Identity Stretch, Dennis Oppenheim

Exhibition Label:
"Site Specifics,” Aug-2010, Susan Earle
Collapsing any normal sense of scale, this work documents Oppenheim’s project of impressing a huge image of his and his son Erik’s thumbprints onto a landscape in Lewiston, New York. He stretched a trace of his body over the terrain, using hot sprayed tar to simulate the black lines of a fingerprint and covering an area about three hundred feet by a thousand feet. Emerging from the countercultural atmosphere of the late 1960s, this kind of conceptual work ignores the limitations of museum buildings and evolves instead in nature or elsewhere. The photographs shown here serve to document the event, further defying the notion of art as something made. This photo montage is very representative of the way in which Dennis Oppenheim makes use of his body and nature as both subject and medium in his art.

Archive Label 2003:
Collapsing any normative sense of scale, this work documents Oppenheim’s project of impressing a huge image of his and a relative’s thumbprints onto a landscape in far upstate New York. He stretched a trace of his body over the terrain, using hot sprayed tar to simulate the black lines of a fingerprint and covering an area about three hundred feet by a thousand feet. This kind of conceptual work ignores the limitations of museum buildings and evolves instead in nature or elsewhere. The photographs shown here serve to document the event, further defying the notion of art as something made.