Word: oppenheimers
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Many of the handicapped, for whom a car is a pair of legs, complain that under those conditions they cannot buy enough gas to get around. Garrett Oppenheim, whose legs are crippled, figures that he can continue to drive 20 miles from his home in Rockland County, N.Y., to his job as an editor for Medical Economics magazine in Oradell, N.J., but otherwise, if the shortage continues, "I'd be stranded. No shopping, no errands, no visits." He finds that a threat not only to his mobility but to his self-respect. "After I got a hand-controlled...
These matters do not afflict body art to the same degree, even though the atmosphere of suspension and privilege peculiar to the recent avant-garde remains. But the trouble with most body pieces is that they are either so small in conception as to be negligible-for instance, Dennis Oppenheim slowly tearing off a section of his fingernail-or so grotesque in their implications, as with poor Schwarzkogler, that they amount to overkill. Triviality or threat: take your choice...
Manic as Samaras' "transformations" are, they still possess a system and a history; his subverted objects have a common ancestor in Meret Oppenheim's surrealist icon of 1936, the fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon. Yet they are not mere footnotes to Surrealism. Samaras has a way of undercutting, or predicting, his more "mainstream" contemporaries; in 1961, for instance, he laid 16 square textured tiles flat on the ground, four by four, as a sculpture. In the Whitney, it looks like a waggish parody of Carl Andre's floor pieces-until you remember Andre's sculptures...
...Ecological" is a designation that occurred to these glib young opportunists at a very late stage. When Mr. Oppenheim sent out press releases and photographs of models of his works one or two years ago, there was no mention of ecology at all. As a matter of fact, it is reasonable to assume that his activities do more to upset the balance of nature than do anything positive for the environment. One might well ask how much small marine life was poisoned by the magenta dye which Mr. Oppenheim foolishly and recklessly released into a Caribbean cove. He should...
...Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art was composed of some surprisingly beautiful underwater photographs, and charted new ecological territory. Hutchinson strung out calabash, a local fruit, so that it floated eerily in the sea; he also transferred yellow leguminous flowers from nearby slopes to the ocean floor. Oppenheim, long intrigued by the "incredibly irregular" patterns of U.S. Highway 20 he had observed on maps, decided to transfer the configuration of the highway to water. Using a boat to plow a path in the bay, he dropped deep magenta dye and gasoline in its wake, then set the gas afire...