppenheim's artistic practice has involved actions, performances, installations, sculptures, film, architecture and all the stops between. He has constantly shifted the attention of his investigations at the very moment when his modes of working have become fixed into definable genres, such as Land Art or Body Art. Such a methodology has resulted in an eclectic practice that pushes at the limits of the artist's own comfort zone - be that physical, perceptual or even in relation to external expectations of his own artistic practice.

His early work, such as the 1969 Cancelled Crop, where a field was harvested in the form of an X, made incursions into the landscape and became associated with artists such as Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer. In the early 70s Oppenheim shifted to using the surface of the body as a possible territory where events could take place - at this time his work was frequently discussed in relation to Vito Acconci's practice. This mode of working can be most explicitly seen in Reading Position forSecond Degree Burn, 1970, where Oppenheim stretched out on Jones Beach in New York under a blazing sun with a book, titled Tactics, splayed across his chest. After five hours the outline of the book is marked on his skin: the artist becomes subject and object, transmitter and receiver. In 1974 Oppenheim turned away from using the human body to use surrogate puppets as an extension of himself, as ever altering his practice right at the point when registers of critical 'success' were imminent. In all of Oppenheim's work there is something reckless being put into action - from creating viewing platforms in the gallery to be looked from rather than at in the 60s (Viewing System for Gallery Space,1967), to arranging rocks to be thrown at himself in the 70s (Rocked Circle - Fear, 1971), building machines in the 80s to release fireworks and, in the 90s, turning his attention to the most excessive iterations of public sculpture. Other works are extraordinarily prescient of more recent practices - for example Ground Matters, 1969, used the sole of a shoe to mark out space while walking on sand - see Allora & Caldazilla - and Sterilized Surface Glass, 1969, blanked out gallery windows with white cleaning material to give the appearance of the gallery being closed - see Ryan Gander.

Tooth and Nail is a collection of film and video works made between 1970 and 1974. These are infused with a wonderful curiosity and intellectual engagement with the assumptions of art-making and interrogatethe function and meaning of the creative act by unpacking relationships between the object, artist and viewer. Although the artist has alluded to the moving image being a convenience rather than a chosen format, Tooth and Nail draws attention to Oppenheim as a crucial contributor to debates within the medium. This period marks the moment when Oppenheim focused on the use of his own body and that of his children. In one work, A Feedback Situation, 1970, Oppenheim originates a movement through drawing on his son Eric's back. Sonthen returns the gesture to his father,so initiating a three-minute feedback loop of past, present and future. In another work of the same year, Objectified Counter Forces, Oppenheim's 'offspring (physical extensions of myself) are pitted against each other in a sack race',and in another he describes an event where his daughter 'Chandra hit[s] herself with mittens attached to her coat - they become an uncontrollable outside force'. In all of the pieces in this collection there is an exploratory sense of the possible: childlike attempts to work out the limits of one's own bodyare played outby the artist on behalf of the viewer. There is an intense intimacy as Oppenheim simply tries things out - painting his own teeth or breaking off his fingernails in the gaps between his studio floorboards.

In August 1970 the magazine Arts Canada printed a text by Oppenheim titled 'Catalyst 19671974', which consisted of a list of statements from Oppenheim's sketchbooks. Many of these one-line descriptions - such as 'branded mountain', 'cancelled crop', 'wooden leg' and 'potato sack race' - became works: the latter two film pieces feature in Tooth and Nail, Objectified Counter Forcesand Lead Sink for Sebastian, 1970. This second work is a short video where an amputee, Sebastian, replaces his own wooden left leg with a lead pipe, while a portable butane torch is attached to his right leg. As he walks, the lead prosthetic melts from contact with the flame, resulting in his height gradually becoming uneven, giving the appearance of sinking. Two Right Feet for Sebastian, made four years later, features two boots on motorised contraptions that kicked against the gallery walls 60 times a minute, the sound amplified. Between these two repetitive movements a pair of spot-lit metal poles reached down from the ceiling - one touching the floor, the other unevenly hovering above ground level in an echo of the earlier performative-videosculpture. A transaction involving the body is caught in a process of reduction rather than production - a system Oppenheim has described as precipitating 'changes to activate the periphery of things', destabilising any faith in objects and assumptions.

In an interview with the artist Bill Beckley, Oppenheim described his concerns in the early 70s as focused on disturbing the presumptions around the object status of art, noting that paying attention to 'the non-object was an idea that was reckless' as it broke with conventions of both the received nature of art and its circulation in the market. Such ideas created a break that is now familiar, however, at this present moment when we are seeing a return to objects - as evidenced by last year's Documenta - with newly charged complexities. Today Oppenheim's moving-image works raise the pertinent question as to how the object can be addressed in the light of orthodoxies of critical practice. In this conversation, Oppenheim questions Jasper Johns's definition of what artists do with their time - 'take an object and then you do something else to it. And then you do something else to it' - suggesting instead that the artist is doing something more complex to an object that has alreadybeen acted on: 'You are operating on the operation not the thing. When you are operating on the operation you have found a way to separate yourself from the things and you operate in a more intangible way.' Such intangibilities suffuse Tooth and Nail, posing questions that refuse to be answered and all the while tapping into ways of understanding the world that demand attention to be tuned in.

Dennis Oppenheim, Tooth and Nail: Film and Video 1970-74, 2007, DVD and 12pp booklet, Slought Books, Philadelphia (www.slought.org) with Fabian and Claude Walter Galerie, Zürich, 2007, $30.00, 978 0 9714848 9 4.

This review was originally published in May 2008 / No 317, p36.

Lisa Le Feuvre is curator of contemporary art at the National Maritime Museum and teaches in the department of art at Goldsmiths.

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