A Feed-Back Situation

In 1969, when Dennis Oppenheim began to experiment with his own body as a field of artistic practice, he befriended Vito Acconci and collaborated with Bruce Nauman. It is also at this time that he incorporates the concept of energy exchange, which in some way captures the concept of transference that he had already used in the field of Land art and which also animates the works made between 1970 and 1974 with his son Erik and his daughter Chandra. Oppenheim makes a drawing on his children's backs, which they reproduce, through tactile sensation, on the wall or on each other’s back, switching roles when finished. ‘I am drawing through him,’ Oppenheim writes. By provoking a continuation of his actions and a feedback effect on himself, he creates an extension of his own movement through the sensory system of his son or daughter. ‘We realised that Body art was about “transfers” that did not materialise. Energy was for the Body art artist what marble had been for classical sculptors: the material par excellence. The exchange of energy between people became the medium. So, the work with my children was about activities in which energy was transmitted through certain functions. I remember that for a whole year, the only material I used was energy.’ Oppenheim is interested in incorporating the body’s memory and the transfer of information through a sense as primal as touch, but also in the affection between father and son and the poetic gesture that derives from it.