Ground tremor

Oppenheim's first steps as an artist were taken in association with Kienholz, with whom he created Neo-Dadaist works that he later destroyed. His entire oeuvre expresses his personal involvement with the problems raised by the role of art and its limits, and the role of artists and their communication with their public. In this he attempts to debunk the mechanisms of Western life and to arouse awareness. Thus, at the end of the '60s, finding the confines of art galleries limiting in terms of the art that can be shown there, Oppenheim turned to Land Art, particularly in areas far from the centers of the art world.
In the '70s his need to create works unrestricted by spatial boundaries and accepted formal conventions led him to chart the interior space of thought and ideas. He sought the underlying intention behind the artistic act (Conceptual Art), and the cerebral stimuli that guide the artist. His concern with the relationship between artists, their speculation, and their public is clearly apparent in his works on the theme of the artist as marionette. Here, the movements of his marionette are directed by the invisible strings of the market, on the one hand, and of conventional concepts of the role of the creative professional and the public who act as recipients of his art, on the other. Oppenheim's video installations, films, happenings, and environments are the media through which he registers his involvement with these problems.
The dominant feature in Oppenheim's work has always been the discovery of the artistic act in its very conception: Where does art come from? What are the processes that produce it?