Dennis Oppenheim: Performance Film 1970–1974

The American artist Dennis Oppenheim came to prominence in the late 1960s as a pioneer and major exponent of Earth Art and Body Art. After creating large site-specific installations in the landscape, Oppenheim turned to working on a small scale, using his own body as a site of exploration. Over a period of four years from 1970 to 1974 he created a series of intense, short films that documented performances and actions. These deceptively simple films depict Oppenheim’s own body, and that of his children and partner, in scenarios that test the relationship between an object, the body and viewer. The actions range through talking under water, covering the hand with glass or leaves, to Oppenheim drawing on his son’s back.

In the films, Oppenheim uses repetition to explore the contact of human matter –hair, nails, flesh– with objects external to the body. Oppenheim described the shift from making land-based art to working on his body as one of great risk: 

You were using yourself. The commitment was horrendous. You were making things very difficult. You were getting the residue of this sort of difficulty as absolute tangible evidence to a film or video tape.

Maria Zagala, Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs