 Recall , 1973 Dennis Oppenheim Recall "...A paint medium used to draw me into the past ... as a sensory catalyst ... activating my reflections as a painter ... an art student ... during the 50s ... I concentrate only on what is directly stimulated by the smell ... the prevailing sense of turpentine..." (from the sound element of "Recall") Dennis Oppenheim's "Recall" consists of two elements. A video, tightly focused on Oppenheim's lips, shows the artist talking about his art school years, how he changed his practice, and how he specifically moved away from painting as he came to see it as a redundant medium. In order to tell the story he is getting high off turpentine, and you can hear him shifting in and out of sense with the narrative veering between humour and melancholy. The second element is a long metal tray placed in front of the monitor, filled with turpentine and ink reflecting back the image and infecting the gallery space with the smell of turpentine. On entering MOT you are taken right back to that all pervading heady smell that fills art schools and studio complexes. Oppenheim inhales the turpentine and "...like a drug, it induce(s) an alteration of consciousness; as my senses are filled with this smell my memory slowly uncovers images of a past region in which the smell prevailed, as I verbalise in a kind of rambling stream of consciousness monologue. For me, that smell is associated with my art school years, the late fifties" (from an interview with Willoughby Sharp, Avalanche, December 1974). He talks about the difficulties of getting a painting right, of overbearing art teachers, of smoking on fire escapes and of the impossibilities of the medium itself. There is a timeless sense of the contemporary in Oppenheim's monologue, these stories are not dissimilar from the ones all ex-art students have recalled at some point - tales of being misunderstood, misdirected and then, ultimately, of refuting the entire art school system in some way. This live monologue transmits across time and place both in terms of the work itself and the experiences and memories the smell evokes. On its initial showing in 1974, in the New York independent space 112 Greene Street, the recording existed as a stand-in for the absent artist. To look at "Recall" now makes time become duplicitous and constantly present, as the atmospheric qualities of the gallery ties past moments to the present. Doubled by its reflection in the liquid, the experience is doubled again by the experience of entering MOT. Art making is far from a linear progression - ideas appear and reappear, are layered up, refuted, contested and questioned. Any artwork will be contingent on surrounding contexts that will shift over time with each showing initiating new dialogues. There is something incredibly contemporary about "Recall" and its dialogue with practice, anxiety, process, and its healthy disrespect for preconceived notions as to what constitutes art. "Recall" suggests a model of thinking and investigation that prioritises ideas in this-moment-now. Gertrude Stein wrote of the continuous present where she suggests that the world -and our knowledge of it - can only possibly exist in the present. The continuous present is a dimension where each frame of memory is layered on to the present, making every experience unique and extended into space and time. Dialogue, conversation, and ideas of exchange within artistic practice are at the heart of how artists reconfigure what it means to make work. "Recall" operates as a video, a sculpture, a painting and, more importantly, as a proposition for thinking about artistic ideas and practices. In the gaps between conversations and practices ideas are communicated: like layering up paint, this work stacks up recollections and associations to question the very activity of being an artist. Curated by Lisa Le Feuvre "Recall" is loaned courtesy of the Fundacao de Serralves - Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto. Exhibition: February 18 - March 25, 2006 Gallery hours: Fri-Sun 12 - 5 pm or by appointment MOT Unit 54/5th floor Regents Studios 8 Andrews Road GB-London E8 4QN Telephone/Fax +44 (0)20 7923 9561 Email info@motinternational.org www.motinternational.org |
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