Dennis Oppenheim

Dennis Oppenheim (born 1938) has received international attention for a conceptual oeuvre spanning performance, video, sculpture, installation, and land art. In the early 1970s, Dennis Oppenheim was in the vanguard of artists using film and video to investigate themes relating to body and performance. This portfolio features a selection of his works known as the Aspen Tapes, produced between 1970 and 1974, in which Oppenheim uses his own body as a site of experimentation on the personal. In these works the artist enters into an intimate and dynamic dialogue with his body as he explores the boundaries of personal risk, bodily transformation, and interpersonal communication. With the publication of this portfolio in collaboration with the artist's studio, this seminal series of quasi-anthropological performances is now available to the public for the first time on DVD.

Just as Oppenheim's work explores new and unusual forms of communication and address, Slought Foundation hopes that this portfolio contributes to an existing discourse about alternative possibilities for cultural production and reception. In Oppenheim’s Transfer Drawings and Identity Transfers, for instance, the artist deposits and retrieves information from his daughter Kristin and his son Erik. In so doing, Oppenheim presents the act of communicating with others as a physical and biological extension of the self. Likewise, we encourage you to experiment by viewing the works featured in this collection outside the confines of a gallery or museum, and in your own home, community, and places of work, alone or in dialogue with your children and parents, colleagues and friends, neighbors and strangers.