Dennis Oppenheim, our friend and generous contributor to White Box, has left us. He died of colon cancer at Sloane-Kettering last night, Friday, Jan. 21. All of us involved in White Box shall miss Dennis' input and when asked for advice, he at times treated us to nuggets of wisdom while at other times came up with outlandishly humorous suggestions.
One of the last surviving iconoclasts, Dennis was a key figure in all the major N.Y. international avant-garde movements during the 1960s and thru the 1970s. His 'performer' in Raising Hell, 1974, was a seated puppet with a cast iron bell suspended from the ceiling. A timing mechanism forces the puppet's head to lunge forward and strike the bell at eye level every sixty seconds, producing an echo lasting half of that duration. Eleanor Heartney has said: "His work has always been characterized by its incorrigible discontinuity, motivated then as today by an intensely adventurous curiosity."1
Dennis continually challenged the conventions and traditions of the new, including institutions, galleries and the art market. Restless and on the move, he kept recreating himself and, while the work touched on the abrasive and provocative, it also attracted and intrigued us all. Toward the end of his 40+-year journey, Dennis Oppenheim turned to public sculpture constructed of existing industrial materials which could either be garish or dazzling. Recent 'dazzling' examples are Electric Kiss, 20092 and Radiant Fountains, 2010.3
1Art Press, January 1993, Dennis Oppenheim: A Process of Discontinuity, by Eleanor Heartney
2Electric Kiss, 2009 24 feet high by 2 feet width by 24 feet depth; stainless steel, tinted acrylic rod, fasteners;APEC Naru Park, Busan, Korea.
