Annual Rings

Dennis Oppenheim

1968 · Gelatin silver print(s), ink on paper, photomechanical prints, wax crayon · Photographs

During the 1960s, a number of artists-including Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, and Walter De Maria-sought to liberate sculpture from the pedestals of the museum and made work that was inextricably bound to its site. In this piece, Oppenheim enlarged the patterns of the tree's growth and, by shoveling pathways in the snow, transposed the annual rings to the frozen waterway that divides the United States and Canada and also divides their time zones. By juxtaposing man-made national and temporal boundaries, Oppenheim opened to question the relative values of the ordering systems by which we live.

Artist

Dennis Oppenheim

Date

1968

Medium

Gelatin silver print(s), ink on paper, photomechanical prints, wax crayon

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1999