Dennis Oppenheim | Safety Cones | 2017

Dennis Oppenheim was an early pioneer in several art movements, from Earth Works and Conceptual art to art using the body. Like a ringmaster orchestrating the unexpected, through relentless experimentation he created experiences and performances as well as flamboyant, circus-like art works with a hint of caprice and danger. He has used wheat, salt, dirt, puppets and up-ended architecture in his works, borrowing from the world to create sometimes fearless, sometimes fearsome work. 

Oppenheim’s Safety Cones are giant beacons (or dunce caps) for the mishmash urban spaces that are always in the process of coming together or falling apart, like the rest of nature around us. At night, their spectral blue lights will draw downtown visitors to the orange pyramids, like moths to a flame. This work harkens back to Oppenheim’s earliest works, made when he first moved to New York in 1966, where he simply marked off spaces in the city with engineer’s stakes, creating zones of art, or curiosity, or danger. Oppenheim’s Safety Cones remind us that humans continually change their environment, often losing what is poetic and historical about our place on this land.

Oppenheim avoids a signature style, though he consistently riffs on known architectural styles when creating his diverse body of public art works. Oppenheim’s permanent work at General Mitchell International airport, Milwaukee, Submerged Vessels, 2004, is a series of child-like boats floating inside a parking structure. The boats are in honor of the fishing and trade that happened along the Lake Michigan shoreline for thousands of years. Submerged Vessels was the replacement piece for Oppenheim’s originally submitted piece Blue Shirt, a work in homage of the city’s workers and industries of the 19th and 20th centuries

Otterness was part of the influential downtown New York group Collaborative Projects (COLAB), that in the 1970s and early 1980s used the urban environment as a site for cultural commentary through posters, performances and guerilla exhibitions.