Walter Klepac Conjectural Imaging: Dennis Oppenheim Vanguard, Vol. 8 #8, October 1979. [ 4,190 words ] Dennis Oppenheim's position as a major artist of the 1970s rests primarily on his ability to extend the formal rigor, objectivity and cogent generalities of the early minimalists into psychological areas of artistic investigation. While much of the art which has surfaced in the past decade has claimed to derive directly from the radical departures of the minimalists, Oppenheim's is not derivative: rather it shares implicitly in their underlying and characteristic assumptions about self, other and contact with the external world. Not only did the minimalists posit and affirm a public space, they also tacitly acknowledged that there is a public aspect as well to the spectator's experience and comprehension of the external world. The peculiar kind of self-consciousness which Judd, André and Stella induce in the spectator is a composite of primary and normative experiential operations of perception, judgment and bodily orientation. Their work articulates a general truth about the property of objects to exist independently of perceptual processes and suggests, also, that one's perception of such objects are not merely self-generated fictions. Despite the intrinsic temptations and pitfalls of his subject matter, Oppenheim (like the majority of minimalists before him) rejects any view of the self that would lock the individual within a subjective and ultimately solipsistic bind. Oppenheim's treatment, within a given work, of our basic fears, desires and frustrations can be said to be an empirical one insofar as it can be compared to the spectator's own. (This would be an impossible luxury for the solipsist.) And even though Oppenheim's means are for the most part dematerialized, metaphorical and, in a special sense, gestural, his works directly confront the exigencies of human consciousness and its conditions. For this reason, Oppenheim's metaphors and gestures are far more constrained and down to earth than is normally assumed: they do not represent mere projections of a desire but are instead statements about the fate of such desires. Perhaps Oppenheim's work has been misunderstood because we overlook his penchant for creating in each of his best pieces a striking, truly memorable image. Even in Oppenheim's early 'conceptual' phase it was the arresting image that commanded a closer inspection of what might otherwise be seen as a self-evident presentation of an elementary idea or straightforward documentation. On the whole Oppenheim's images depict either a conspicuous alteration in scale or a radical transfer of some sign into an unfamiliar if not bizarre context. It should be kept in mind that these transformations are used as formal strategies: i.e., as a means for making a statement, rather than as the statement or content itself. More often than not critics have tended to discuss a particular work by Oppenheim as an instance of one or another of the artist's typical modes of transformation. Elaborate discussions of a given piece usually start and end with the writer expounding on the significance of the fact that the piece embodies a strategy of, for example, material interchange, identity transfer, concretizing abstract concepts or linguistic expressions, energy transfer, substitution, superimposed contexts, magnification or reduction, etc. The fact of the matter is that Oppenheim's images stimulate a variety of associations which all have to do with some particular aspect of common existence. These associations which may at first appear to be entirely random and merely witty are in fact focussed by an extended reflection on such fundamentals as time, genetic relationships and death. The image in a typical Oppenheim piece, therefore, generates a complex yet almost crystalline web of innumerable cross-references, ironic contrasts, inversions and unexpected analogies that both amplify and qualify the significance of the piece. It is this totality that makes up his 'gesture' and final statement. For this reason Oppenheim's works should be approached as a sustained and intensely critical thought process, the end of which is a paradox that encompasses and orders commonly felt ideas and feelings. In Identity Stretch, for example, the viewer has no difficulty at all in recognizing the sign: both its reference and its bizarre incongruity are immediate and striking. Two gigantic overlapping and elongated thumbprints of unequal size are etched in tar upon a barren field, 300' x 1000' in area. Pictured in a number of aerial photographs, the thumbprint configuration takes on the appearance of a topographical description of a landmass — much like those found in official government maps. Yet despite the clarity and authority of this image, it is impossible not to notice its stubborn irony. That Identity Stretch might conceivably be intended simply as a colossal personal monument is effectively short-circuited from the start by the highly generalized nature of fingerprints. Fingerprints are basically empty marks of identity inasmuch as they afford no concrete information whatsoever about the personality, character or appearance of their owner. Although each and every set belongs to only one person, fingerprints remain totally anonymous in appearance: to the ordinary observer they could belong to anyone. For the artist to deliberately employ a sign of this sort to manifest his desire to 'make an impression' in the world is, in effect, a way of discretely denying the possibility that that desire can actually be fulfilled or materially realized. Thus the gesture in Identity Stretch consists of not only a particular act but of its implicit negation as well. Since it is obvious from the typed comments included in the piece that the thumbprints belong to the artist and his son, one is inclined to interpret the image as an attempt on the part of the artist to extend (stretch) himself through time and space, his child acting as an agent of immortality and supercorporeality (the physical projection of the body via one's genes). The sheer blatancy and matter-of-factness of Oppenheim's attempt to literally stamp his private (but universally intelligible) aspirations on the face of the earth suggests an intensity of focus and a naïveté one normally associates with the unabashed determination of a young child. By resorting to the spontaneous mode of action of the very young he overcomes the adult's sober awareness of the impermanence and finitude of human existence. Oppenheim has produced a highly compressed statement in which the two extremes of desire (its beginning and end) are inextricably fused together. The inherent circularity of this gesture has certain implications. Nothing substantive about the artist's basic condition has of course been changed by his symbolic attempt at self-projection. This very circularity does, however, strongly intimate that the desire for transcendence of one's material circumstance perpetuates itself from generation to generation. It also asserts that the energy and innocence of youth in the end only serves to fuel the profound sense of limits that comes with maturity. A further remark concerning the priority of the image in Oppenheim's work is required. While the written comments that appear with a given piece do establish its general frame of reference, it would, I think, be a mistake to regard them as the final word. Instead these commentaries should be thought of as being supplementary remarks that explore tangential ideas or elaborate the lines of initial speculation and enquiry. In most cases there is a notable discrepancy between these texts and the plausible inferences drawn from the image. This is seen perhaps most clearly in those cases where the image of a work is not entirely successful and actually needs the commentary in order to achieve cogency. What the viewer sees in Annual Rings, for example, is a series of dark concentric rings (pathways shovelled out of a thick blanket of snow that is bisected by a blackish stream of water. By itself, this image generates a forceful visual tension. One may even be struck by the eccentric sight of the artist fastidiously executing this orderly graphic design in the middle of some out of the way ice-covered lake. But it is Oppenheim's remarks informing us that the scene takes place on an international borderline and time zone, which places the work within broader parameters. They introduce, for example, the familiar concepts of tree rings, time zones and geopolitical boundaries. Wrenched from their respective semantic contexts these notions are intertwined and rooted together in a single image. Their unexpected juxtaposition creates a jarring dissonance that the mind cannot resolve. It is as if the partition separating discrete compartments of knowledge had suddenly been removed and the spectator left to contend with various conflicting perceptions of equal intensity. One finds, for instance, that the superimposition of the natural and the organic (the tree rings) upon a man-made system of time keeping effectively explodes one's sense of time. Yet while such associations fuse into deeply felt and ultimately impenetrable paradoxes — as they do in Oppenheim's best works — their relation to the image remains ad hoc and circumstantial. A nagging suspicion remains that the emotional and cognitive resonance of the piece, powerful as it is, depends on the artist's external suggestions and a spectator's active imagination. One need only turn to a work like Wishing the Mountain Madness to find a comparably profound telescoping of conceptual categories and an unsettling clash of expectation being generated by the image. Although these images continue to be Oppenheim's métier, both their nature and the way that they function within a given work have changed significantly since the artist began to make what he calls installation pieces around 1974. Basically these pieces consisted of solid but unobtrusive objects placed in unexpected contexts or disconcerting combinations. A physical object standing on its own suggests an infinitely wider variety of interpretations than one that is 'fixed' permanently in place by a photograph. Wily and intractable, it attracts attention but subverts any rash attempt to arrive at a coherent and consistent reading. The object enters into the meaning of the piece, strictly on its own terms, as a thing in itself. As a consequence, the installation pieces no longer operate in terms of certain basic clusters of associations and therefore do not lead him from one set of connections or correlations to the next, step by step, as the photographic pieces had. The viewer must instead discover his own way through an amorphous, highly charged ambience generated by a peculiar concatenation of diverse particulars. Made and exhibited before 1974, Color Application for Chandra remains one of the most brilliant of Oppenheim's installation pieces. At first glance it looks irrational and piecemeal and yet at the same time strangely compelling. One sees in quick succession, the cool blank stare of a video monitor, a live parrot perched on a tall stand, two bright yellow neon tubes, and, off to one corner, a tape recorder with speakers. The startling incongruity of the assembled objects is further intensified by the singular autonomy exerted by each of them. Although Color Application, like all the other installation pieces, has the appearance of a tableau, its component objects are to be understood as existing in real physical space and real time. Its objects therefore are not images in space but actual bodies. This is essential, for Oppenheim seems to take pains to insure that each object in the work, because it represents a particular class of things in the world, engages the attention in a completely distinct way. Each encounter with one of the component objects is separate and contributes to the overall statement of the work. Surprisingly enough, even the video monitor with its continuous tape loop asserts a wholly authoritative presence. It virtually draws the viewer into its unique sphere. Nothing interrupts its inexorable sequence of pure electronic colours: one is almost hypnotically locked into an infinite present tense. The narrowly channeled experience is always immediate, distanced and entirely passive. One is made into a kind of involuntary recipient of a relentless, rigidly ordered outpouring of abstract visual information. The parrot, on the other hand, presents another situation altogether. There is almost an obligation to attract the bird's attention, or make it respond in some way. There seems at first to be so little else of interest in Color Application that one's direct interaction with the bird appears to be required in order to even begin to appreciate the piece; i.e. to get it to 'work'. In any event, it is hard not to feel acutely self-conscious about just standing there and not doing anything. What complicates matters all the more is that one's relation to the parrot looks like a feedback situation, but it is not. In fact, that relation is as distant and passive as it is to the video monitor. Oppenheim has in effect introduced the parrot with its pungent, exotic, living presence to make, in part, the concept of aesthetic distance palpable. For in spite of the fact that the parrot exists most conspicuously in the same room occupied by the viewer its function and reason for being there are defined exclusively in terms of the internal relations within the work. Because of this enforced and unexpected distance the viewer becomes conscious of being blocked from assimilating the object into a casual, everyday perspective. There are times in an installation like Color Application when one is drawn completely into a particular state of consciousness. As we watch the colours change we also hear a man coaching a child on the names of those colours. It is hard not to become involved in Oppenheim's (we presume) efforts to coax his daughter in identifying colours. The artist makes a past event, having no direct connection to us, seem immediate and personal. It is as if his vivid mimetic effects have accomplished an exchange of consciousness. After one has gotten the drift of the exchange and has observed something of the child's ability to respond to the colour exercise, the mechanical aspect of both the exercise and the videotape and sound track apparatus becomes more and more obvious. For while the apparatus facilitates and provides a model of the rote method of instruction, it eventually parodies that method: it drones on long after its apparent pedagogical role has been performed and its spell over the viewer has been broken. In the final analysis, it is seen to offer only a shadowy record of a salient and purposeful human action and, more importantly, to operate according to its own nature as a mechanical device, ultimately subject to the laws of entropy and totally oblivious to human intention or presence. Oppenheim shifts our focus of attention and reminds us of both the reality of an extra-mental world and the fact that this world could well exclude the self. What unites his sundry objects is an elaborate transfer of names and voices. There is a muffled clamour of disparate sounds. The same word is in effect heard in three distinct and autonomous states — it occurs naturalistically in the context of the colour lesson (the video monitor), isolated, 'disembodied' and somewhat garbled (the tape recorder) and as a strange, raw, disquietingly immediate squawk (the parrot). However, while the viewer finds the names of colours disintegrating into increasingly unintelligible mechanical and animal noises, he sees that the colours of the actual objects have retained their initial clarity and impact. Indeed, one of the most important aspects of Color Application is the sharpness with which the specificity and emotional tenor of our response to colour is separated from our response to and dependence on our words for colour. The isolation and relative containment of the verbal-semantic aspect in Color Application brings to light a major obstacle to our dealing with things in themselves. (That the words in this piece have to do with the subject of colour is a particularly brilliant stroke on Oppenheim's part, for it could, I think, be reasonably claimed that the colour found in Color Application actually intensifies the concreteness and ineffability of the objects in it.) Put another way, the motivation behind trying to clear perception and understanding of an entanglement in language could be the artist's way of working the individual objects into fresh and potent symbols. After all, if genuine symbols do exist they must do so at that deeper level of the collective and individual psyche, which is prior to language. It is this quality which distinguishes them from those 'symbols' which are in fact the word-generated constructions of literary and psychoanalytic contexts. Color Application is organized into a single fundamental contradiction. The lesson shown on the video monitor represents a closed, self-contained system — one that is intelligible only in reference to a human's faculties of comprehension and communication. Because of this fact the apparent gesture of the piece — that of the artist transferring both his voice his words through the medium of his daughter to the parrot — is actually the antithesis of the real gesture and meaning of the piece. Moreover, not only does Color Application clearly demonstrate that the application of the elementary transfer model of communication to other than human receivers is impossible and senseless, it also provides a stunning and incontrovertible emblem of that which lies beyond the boundaries of all forms of such communication. For above everything else the presence of the parrot dramatically and conclusively attests to the persistence of an external world that refuses articulation. For all intents and purposes then, Color Application for Chandra is Oppenheim's way of saying that language, as central an instrument as it is to human intelligence and perception, cannot substantially alter or adequately elucidate the nature of reality. One could go so far as to say that the work strongly implies that the consequence of our habitual and unconscious dependence on language is that it narrows, even in its very effort to comprehend, the scope of our attention and closes off innumerable avenues of knowledge and intuition. One of the more intriguing observations on Oppenheim's work comes from Alain Parent in the catalogue for the retrospective that he organized for the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Montreal and which was exhibited this summer at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. 'Oppenheim's primary purpose', Parent wrote, 'seems to relate to a dynamics of culture in a broad sense . . . a dynamics using at once several levels of consciousness irreducible in the density and wealth of their syntheses to one type of interpretation only.' He concluded that Oppenheim's work 'relates not only to the individual consciousness and to its structures but also beyond, to culture, history and myth'. Parent is correct, I believe, in stressing the subtlety and depth of the artist's comprehensive probings into contemporary psyche and culture. But the main thrust of Oppenheim's art shows that the dynamics of that culture have been absorbed into and have transformed individual consciousness. What makes the installations of the past five years so particularly impressive is the range of experience and the dimensions of awareness they induce. In An Attempt to Raise Hell (1974), for example, Oppenheim constructed a purely contemporary, secular correlative for feelings and emotions whose supporting cultural infrastructures and belief systems have eroded. The deeply unsettling response that this work elicits serves as a reminder that, somewhere in its subconscious depths, the collective psyche has not entirely lost its memory of what was once referred to as religious dread. Oppenheim scrupulously preserves the neutral appearance of the objects in this piece knowing full well that his audience would not tolerate any overtly symbolic images. His strategy is, instead, to orchestrate his innocuous, bizarrely comic props into an authentic and powerful symbolic gesture. The sudden deafening sound made by the metal head of the puppet slamming into an overhanging bell effectively shatters any composure or sense of detachment the viewer may have had. In a stroke we are rendered vulnerable and wide open to suggestion. The sight of the dumb, black suited puppet figure jerking forward into the bell every minute and a half is at one and the same time mechanical, pathetic and profoundly absurd. Having aroused such feelings in us, Oppenheim is content to let our imaginations do the rest. In Early Morning Blues (1976-77), Oppenheim confronts the artistic problems of dealing with that which is by nature trivial and boring without allowing the work itself to be trivial and boring and of treating essentially private thoughts so that they can be easily recognized. The elephantine banality of the Rosenquist-like images in Early Morning Blues takes on an unexpected yet totally convincing intimacy. It is as if ubiquitous, publicly accessible surfaces which once typified Pop Art of the sixties have now become 'occupied' and are being shown from the inside, as it were, filled with specific human content. The artist's voice is heard over a pair of earphones peevishly hectoring someone to wake up. While several first names are mentioned it is fairly clear that the voice is that of one's conscience. Beneath the droll monologue lies a view of existence that regards day as a long stretch of unrelenting interruptions and activity and night as the domain of the subconscious. The main thing, the life of the mind, is consigned to the brief period before falling asleep and right after waking. At night you move your thoughts around and in the morning you retrieve them so that you will have 'that hot centre that stays with you all day.' Failure to preserve this continuity is to be avoided: 'put the covers on your thoughts tonight, and you'll wake up with nothing'. The body needs the mind to establish direction and solve problems so that it can run its course. The vision Oppenheim presents us with in Early Morning Blues permits no time for reflection or for questioning one's larger purpose in life: perpetuating the endless relay race with oneself seems to be all there is. The kettle on its oversized neon coil and the aluminum turntable and record loom ominously in the darkened gallery. As objects they have become trademarks of the eternal verities of ordinary life. Returning to them after hearing the tape-recorded message completes the vision. The distant hissing of the kettle marks the beginning of our gradual, daily drift into consciousness; the at first annoying and then increasingly oppressive scratching sound produced by the revolving record comes to suggest the senseless repetition which Oppenheim offers up as the end of all our efforts to keep going. With works such as Wishing Well (1973) and Ultimate Outfield Hit (1978), Oppenheim continues his exploration of pure psychological states. In the case of Wishing Well the artist's verbal description of sinking through the pavement is so graphic and intense that it is next to impossible for the spectator not to become totally caught up in Oppenheim's wish-experience. Oppenheim's technique of relating conjecture as if it were actual fact is executed so effectively that the idea of will, which seems to be the real subject of this piece, is made accessible. The artist has projected himself, not into the earth, but into the mind of another; as a consequence this mind virtually relives the (wholly imagined) fulfillment of an impossible wish. As if to underscore the gap between the mind and the external world the conveyor belt keeps on dropping pennies into the shallow plastic basin beneath it, apparently unaffected by the internal transformations being imposed on the spectator. Oppenheim's concerns are prescient. He desires a level of pre-linguistic communication. Words and language may be ubiquitous social tools but they do not allow us to express secret anxieties and preoccupations in a constructive fashion. He is also practiced in the pursuit of a single but emphatic image. The image must retain memorability at an order which goes beyond casual association and which is infra-real rather than sur-real. Oppenheim's third concern is the exploration of the self beyond the particulars of personality. If one can abstract a 'state' such as that of teaching colour to a child, or early morning anxiety attacks, then one can move with greater relevance outwards from this state and into the extra-mental world. Oppenheim is preoccupied with the communicability of experience; with characteristic verve and a disregard for the standard categories, Oppenheim asks us whether we can conceive the contents of another's experience. In so doing he tests the objectivity of the early minimalists; he remains an empiricist but his data is taken from both the objective and subjective worlds. The strength of the work is perhaps best indicated by its proclivity to a gesturalism that remains earthy in its metaphysics. Vanguard, Vol. 8 #8, October 1979. Text: © Walter Klepac. 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