This next one is amazing. Oppenheim installed guard dogs around the MFA in Boston Massachusetts. I think that it is self explanatory that he was making a commentary on high art. I believe that a piece like this is a big middle finger to people like Nicholas Bourriaud. He was trying to take a stand against the preciousness that is placed upon an art piece when placed inside of a museum. I think a simple concept such as this highly exaggerated can be a beautiful thing. The idea of using the same breed of dog that was once used to brutalize mankind in concentration camps to guard pieces of art if beautiful and ingenious. It's too bad that the guard dogs weren't there when I visited the same museum this summer for a Picasso exhibition.
The piece above is also a Dennis Oppenheim piece. I think that it is amazing that he can make such beautiful intelligent pieces out of near to no medium. When i first saw this piece i was roughly twenty one years old. I paid five bucks to visit the harvard museum. I was really depressed at the lost money until I wandered to the back of the museum. There was a video playing in a small closet of an older man drawing on the back of a small child back, and vice versa. I found the piece to be intriguing without knowing why. As is turns out the artist was delving into time travel. By drawing on the back of his son, and having his son transfer the line that he feels upon his back onto the wall, he is essentially transgressing his past and future state of being.
And last but not least the big "fuck you" to painting, as well as art history/historians. For an artist to transgress to transgress medium is a hard and long journey. To transgress painting and medium in the broad sense is beyond achieving zen, or whatever ridiculous term you would want to use for referencing being at peace with yourself. He speaks of the color red and how he can control the exposure/intensity of the pigment. He claims that he "feels" the act of becoming red, which is my favorite part of the whole performance. He also references the fact that artists/painters generally artificially instigate color activity. The use of his body to reference such color changes brings the conversation into a whole new realm.
I love these pieces. I read this and like it a lot.
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