Digging the Terrestrial Landscape
Admit it, it’s been on your list since May, but did you actually go see the Dennis Oppenheim exhibition at the Storm King Art Center?
As if one needed an excuse to visit what is arguably one of America’s seven wonders of outdoor art (Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” and Walter de Maria’s “Lightning Field” immediately come to mind as other worthy peers), Storm King Art Center, in Mountainville, N.Y., has sweetened the pot with this season’s mini-survey. Along with its permanent collection of works by David Smith, Dorothy Dehner, Tony Smith, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Mark di Suvero, Alice Aycock, Richard Serra, Lynda Benglis, Isamu Noguchi, Joel Perlman, Adolph Gottlieb, etc., etc., it has a significant show by the late sculptor, who lived much of the year in Springs.
Viewing Oppenheim’s “Splash Buildings” in the more confined space of an interior Parrish Art Museum gallery thrills, because the space seems hardly able to contain the sculptures’ exuberance. So many of the works he designed in his later years are large-scale installations, yet it is both freeing and somewhat diminishing to see them out in the open on acres of rolling meadows. It’s as if the landscape’s vastness might swallow them up.
The exhibition has addressed this by including a significant installation in its museum as well. Preparatory sketches and records of previous and yet-to-be-realized projects line a wall or two in long galleries. There are also works in video, a sound installation, a re-creation of one of the body works, a silk tree arbor with tree houses, and much more. It’s a good primer on the major themes and strategies Oppenheim used throughout his career, ranging from the 1960s to his death in 2011.
Outside, seven sizable installations are placed throughout the property, allowing a pretty full experience of the entire sculpture park as well as the span of Oppenheim’s more monumental works. Except for a sketch and a gift from the Watermill Center, everything on view is from the artist’s estate. Some of these works may have been created with the intention of their becoming public art. Given the artist’s ambivalence about his public projects, however, this setting provides the best of both worlds, a chance to experience their monumentality, but under congenial terms.
In a 1997 interview at the time of his Venice Biennale installation, Oppenheim called public projects “a receptacle for bad art. What it offers an artist is an excruciating interaction with bureaucrats and overseers who invariably make a good work impossible.” Calling the context of public art “bittersweet and disappointing,” he said it had produced “some of the worst sculpture in the world.”
By these standards, a work called “Alternate Landscape Components,” while engaging in its bright perkiness, seems crass in its execution. That seems to be the point. The title and theme of the exhibition, “Terrestrial Studio,” emphasizes the sculptor’s interest in the interaction of the natural world with the man-made. The components are highly stylized trees, small bushes, and red rocks rendered from steel drums, plastic pipe, and acrylic. One of his late works, it was made, he said, in opposition to some of the original tenets of Earth Art: site specificity and references to Zen Buddhism. It was part of a larger project with other components, of which the museum displays multiple drawings.
Sometimes Oppenheim designed things to help people interact with landscapes, like his “Dead Furrow” viewing station, constructed of plywood but painted in such a way to resemble the solidity of concrete. Placed in the center of a meadow, it resembles a ziggurat or pyramid, with references to a fortress or a tomb. A path cut through the grasses makes an approach feel like a pilgrimage. The “dead furrows” of the title, which comes from a farming term for the trench left after a field has been plowed, are constructed of large plastic pipes and rocks. There is something both serious and offhanded about the piece, in a Pop Art kind of way.
Re-creating an early urban experience, his “Sound Enclosed Land Area” is a 1969 recording of footsteps taken while walking within a highlighted area on a map of Milan. Set near the entrance and the interior of the museum, the piece has a haunting quality that is enhanced by the precision and even a kind of music made by the uniformly spaced footfalls.
The gateway sculpture to “Entrance to a Garden” was commissioned for the Milwaukee Airport but scuttled after Scott Walker, now Governor of Wisconsin but then a county executive, protested that the blue color of the shirt was demeaning to blue-collar workers. In this version, the sculpture, of a suit jacket, tie, and shirt, is incorporated into an overall artist-designed landscape scheme that resembles a cuffed and collared dress shirt, which also provides seating.
“Electric Kiss” has the look of candy, but also an onion, if onions came in electric blue, green, and yellow. Another way to view the landscape, both semi-protected inside or as an ornament to it, the structure has one of the most pleasing and effortless interactions with its environment.
The “Architectural Cactus Grove” is agreeably goofy, reminiscent of a sculpture like Jeff Koons’s “Puppy.” The cacti even have visual qualities akin to baby chicks or other small birds, joyful and exuberant, a frothy delight uninterested in deeper meaning.
At the very outskirts of the property, but in one of its loveliest parts, sits an installation of blue, pink, and white-painted wooden stars. They make up the piece “Wishing the Mountains Madness,” a work initially installed in Montana in 1977. It is best viewed from above; images of the work both from aerial photographs and taken from a nearby hill are more satisfying than trying to see it up close.
For those who like to take their fall leaf-peeping off-island, the 500-acre sculpture park, set in the lower Hudson Valley, offers a destination that can easily be incorporated into a weekend excursion along with Dia Beacon, West Point, kayaking, fine dining, and even shopping. But be warned, Storm King could easily be a day in itself if the goal is not to rush through it.
A park employee emphasized that fall weekends are extremely busy and the best time to go is during the week. Barring that, aim to arrive early, when parking spaces, bike rentals, and peace and quiet are still plentiful. Storm King is closed Tuesdays through Oct. 31, and Mondays and Tuesdays in November. The Oppenheim exhibition will be on view through Nov. 13. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.; to 4:30 in November. Admission is $15.