“A body meeting the land”: Dennis Oppenheim's earth-body performances

Abstract

Among the artists who worked with the body between the end of 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s the case of the American artist Dennis Oppenheim (1938-2011) is particularly significant not only for the physical relationship established by him, in his artistic practice, between the body and the natural material par excellence, that is the earth, but also for his personal reflections on the role of photography inside his work. By developing some premises included in his Land Art works (which Rosalind Krauss leads back to a kind of “marking of site”), Oppenheim created a number of earth-body performances in which he experimented the physical possibilities of his own body, as well as a physical exchange with the living forces of nature, to the point that he understood the earth itself as an extension of his own skin. Although these actions were immortalized by photography, for the artist photography is and must remain a merely secondary element, a “residue” which serves only to communicate the artwork to the public. The deliberately “prosaic” – but at the same time strictly controlled - use by the artist of the photographs documenting his performances is an interesting case study of the problems and issues faced in those years, besides to the artists of Body Art, by the artist of Land Art and by the “dematerialized” side of Conceptual Art, that concern the possibilities and the limits of the use of photography in the documentation of ephemeral actions.