Art review: Dennis Oppenheim at Thomas Solomon Gallery
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At Thomas Solomon Gallery, ‘Dennis Oppenheim: Early Works’ takes visitors to the early 1970s, when art was, on one hand, an open-ended experiment capable of just about anything, and on the other, nothing special – just another part of life’s unpredictable thrills and pitfalls, not to mention its inescapable freedom.
A sense of Everyman accessibility and see-for-yourself inquisitiveness is palpable in Oppenheim’s wonderfully blunt art. Four of the five pieces document what have come to be known as performances but are actually so basic that they should be called activities or, better yet, exercises for the imagination.
Oppenheim’s body is the starting point for ’50 Yard Dash’ (1969), ‘Stills from Gingerbread Man’ (1969-71), ‘Parallel Stress’ (1970) and ‘Reading Position for Second Degree Burn’ (1970). Black-and-white photographs, alongside informative captions and a stack of plaster casts, show him running, eating a cookie, suspending himself between unstable stacks of cinder blocks and sunbathing.
In contrast to a lot of today’s artists, who focus on their feelings and narcissistically presume that they matter, Oppenheim treats his body as if it could be anyone’s. In his salt-of-the-earth art, the body is a sensitive and vulnerable organism that is the basis of all human experience. It is everyone’s most intimate point of connection to the world as well as everyone or anyone else in it.
The only piece that falls flat neither begins with the body nor documents something that actually happened. ‘Wolf It Down: Project Proposal for Western United States’ (1977) is a funny one-liner: an earthwork that resembles a bumper sticker on steroids. It shows Oppenheim turning away from art as DIY experimentation and toward crowd-pleasing, big-budget, institutionally supported monumentality.
Happily, two small TVs in the gallery’s front windows play a DVD of 30 short videos and films Oppenheim made in 1970-74. Only a few are longer than a pop song. Many are quicker than punk numbers. Most take you to an optimistic era of heady integrity, when curiosity and communication were what art was all about, and showing off, by showing others up, had not yet become a profitable entertainment or national pastime.
– David Pagel
Thomas Solomon Gallery, 427 Bernard St., (323) 275-1687, through May 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.thomassolomongallery.com