Dennis Oppenheim. The body of work and the work of the body
by Irmeline Lebeer

From Chroniques de l’Art Vivant no. 40, June 1973, pp. 13-15  

Irmeline Lebeer: When we become aware of your evolution since your first proposal in 1967, we have the impression that your body art works have come out of your practice of land art. What should we think about this?  
Dennis Oppenheim: It seems to me that there is always a need to establish the points of connection between the various aspects of an artistic practice. It is obvious that a transition had taken place around 1969 that placed me in a rather different situation than the one I had been in in the past. But if I look at the journey I have travelled, I have the impression that there has been a logical and almost rhythmic progression. The most difficult thing was to give up the great spaces of land art, to change scale.

IL: Have you been looking for a new language from the start?  
DO: When one is immersed in an artistic practice, one is not always aware of abolishing the current categories. But around 1967, I had the distinct feeling that we were at an impasse with regard to the perceptual capacities of an object placed in the spatial continuum of a gallery. It seemed obvious that an alternative had to be considered, and this alternative I found when I left the gallery context to look for a more active, external place. I believe that the term "place" is heavy with meaning insofar as it conveys a broadening of the context in which art is likely to function. A major element of land art was that the works could be seen as a place with expandable boundaries. And of an indefinite materiality. This approach contradicted many notions of the traditional artistic context and especially the traditional concept of reception of works. There was no possibility of collecting his pieces, they could only be transmitted in the form of documents—which, at the time, were not considered as a viable art form, but as residual, post-event elements. Thus, this art was completely freed from the context of the galleries.

IL: And how does body art relate to this approach?  
DO: Already when I was performing pieces outside, I activated the chosen location by loading it with a kind of substance—either in a conceptual way or by physical intervention. The theme of all my land art work was dynamic processes. This aspect of change and physical contact is not apparent in the photos that have been made of his work. This method of physically appropriating a place has a definite relationship to the physical work that followed.

IL: The transition from one to the other is made through pieces such as Sound Enclosed Area, which dates back to 1969?  
DO: Yes, Sound Enclosed Area was a sound recording of my footsteps as I walked through Milan, following a route that encircled a certain part of the city. It was still land art, but I myself was already the main actor in this piece, since there were no traces on the landscape, only the unfolding of the sound fragments corresponding to my footsteps.

IL: Does your film Backtrack belong to the same category of transition work?  
DO: Yes, it's a 16mm film showing my body dragging in the sand. I was looking for a fusion between the action of measuring a place and the very act of creating, of doing. The body became the tool, the sand recorded the footprints left by its passage. I tried to stay as close as possible to the "support"—there were no intermediate substances between the material, the sand, and my own body. 

IL: That is how you began to use your body as a tool...  
DO: This is an aspect that came out a little bit from my previous work: I simply allowed it to develop. There tends to be resistance to change, especially when you feel comfortable in a field, and this was my case because I had developed a very efficient working method that allowed me to produce large land pieces. 

IL: And in the following works, you completely abandoned the notion of place and space to focus exclusively on your body...  
DO: It was a film—Arm and Wire, also produced in 1969—that marked the beginning of a whole series of later works. It is based on the notion of the artist using no secondary element, be it a brush or a surface, to recapture what he does. I express this concept in a very didactic way by wrapping my arm around wire so that it expresses itself in my flesh. The arm exerts pressure, it leans on a surface and receives the imprint of its own energy. It gives itself a mark. It's like driving a nail into wood, not to drive a nail in, but to make a mark on the hammer. In this way, the artist dispenses with the intervention of a secondary element: he becomes both the instigator and the victim of his art. It is a feedback system, a closed system.  

IL: Photographs of the arm rolling on wire give the impression that this action was dangerous and that you were in the process of inflicting an injury on yourself. Is this effect on the viewer intended? As with other body art practitioners, there seems to be a certain obsession with bodily harm: wounds, scars, burns, etc...  
DO: For a short period of time, my work could indeed give the impression of having violent harmonics, of being the bearer of an aggressiveness directed against my own body. But once again, I simply let my work pursue its own course. It seemed that a certain physical risk introduced an additional "aesthetic charge" and the work became more legible and powerful.

IL: Why is that?  
DO: The pieces I made at that time (1970/71) with the subject of exploring the body as a surface as material. This excessive indulgence towards one's own body seemed a form of abuse or physical inversion: a self-aggression. But these elements of violence were never pursued for their own sake, it only resulted from the fact that the artist was at the same time the subject and the object of the action, of the trans-action.
The Sun-Burn project (1970)—one of the most characteristic pieces of this period—shows me exposed to the sun with a book on my chest: after several hours, the book is removed, revealing a white stain on the reddened skin. 

IL: That action must have been very painful?  
DO: No, once again, this is the impression the viewer may have in retrospect. The theme of the piece was not pain but color I expose myself to the sun and change color. As if I was experiencing "the act of turning red". It is to show the difference between reality and artifice—between applying red color to a plastic support and allowing a natural element to change the color of a body. You become color yourself. 
This "direct" character, this absence of intermediate elements, is characteristic of this whole first period of my body work.  

IL: Does Material Interchange also fall under this category of work?  
DO: Yes, it's a 1970 action with my fingernail. The nail is made of a-cellular material (keratin) is like hair, it can be cut or removed without pain. Thus, by cutting myself an angle and placing it between the planks of a gallery floor, I drew the material for my work from my own productive system. The object was very small, but it had a physical presence—especially when viewed through special lenses (stereomicroscope). This action suggested the idea that six months before the exhibition I was producing material that was an integral part of my body. It was as if I was working for six months in my studio to make a metal sculpture. So what I was doing was basically quite traditional, with the difference that the material I was using was intrinsically linked to my own body.  

IL: Has your relationship with your body changed since you've been doing this kind of activity?  
DO: They have reached an impasse. The logic of an action progresses to a point where one reaches a limit, or one wonders whether one should abandon the notions acquired or whether one can go even further.  

IL: And have you reached this point?  
DO: No—but my work has become more and more expansive. The Extended Armor piece introduced this new dimension and was executed at the end of 1970. I was lying on the floor, my face between long wooden planks. At the other end, a video camera pointed at this kind of corridor showed my face between the planks. The action, which lasted an hour, involved the use of a spider, placed near the camera. When the animal approached, I would pull out hair from my head and blow it through the passage, using it as a shield, an armor that protected me from the attacker. 
What happens in terms of sculpture is that, having produced this material (the body identifying itself with a generating system) and this material having been removed from its context, displaced from the body and "externalized", I began to blow it out, to move it further and further away from its bodily source. At a certain point, I was thus controlling a part of my body that was two meters away from me. I even made additional demands on this externalized part of my body by using it as armor to protect myself from aggressive power. 
So I insisted again on this notion of extension: I was in a specific place, a part of my body was two meters away from me, but I continued to control it. I was, at the same time, here and there, but that part of me that was there was threatened, acting as an autonomous block, always active. 
This overall concept of expansion, of extensibility—being here and there, doing this and that, but also being able to do it in another form—underlies many of my current projects.  

IL: Is it the same theme as the piece where a mosquito bites your arm and carries part of you—a drop of blood—to places you can't reach?  
DO: Indeed, this piece relates to the idea of displacement: of my existence in another body, of the possibility I have of being elsewhere. It is based on the notion of transport, of trans-mission, of being transported to a place to which I have no physical access. 
But the method I chose from then on was to use my children as the vehicle of my projects, because they allowed me to access certain regions closed to my personal control. I see my children as extensions of myself. I have no problem considering their actions, their performances as my own. This is how I gradually detached myself from this very intimate form of physical activity which concerned notions such as the artist as both subject and object. These activities were to lead, in fact, to a very different field, a field in which questions about the past and the future, chronology, biology and heredity, as a factor in the displacement of the artist, discovering himself, in this case, through his descendants, were immediately raised.  

IL: You must have a very special relationship with your children to consider them as part of yourself, like your hair?  
DO: There is no need for that. I see my children as pure project vehicles, schematics, using the emotional impact created by employing one's own descendants. 
It is the same phenomenon that occurs in the case of the work that evokes physical suffering—the artist as masochist: in fact, there is no pain, but the work nevertheless transmits this idea, so that it becomes part of the image that is shown.  

IL: Does the work you showed at the Galerie Sonnabend in Paris, the Shadow Projection, belong to the same category?  
DO: That piece is about my father. When he died in November 1971, I conceived this action which I performed four months later, at night, in a very flat field. I used a very powerful lighthouse with a beam that covered a distance of 800 meters I stood in the centre of the beam myself, casting a shadow. 
The action was simple: starting from the standing position I would slowly crouch down, then gradually straighten up again, and as I did so, my shadow lengthened and contracted as well. At the same time, I blew a single note into a trumpet, thus introducing a sound extension factor. The piece was filmed from an airplane. The concept, in the physical sense, was to spread myself through the landscape, both through image and sound. 
At both ends of the beam were two enlarged drawings that were not seen in Shadow Projection. One of his drawings made with magnesium flashes was of my daughter—her first humanoid picture—and the other of my father. It was his last drawing—a diagram scribbled on a piece of paper while he was on the phone the day before he died and which we found on his desk the next day. I called the set Polarities because it involves both my father's last drawing and my daughter's first drawing, one of which somehow gave rise to the other, while I occupy an intermediate position between the two.  

IL: Did you choose this material—light and shadow—because of their symbolic value?  
DO: The whole piece took on the character of a heroic gesture, if only because of its dimensions and the elements it conveyed: a beam of eight hundred meters (produced by an incredibly powerful arc lamp): the shadow, rising from the ground to a height of 60 cm and traveling through this beam, a veritable floating space.
It is really, trying to transport a figure beyond a certain limit. The body, hurled in the distance, I really wanted it to "cross the border".   

IL: Another piece you have just presented in France and Belgium is called Ground Gel. It seems to me that it poses the same problems?  
DO: It is a continuous projection of colou slides where I spin my daughter around in the air: the shots are taken from an elevated position. You can see our heads and arms outstretched and you can see my daughter spinning and spinning in space. When I accelerate, she begins to fade, to fade away, to become less and less perceptible until our two bodies merge: we see arms, but we no longer see her hands grasping mine, we only perceive a continuum, a passage of flesh, increasingly amorphous and finally leading to a spherical shape spinning on the ground and becoming more and more diaphanous is invisible until it blends in completely. 
But the problem with this piece is that it's all about artifice. What it shows doesn't really happen: we don't disappear. It deals with this form of transmission that takes place through descendants: it suggests that my daughter is taking me into a future state, that she is transporting me into the future. The soundtrack that accompanies the images unfolds a kind of muffled melody, constantly repeating that I'm going there, that I want to take over her physical space, to her who de- materializes herself around me, and that I would like her to take me, as it were, to that elsewhere.  

IL: Would it be fair to say that the more you research your own body, the wider the field of investigation becomes?  
DO: My overall approach could probably be seen as a rather chimerical and allusive pursuit, full of consciously integrated traps. Nevertheless, I try to be as rigorous as possible. The issue at hand is extremely demanding, we can see all the factors involved, but in order to express them, you have to constantly fight against the limits. It defies physical law and the only way to proceed is to develop an allusive practice.  

IL: You're talking about the borderline between the physical and the metaphysical?  
DO: I act essentially on a physical level although I push the experience as far as possible in the direction of a quest for the self. But I certainly do not refer to existential or theological concepts: I am not looking for a new definition of the self. 
Fundamentally, my current work is based on the attempt to abolish the boundary between an action carried out within the limits of my life and the action I aim to carry out, at the same time, beyond those limits. 

Translation from French by Joris D’hooghe