Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American artist Dennis Oppenheim.
Last updated on November 23, 2024.
Dennis Oppenheim was an American conceptual artist, performance artist, earth artist, sculptor and photographer. Dennis Oppenheim's early artistic practice is an epistemological questioning about the nature of art, the making of art and the definition of art: a meta-art that arose when strategies of the Minimalists were expanded to focus on site and context. As well as an aesthetic agenda, the work progressed from perceptions of the physical properties of the gallery to the social and political context, largely taking the form of permanent public sculpture in the last two decades of a highly prolific career, whose diversity could exasperate his critics.
You can't understand how strange it was to be a sculptor who exhibited photographs. (On exhibitions of his earthworks and land art pieces.)
Make things that carry with them the residue of where they have been.
An artist works through exposed wounds.
Turning something upside-down elicits a reversal of content and pointing a steeple into the ground directs it to hell as opposed to heaven.
The photograph gives constant reference to the rectangle. This forces any idea into the confines of pictorial illusionism.
Most of my work comes from ideas. I can usually do only a few versions of each idea. Land Art and Body Art were particularly strong concepts which allowed for a lot of permutations. But nevertheless, I found myself wanting to move onward into something else.
[The photographs] were there simply to indicate a radical art that had already vanished. The photograph was necessary only as a residue for communication.