Dennis Oppenheim : Land and Body .[exhibition held at IMMA 28th Feb-22nd Apr. 2001]

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This book is a vivid document of his major contributions to a more idealistic era of extreme innovation and radicality in art. Oppenheim's practice uniquely forms the main transition between Land Art and Body Art. Through texts and images, the book demonstrates the conceptual move from grandiose, large-scale and labor-intensive earthworks to the more intimate, expressive, and psychologically charged medium of the artist's own body. Dennis Oppenheim has had a profound impact in forever altering the idiom of sculpture and what constitutes a work of art.

Land Art, which first became known to a wider public with the Earthworks show at the Dwan Gallery in New York and the Earth Art exhibit at Cornell University Gallery in 1968, was a seminal movement in the critical discourse after Minimalism. Artists made an all-important maneuver to redirect energies beyond the gallery and museum setting by claiming, plotting and reshaping the land as art. Oppenheim had always used his body in producing Land Art, whether he was laboriously cutting through the ice for projects on the border of the United States and Canada or in stressing an embodied viewer in Viewing Systems, 1967. Oppenheim's body, captured on film through photographs and videotape, became the subject of his art. Discomfort, even danger and humor were the key elements in these quasi-autobiographical works in which the artist was his own canvas.