The Artist as Toy-Maker: The Vicious Amusement Park of the Premillennial Baroque

Dennis Oppenheim, Recent Works, February 25-March 27, 1999, Joseph Helman Gallery, New York, NY 10019; Engagement, installation at the intersection of Broadway, 23rd Street, and Fifth Avenue, New York, 1998-99; Sstabb, Pratt Institute Sculpture Park, Brooklyn, New York, Summer 1999.

In his present guise, Dennis Oppenheim creates an oeuvre--sometime fabulist, sometimes trite--of thought processes and poetic associations come to life as sculptural installations. He assembles shows of new and old works when presenting via the gallery format at spaces like his two New York venues, Joseph Helman or Stefan Stux. Otherwise, he creates new site-specific works, as in his recent positioning of Engagement on the traffic island before the famed Flatiron Building (a space previously occupied by Ilya Kabakov's Glove) at the confluence of three main urban thoroughfares and many a line of sight. This followed from his 1996 decision to begin working again in the public domain.

Although the artist as pop toy-maker might once have seemed far-fetched, the similarity between some of Keith Sonnier's sculptural creations and the bilging Evian bottle plastic pipe attachments in Adam Sandler's recent film The Waterboy gives evidence that this is not. (Furthering the correlation is the fact that Sonnier is a native Cajun, and the fictive region of the film comedy is the Bayou State.) Other current examples include Tony Feher's water bottles seen at D'Amelio Terras and Jackie McCallister's Lego portraits shown at the 1999 New York Armory Show. Surely similar arguments might be made for Claes Oldenburg, Matthew Barney, Jean Tinguely, Alexander Calder, Red Grooms, and a whole host of others from recent Western art history. Here, however, not only does the artist tinkering with his work become the toy-maker, but his gallery (in this case, Joseph Helman) becomes the toy store. The most obvious example in the Helman exhibition is A Ring for Every Finger, with its blinking lights going off as if triggered by hyperactive paparazzi without pause, the lights attached to three severed satellite coils broken off from the main serpent formed by three separate snakes intertwined and on the rise.

Candelabra, located behind a partition, seems to use the terms of Tom Wolfe's call for a rich, indigenous American baroque and his challenge to the American writer to investigate its topography. Instead, it is Oppenheim who has found the baroque in America's objects, with their frequent play of scale. In this exhibition, garbage receptacles and woks turned upside-down and sideways meld into parts of the candelabra. In Capitol, exhibited at Oppenheim's 1998 show at Stefan Stux, chafing dishes become the Houses of Congress of the Capitol Building, possibly a literary and architectural interpretation of homelessness or hot air within the seat of power. If the work fails to rise to this grand literary allusion, it does at least create an atmosphere of associations with which the artist's other works abound, a transmutable aristocratic elaboration that asks for the viewer's suspension in a new paradigm, a reality in which the baroque can be baroque inasmuch as it is an ornate convergence of multiple-realized ideas.

Two other works, Blood Breathe and Blushing Machine, come together to form a vicious amusement park, which extend the 1980s fetishization of body processes into the realm of mechanization. Blood Breathe, two upside-down noses in pools of heated, simulated blood clearly belongs to a viscous or vicious amusement park. Here, the mechanical gimmick is that the metal pools steam, like the dishes in Capitol. And Blushing Machine adds to the amusement park theme with a series of flashing red lights projected onto semi-transparent hardened shaped panels, these representing some manifestation of the concept of countenance. Fast Exit is a turned-over, upside-down wooden football stadium form...