Dennis Oppenheim, a master sculptor and conceptual artist for four decades or more, died January 22, 2011. A review of his career was written for New York Magazine by its art critic, Jerry Saltz. Jerry notes two remarks made to him many years ago by Oppenheim that strike home and would seem to be eminently useful to any artist working today, to wit:
"Make things that carry with them the residue of where they have been." And "Make a sculpture in the way that you speak, as a projection that dissipates."
The latter point doesn't apply to sculptures fashioned from solid substances, but in 1968 Oppenheim made a work which was both a sculpture and a drawing: an incision several yards long in the ice covering a river.
Art was dematerializing indeed.
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