Dennis
Oppenheim
Vehicles for Projection:
Factory Projects from the Early Eighties
January 22nd–
February 29th, 2004
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 22nd,
6 - 8pm
Kenny Schachter conTEMPorary/Rove
132 Perry St, New York NY 10014
T 212 807 6669 F 212 645 0703
schachter@mindspring.com www.rovetv.net
HOURS: Tues-Sat 10 am – 6 pm, Sun 11
am-6 pm
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Kenny Schachter ROVE is pleased to announce
“Vehicles for Projection,” a large
selection of Dennis Oppenheim’s Factory
Projects form the early 1980s, including drawings,
blueprints, photographs, multimedia displays,
and an installation.
Approximately 30 large-scale
drawings and blueprints are on display—plans
for many of the Factory Projects, virtually
all of which were realized in the time following
their conception. The drawings, executed in
pencil and ink on vellum, illustrate the general
schematics and details of such pieces as Station
for Detaining and Blinding of Radioactive
Horses, and Accelerator for Evil Thoughts.
The hand-tinted blueprints include plans for
The Diamond Cutter’s Wedding, Scan,
and An Operation for Mining, Elevating, and
Converting Underground Memories of a Fifth
Season. Oppenheim called them “generators
of energy and ideas, rather than products.”
They seem to be mental metaphors writ large
in industrial materials, but they confound
interpretation as much as they seem to welcome
it.
The photographs and multimedia
displays present a full-color record of Oppenheim’s
“Fireworks” series. In these pieces,
fireworks activated pinwheels, swinging armatures,
and other structures, while ramps and tubes
shot incendiaries up into the air at all angels.
In the case of Formula Compound, spectators
had to run for cover from rockets flying at
low velocity, and traffic nearby seemed to
be under attack. Taking the metal metaphor
of his machines to an explosive reality, the
dynamic aspects of consciousness and the volatile
power of fireworks are literally fused together.
The installation on display
is Impulse Reactor: A Device for Detecting,
Entering, and Converting Past Lies Traveling
Underground and in the Air. As part of his
interrogation of the “mechanics of thought,”
Oppenheim conceived the piece as a kind of
“nuclear power plant of the mind.”
Our raw thoughts are represented by stones
waiting on conveyor belts to enter a giant
and complex mechanized armature, a structure
that seems to want to extract something from
these stones, to metaphorically mine our minds
for lies. At the same time, the reactor attracts
lies coming through the airwaves with its
great antennae and magnets. The piece integrates
two gas heaters with whirring fans, but the
antennae, magnets, paper tapes, springs, vents,
conveyor belts, exhaust pipes and other elements
of the reactor all seem to wait for activation.
As Oppenheim says, “As a structural
hallucination, it wants to be capable of another
life,” and the piece gains much of its
potency from its apparent potentiality. This
giant lie detector is a metaphor, or a “surrogate
mind,” but like the other Factory Projects,
it also raises important questions about the
use and accuracy of cognitive models, paradigms
of knowledge, and the conceptual grounds of
art-making. Indeed, the machine anticipates
both a physical and metaphysical activation,
so the question is, “How do we turn
it on?”
A viewer may project upon
vehicles like Impulse Reactor, Scan, and Accelerator
for Evil Thoughts, but what the machines reflect
back through their polished metal surfaces
is far from a mirror image. One man conceived
all of the Factory Projects, yet in their
presence, one feels that the machines have
taken on a life of their own. It’s no
wonder that Oppenheim has been characterized
as a mad scientist, working his idiosyncratic
notions through extravagant machines and explosions.
He once said, “I wanted to reproduce
the elaborate route from the very basis of
impulse, the ignition of a mental chain reaction,
to the point where the thought explodes into
visibility.” A flash of light and a
burst of heat: Oppenheim’s ideas go
off like fireworks in the night, and we’re
left with smoke and a pulsing image burned
in our retinas.
—Benjamin Berlow
