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Dennis Oppenheim (born 1938) has received international attention for a conceptual oeuvre spanning performance, video, sculpture, installation, and land art. In the early 1970s, Dennis Oppenheim was in the vanguard of artists using film and video to investigate themes relating to body and performance. This portfolio features a selection of his works known as the Aspen Tapes, produced between 1970 and 1974, in which Oppenheim uses his own body as a site of experimentation on the personal. In these works the artist enters into an intimate and dynamic dialogue with his body as he explores the boundaries of personal risk, bodily transformation, and interpersonal communication. With the publication of this portfolio in collaboration with the artist's studio, this seminal series of quasi-anthropological performances is now available to the public for the first time on DVD.
Just as Oppenheim's work explores new and unusual forms of communication and address, Slought Foundation hopes that this portfolio contributes to an existing discourse about alternative possibilities for cultural production and reception. In Oppenheim’s Transfer Drawings and Identity Transfers, for instance, the artist deposits and retrieves information from his daughter Kristin and his son Erik. In so doing, Oppenheim presents the act of communicating with others as a physical and biological extension of the self. Likewise, we encourage you to experiment by viewing the works featured in this collection outside the confines of a gallery or museum, and in your own home, community, and places of work, alone or in dialogue with your children and parents, colleagues and friends, neighbors and strangers.
Further Information:
“In a sense, I am creating a system that allows the artist to become the material, to consider himself the sole vehicle of the art, the distributor, initiator and receiver simultaneously. Understanding the body as both subject and object permits one to think in terms of an entirely different surface. It creates a shift in direction from the creation of solid matter to the pursuit of internal or surface change. With this economy of output one can oscillate from the position of instigator to victim. Take the phenomenon of grabbing: instead of grabbing clay, you grab your stomach. For the first time, instead of imposing form manually, you are feeling what it is like to be made. You might have felt your hands picking up a piece of wood and stacking it, but you have never felt what the wood felt.” -- Dennis Oppenheim
"The idea that one developmental sequence has to be traceable through an entire oeuvre may be an outdated Modernist anxiety, from an age obsessed with the idea that History is the temporal embodiment of Reason. Oppenheim’s work, with its emphasis on discontinuities and ruptures, implies a different, more dialectical, relationship to the sense of evolution. In fact, a kind of Aufhebung, or overleaping of the self through incorporation of its other, underlies a lot of the shifts in Oppenheim’s sequences.
In this, the work seems to offer an analogue to the art history of a changing and volatile era—an era when the Hegelian idea of Spirit as the moving force of art became mobile, the Spirit moving restlessly from one lode to another for its fuel. It is arguable that Oppenheim’s shifts have not been strictly in response to this generalized shifting of the Spirit of things, but that, in part, they have been a guiding force of the series of shifts. -- Thomas McEvilley
| Catalog Number: MC-778 |
Type: Feature |
Genre: Video Art / Film Art |
| Copyright: 2007 |
Length: 137 minutes |
Format:
DVD Region: 0 (All) |
| TV System: NTSC |
ISBN: 0-9714848-9-9 |
UPC: 880198077899 |
| Label: Slought Foundation |
This title is available in Europe for Wholesale - List Prices: £19.99 / 30.00€
This is a Microcinema Exclusive title.
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Exhibition:
Program MC-778 may be licensed for Exhibition.
Films In Compilation
Tooth and Nail directed by
Dennis
Oppenheim
USA,
Experimental,
2007,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
02:17:00
MATERIAL INTERCHANGE
1970 / 2:33 minutes
IDENTITY TRANSFER
1970 / 0:52 minutes
ROCKED HAND
1970 / 3:29 minutes
COMPRESSION - FERN (hand)
1970 / 5:38 minutes
PRESSURE PIECE
1970 / ...
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2008-10-23 Media Reviews Online
By Sebastian Derry
On the one hand, this compilation of 30 short experimental films from Dennis Oppenheim is a valiant effort, providing us with a historical record/document of what one artist was doing with nascent video technology in the early 1970s.
On the other hand this collection also serves to point out one of the unspoken truths about a lot of experimental video from the early 1970s, and let us not mince words here: most of it is dull, repetitive, unimaginative and uninteresting—bordering on rubbish.
The artist-becoming-the-canvas trope is one of the oldest on the books and so Oppenheim is himself the object of much of the material here, whether he’s using his own body or someone else’s to explore “boundaries of personal risk, bodily transformation, and interpersonal communication”. But looking at it now nearly 40 years on, filming oneself methodically eating a gingerbread man cookie, or taking repeated slow-motion punches to a rather doughy midsection — which Oppenheim in fact does in (you guessed it) “Gingerbread Man” and “Slow Punch” — is a good deal less “risky” than “risible”.
Given the age of the original source video material and subsequent transfers over the years, there is a certain rough-hewn, grainy, even lurid visual quality to the proceedings. Kudos are in order for the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia, for producing a beautifully mastered and packaged DVD, with gatefold cover, and glossy booklet featuring an essay by Slought’s Senior Curator Aaron Levy, and a reprint of Willoughby Sharp’s 1971 interview with Oppenheim originally published in Studio International.
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