Three Stage Transfer Drawing from Program Six
Dennis Oppenheim
American, 1938–2011
1972
A three-minute silent Super 8 film (transferred to video) in which Dennis Oppenheim stages two women tracing and passing a painted line across each other’s bare backs to make a drawing through a performed transfer and its documentation.
The grainy, pale image fixates on the intimate rhythm of hands and spines as a continuous line is traced, turned into a bodily relay that reads like drawing in motion.
By moving drawing off paper and into a filmed performance, Oppenheim expanded Conceptual art’s concerns—using the body as surface and video as record to question authorship, process, and the nature of the art object, influencing performance and body art practices of the 1970s.
Medium
Super 8mm film transferred to video (color, silent)
Dimensions
3:07 min.
Classification
Department
Credit
Gift of the artist
Accession
665.1997.5
Palette
Exhibitions
