Installation Diagram for: Untitled Performance

An idiosyncratic artist working across installation, performance, and video, Oppenheim first gained attention in the late 1960s for his temporary outdoor sculptures created through interventions into urban and natural environments, later known as "land art" or "earthworks." From 1969 to 1974 he turned his attention to performance art, becoming part of a pioneering group of artists in New York who explored the body and its limits through ritualistic and durational actions.


In this diagram for an unrealized installation and performance, Oppenheim sketches a dramatic scene. A mirrored platform topped with a wooden box stands in the middle of a dark, curtained room. The action calls for a performer to place their head into the box and recite, for ten minutes, three statements into a microphone hanging overhead: "Can you keep in touch?" "Can you stomach it?" and "Avoid the issues." These random and mundane pronouncements, spoken within an overly elaborate stage set, both satirized performance art and affirmed it by confirming the modernist notion that any action or enunciation can be considered an artwork. Oppenheim produced this sketch as a red line print, using a technique common to architectural design and other draftsmanship work for recording changes to a project plan in red ink.