Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Dennis Oppenheim
American; 20th-century
Normal, IL: University Galleries of Illinois State University
51%
Occasion for Expansion — A Combat of Structural Projections. 1992. Lithograph
Present here are exquisite design decisions almost to the last — check out that cut of background white through the image's top edge at center! — but little else intrinsic that justifies this lithograph's status as a discrete "work." These are blueprints, that is, for one of Oppenheim's large machinic installations, transferred into print form. But what about this object demands that it's exactly a print? The blueprints themselves were likely more beautiful, as they would have stood closer to Oppenheim's own artistic ideation (in the way that a sketch is a painting thinking). The actual finished 3D structure, too, would have borne the marks of having passed through all the mediating rounds in between thought and thing. So this print represents something like an awkward checkpoint in Oppenheim’s making-cogitating process; the idea of his artwork has stopped to sort of wheezily catch its breath. (2024)