Dennis Oppenheim, who died unexpectedly in January, began his walkabout as an artist in the early 1960s, hanging out on the West Coast exploring the surf life before he arrived in New York City with his Stanford art degree and a vision of wildness in his heart.  In a fifty year art career that survived decades in an art world obsessed with the gamesmanship of shifting styles, fixations and flavors of the moment, Oppenheim managed to pursue his own interests, refusing to be pinned like a butterfly into a signature style or affect.  The net result is a sprawling, protean oeuvre that occupies museums, collections and public spaces across the globe, from Zurich to Los Angeles to Beijing.

Oppenheim, who was recently recognized with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2007 Vancouver Sculpture Biennale, left landmark work behind him in the categories of Earth Art, Body Art and performance.  Turning in the early ‘70s to sculpture, Dennis’ work ultimately migrated beyond the containment of the gallery out into the real world, sometimes with startling effect. Some found his early ‘80s Fireworks Series, quasi-dangerous firework-laden sculptures which the artist referred to as “thought collision factories,” to be hostile, aggressive and threatening.  Apparently they didn’t like the idea of being so close to the ecstatic explosion of a giant mind on fire, as when “Launching Structure #2” forced the evacuation of the Bonlow Gallery on Greene Street in 1982.

Throughout the ‘80s, Dennis continued to produce ever larger and  more convoluted “machine pieces,” enormous factory-like works which filled up exhibition spaces with complex arrays of ramps, tracks, ducts, sleds, engines, coils and all manner of industrial and quasi-architectural elements, traces of which are still present in his public works today. He spent much of the ‘90s exploring the otherworldly potential of everyday objects, with coffee cups, power tools and lawn sculpture transformed into mysterious messengers and signifiers from other dimensions.  Throughout these decades Oppenheim continued to develop a vocabulary of image transfer, transparent materials, metal armatures and bio mimicry through which he organized shapes to appear as flower petals, tear drops, splashes or other organic and fluid forms.

His trajectory thus seems to follow a purposeful spiral, first bringing earth works into the gallery with documentation, project drawings and conceptually-driven texts, next, over an extended period, keeping the work bottled – just barely – in the gallery, until finally he brings it outside again, this time as full blown monumental works that speak not only to the cognoscenti but also to the person on the street.  Large works such as the lyrical Tempest in a Teacup (1992, Andorra Spain) or the nearly psychedelic Bus Home bus shelter produced for the city of Ventura in 2002 brought recognizable yet completely reconfigured objects back from the artist’s private interzone into the lived world of ordinary, non-art world mortals.  As he admits in a 2009 interview with Douglas Kelley, he ultimately enjoyed bridging the two worlds of studio art practice and architecture, although he found that, his admiration for the democratic process aside, the process of being judged by a widely divergent body of jury members required a “very thick skin.”

Dennis was always trying to find a perfect balance in his practice, desiring first and foremost to keep it interesting and engaging for himself.  He was in hot pursuit not only of material and technical considerations, which at the scale at which he operated were certainly challenging, but of means of mitigating and negotiating the fine line between what is important to the discourse and what is important at a personal level.  He did not want to be so cool as to present merely intellectual exercises, a rarefied conversation between artists, but nor did he want it to become so self referential and personal as to become self indulgent. Oppenheim’s guiding light over the years was a kind of rigor offset by the spontaneity required by — and honed through — performance.  He was very often his own harshest critic.  Indeed, it was precisely this dissatisfaction that seems to drive him to experiment further, to really get it right at least a few times.  And as he got older, the idea of “getting it right” shifted, as it does for us all, as he sensed the breath of mortality on the nape of his neck.

In the course of our long friendship, I had the chance to interview Dennis several times.  One could not help but be struck by the strange poetry and complexity of his language, a quality which would carry over to the titles and descriptions of various works.  You could tell when he was reading more or less theoretical texts, or when he had leapt over that to embrace a more diagnostic, medical or semantic approach, or was onto the next thing that captured his relentless curiosity.  During his diagnostic period, the gallery became transformed into a mutant lab from which strange forms percolated and expressed pathogens.  This period includes poetic and haunting pieces like Digestion (1988) in which deer with flaming antlers emerge from and melt back into the gallery walls, or Steam Forest With Phantom Limbs (1988) in which blown glass containers with water are heated to emit the missing structures of the title.

Oppenheim believed that artists should “make things that carry with them the residue of where they have been.”  He was often described as an artist with shamanic leanings, much like Joseph Beuys, although he told me that he did not really feel that he had earned the right to make such a claim and would prefer it not be part of his mystique.  He loved Halloween and something of the direct, rustic and pagan spirit of that holiday seems to have penetrated much of his work, with its simple faces, legible forms and possible spirit possession.  One of his early pieces, Towards Becoming A Scarecrow (1971) created on Halloween in Dusseldorf offers the description: “Like a moving snowball the body slowly builds a skin, based on where it has been. After emerging from heavy foliage, I need not look back. The 1000 foot path is clearly read from my outer shell. My body has collected remnants of its past. I have become that direction.”

These traces of otherworldly information and his famous “residues” from abstract journeys percolate throughout his oeuvre. Whether or not he is to be considered a mystical artist, he certainly did walk the Earth preparing the ground and his audiences for a shift in thinking, an acknowledgment that our ordinary lived world harbors the potential to be something more, if that is the way we choose to perceive it.  That is the artist’s role, in the long run: to allow us to see life as never before, and in that Dennis was a true master.

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Willoughby Sharp leaves a legacy that will take many years to catalogue and integrate into the annals of the art world.  His wife, the inestimable Pamela Seymour Smith Sharp, will do us all a great service in meeting this task with her keen grace and insight.  Like few of his contemporaries, the late self proclaimed “mighty mogul” grasped both ends of the twentieth century and circled them together in a great arc, linking up not only the generations of Duchamp and the Dadaists with the conceptual giants of the sixties and seventies, but adding his own special electronic fire, his innate understanding of the digital era as manifested in his early experiments with film, video and globally oriented simulcast transmissions.  He was a pioneer in print, with his seminal publication Avalanche that he co created with his partner Liza Bear, and a pioneer in vision, exploring the interplay of every part of the art world whether as art historian, critic, artist, interlocutor, talk show host, curator, gallerist, teacher, mentor, collaborator and many other roles yet to be assimilated by his public.

Sharp’s uncanny ability to recognize talent and to see history in the making was a great gift.  He saw very early on the genius in so many artists that are today’s glitterati that it seems unfair to single out only a few.  Nonetheless, his identification of Joseph Beuys as a brilliant and unique voice that should be heard in this country helped to bring a new audience to this giant in a very special way.  In addition to nurturing the careers of several generations of artists, Sharp also mentored all manner of young writers, gallery assistants who learned the ropes under his raucous tutelage, denizens of the demi monde surrounding the art and club scene of the East Village explosion, and numerous collectors, all of whom gained a great deal of insight and a sense of historical continuum by simply hanging around while Sharp put it all together, ruminating out loud in a semi-continuous conversation that lasted for several decades.

Sharp’s style of interview was an interrogation, his fearless questions puncturing the façade of his subject in a relentless manner that might have offended were it not so clear that it was his passion rather than rudeness that made him so driven in pursuit of answers.  In a late eighties interview with Leo Castelli, Sharp asks him several times to account for himself; he badgers Castelli, demanding, “What do you think your greatest contribution to art has been?”  When Castelli demurs that he has no idea, that he was lucky, Sharp objects and insists, “But that’s not a contribution, luck isn’t a contribution.  What have you given?  What has your life changed?  What have you made?”  Talking about the seminal moments in which the Pop Art movement literally gained shape and form, Sharp is able to draw a detailed discussion from Castelli, as he does with all his subjects, because he speaks with the authority of one who was there, who witnessed, and he carries on his cross examination as if the questions of what makes great art great is one of the deepest secrets ever to be wrested from human lips, one that he alone can find – if only he is determined enough.

This is the reason that people loved Willoughby Sharp, because like perhaps no other person in the US and European art scene of the past forty or more years, he moved heaven and earth – literally – to bring the true gift of art home to us all.  He was not a perfect man, but he had a perfect passion and a set of skills and talents that were perfectly matched to the task, concretizing the ineffable of what beats at the heart of the contemporary art scene just long enough for the rest of us to follow along.  He will be sorely missed.

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October 27th – February 3rd 2007

By TOBEY CROCKETT

Andrew Krasnow’s retrospective exhibition, “Of The Flesh: Skin Works 1990-2005” at  ADM Project in Hollywood is an extraordinary exhibition, by almost any standard.  While the show also includes part of an older film depicting the crucifixion, a keepsake box of slides depicting older performances and installations, and some handsome prints, the lion’s share of the work are objects which Krasnow has fashioned from leather he has made from human skin.  Some of the leather is brightly colored and much of it is rendered into a soft cocoa or taupe sort of neutral, a palette not out of place in the pseudo-Zen of today’s contemporary fashion scene. Legally acquired, and also including some of his own skin as is documented in some slides on the side, Krasnow’s use of our oldest material, ourselves, has understandably been a source of consternation over the years.  But taken at face value, there is almost nothing in the materiality of the objects which suggest their unsettling origin, until one begins to look more closely.  It is not a lurid undertaking.  In fact, it is a rather beautiful, painstakingly crafted and well-installed exhibition with an attention to detail and respect for the material that is quite nearly heartbreaking, the show undeniably packing a visceral and emotional punch.

The gallery is divided into an inner room and an outer perimeter by a set of four columns and open panels which enclose the inner sanctum.  While the exterior walls and the perimeter spaces are the typical antiseptic white of a well-lit gallery space, the inner sanctum is moodier, with the nearly neutral colors of the undyed human leather works nearly merging into the natural grain of plywood walls stained a soft walnut-ty brown.  Within this confessional space, Krasnow blends motifs drawn from the Judaic, Buddhist, Christian and Muslim traditions with various everyday objects.  Known for his mechanical objects, Krasnow has here limited himself to just one: a wooden platform dominated by a noisy and Kafka-esque reading machine entitled “Bookmark” (1999).

“Angel” (2000), the piece which most perfectly encapsulates the ambitions and successes of the show, both transcends and embodies the all too human materiality with which the visitor is inevitably confronted.  What to make of this human flesh, literally tanned,  pieced and sewn into an aspirational representation of a transubstantiation into lighter-than-air spirit?  Modeled on an osprey wing from Audubon, and set into a rectangular ground as if torn from a book, one can not help but admire the subtlety with which the alternating feathers are signaled, the varying palette of taupe and cocoa brown, the rough and smooth sides of the leather creating a play of light that allows for an unsettling realism, as if it were a detailed fossil found in the living rock.  Trailing strands of excess material break the frame on the lower right and allow for a messy spillover into the viewer’s space.  Like indigenous and pioneer hunters and trappers of yore, these dangling ends alert us to the artist’s apparent loathing to waste any of this precious material.  Indeed, many of the objects in the show are made from tiny scraps left over from the larger projects.  In its many aspects, “Angel” is a heady confrontation of material and symbol, craft and technique – a text which viscerally enters our consciousness before we are able to fully process it.

Other neutrally colored, tanned but not dyed leather pieces which evoke simple, everyday objects include a baseball cap, a pair of strange cowboy boots, a flag, a wallet, a tie.  Mixed in among these is Hamburger” (2000), a small object reminiscent of Rona Pondick’s pink, toothy “Head” (1991) sculptures.  Krasnow’s labial stack is punctuated by the eerie presence of actual human teeth nestled amongst the folds which represent meat and bread, an evocation of vagina dentate that embodies menace, horror and suffering.  As a statement for vegetarianism, few objects could hope to succeed more artfully.

Evoking the Holocaust, but not dwelling upon the tragedy to the exclusion of other acts of genocide taking place either in the past or present, Krasnow’s political and religious critiques are inescapable. The perimeter of the space is filled on one side with two rows of objects, faced off in confrontation with one another like partners at a square dance.  On the one hand, “Parade Flags: Apollo Series” (1992) presents stiffly mounted American flags jutting out from the interior wall, an imperial display of patriotic rigor mortis, the shiny metal backs which support the flags reflecting one another in a regressive salute to the moonwalks of another era.  Opposite, the “Lamp Shade Series” (1992) describes the infamous lampshades of the Holocaust by their absence, presenting only kerosene lamp bases without shades, the only alteration being a brightly colored band of red human leather which echoes the colorful flags en face.

With dozens of carefully constructed objects, the show is extensive, offering serious discourse tucked away in a beautiful and brave gallery across from the “Hollywood Forever” cemetery.  Far from being sensationalist, it is a tender, spiritual show which confronts the viewer with deeply meditated philosophical and aesthetic issues.  The transgression of materials is almost but not quite surpassed by the craftsmanship of its creation, by the artist’s abilities to shape this ever-present and overlooked material into richly challenging ideas and to remind the viewer of the power of art to transform our world.

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