Final Stroke, Project for a Glass Factory (1980) was made up of numerous elements that had associations to a mental construct. It had doors that would rotate if they were hit, openings, sieves, screens, elevated tracks with materials on sleds that were pulled back and aimed at a central station. It had a crankshaft hovering above that looked like a diagram of a heart attack graph on a medical machine… Everything was carefully associated with mental counterparts.
 

"Interrogating the art making process" is central to Dennis Oppenheim's work. On many occasions, he speaks in terms of mental mechanics, chemistry, and experimentation--all suggesting parallels between the processes of artistic creation and scientific research. These processes fuel his singular verbal and visual acuity, stimulate his creative impulses and unite the many forms of representation in which he works. Oppenheim shares his philosophy and his views of artistic practice with a number of conceptualists and other artists who aim at searching for and defining the essence of ideas and objects, as 

Dennis Oppenheim 
Second Generation Image, 
Iron/Boats, 1988

opposed to merely painting a surface. Oppenheim's rigorous conceptual orientation and inquiry into underlying and shaping experiences - going "into the heart of the matter" - transcend both the self-analysis of traditional conceptual art and the quasi-scientific vernacular of some more recent conceptualist work.

In one of the early Land Art pieces, Annual Rings (1968), Oppenheim traced the growth rings of a tree as large concentric circles in the snow dissected by the line of the United States-Canada border. This work was motivated by Oppenheim's view of certain epistemological mechanisms - changes of scale, mutations, dematerializations, displacements, interventions, and subversions of the image - as constructs of the imagination engaged in "a strong dialogue with the real world." This insight pervades Oppenheim's other Land Art works, acquires greater embodiment in his Body Art, and finally "materializes" in the physical form of his sculpture. With its visual poignancy, rich play of forms and materials, and radical imagery, Oppenheim's art doubtless has many sources of inspiration and multiple meanings. Its epistemological tensions, however, remain the primary catalyst defining both the content and structure of such works as Cutting Tool (1989), Long Distance Anger (1992), Four Corner Murder (1996), Sleeping Dogs (1997), and Blue Collar (1998), all of which are among the works to be exhibited in the upcoming ICAR show. Early in his career, Oppenheim made a conscious choice to operate in this space defined by uncertainty, paradox, incomplete knowledge, inconsistent ideas, and chance.

At the conclusion of his famous lectures, The Character of Physical Law, physicist Richard Feynman describes a similar process as governing scientific research:

There is also a rhythm and pattern between the phenomena of nature, which is not apparent to the eye, but only to the eye of analysis...In general we [scientists] look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences ... Experimenters search most diligently and with the greatest effort, in exactly those places where it seems most likely that we can prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.

There is a clear rapport between these observations and Oppenheim's characteristic "agenda of attack, trying to frustrate the credibility of work that seemed to know how to operate."

Like an experimental researcher, Oppenheim always takes risks to go beyond the already known, to seek new constructs and inventions that spur himself and others to prove these constructs wrong, and suggest new fields of exploration. In the meantime, as the ICAR exhibition hopes to show Oppenheim's body of work presents a coherent, if diverse, view of the world.