Dennis Oppenheim at BlumHelman - installation art exhibit, New York, New York

Art in America, Oct, 1993 by Richard Vine

Now 55, Dennis Oppenheim has been integral to the history of nontraditional mediums since the late 1960s. Recently, however, his oeuvre--ephemeral earthworks, Conceptual exercises, body art, machine pieces, installations and performances that often combine serious menace with mischievous wit--has seemed at odds with today's more politically explicit art. Thus this new show raised the question of whether the artist's signature inventiveness would still be in evidence, and still potent.

The answer here, as in the huge 1992 retrospective at P.S. 1, was a.qualified yes on both counts. In one corner of the gallery, three monumental fiberglass-and-plaster torso segments held a headless colloquy amid scattered ear, eye and lip fragments. Two nearly 5-foothigh mesh "Think Tanks," painted fluorescent orange and looking vaguely like nuclear cooling stacks on round, unstable bases, were ringed by electric-train tracks with engines poised for endless circular journeys. In the back room, two upended "Iron/Boat" objects faced each other at an oblique angle, their fiat, mirrored surfaces mutually reflecting in a way that snared the viewer's multiplied image from four low perspectives--suggestive of a depressing voyage of self-discovery, perhaps.

The show's most ambitious work, Blue Tattoo, filled a small room with diverse elements. A red fluorescent light straddled one corner close to the floor, while steam from three electric tea kettles flowed through hoses into a snorting toy bull whose mechanically pawing shoulder bore a blue heart. A camera and projector then enlarged and retransmitted an image of the wobbling heart against a huge hanging glove (which also evoked an apron or housedress), patterned with the terms "si-sis-sister" and "mo-mo-mother." It is a sobering vision, this tiny bull, the mythic embodiment of orneriness and virility, here rendered as just one more link in a domesticated circuit dominated by the invisible hand of familial Woman, whose titles cannot even be transcribed without a hesitant stutter.

Oppenheim's skepticism continues, sculpturally, via his refusal of high finish. In his rough-hewn esthetic, "quality" is suspect not because it excludes certain audiences but because it propounds a fallacy--that of potential mastery over the human condition. In truth, these works seem to imply, life is much more a matter of wild hairs and loose ends, recalcitrant materials and marginal human competence, all in flux and ultimately entropic.

In the relatively optimistic Galloping through the Wheat, for example, a 28 1/2-inch-high loaf of foam-rubber white bread is progressively sliced and diced by the knife-blade-wielding hooves of small stampeding bronze mustangs. Here all the energy flows, with the toy-sized horses, away from the bland and highly processed food staple toward, well, a blank wall. One horse has already hit that barrier and passed halfway through--as if transmigrating into a new, unidentified dimension.

It is impossible to view Galloping without a certain nostalgia. Was it only 20 years ago (when Oppenheim was allied with artists like Smithson, Heizer, Nauman and Acconci) that sheer creative insouciance seemed enough to revolutionize art every few months? Maybe we all ran a little bit wild in those days. But in the sober morning-after of the '90s, one cannot help but ask where these tameless horses are really going, and what they'll do when they get there.