18 - Dennis Oppenheim (American, 1938-2011

Dennis Oppenheim (American, 1938-2011 Protection - 1971 Photograph and collage on paper 70,5 x 55,5 cm Signed alongside the right edge Provenance: The Robert and Suzanne Pannier Collection, Bruges (acquired directly from the artist) This collage relates to Dennis Oppenheim’s 1971 performance Protection. A description of the performance appears in the catalogue Dennis Oppenheim: And the Mind Grew Fingers, published in conjunction with the exhibition at P.S.1, New York, in 1991-1992: “The complementary themes of self-endangerment-as-art and of gallery critique mingled in Protection, 1971. An area of land was marked off and protected from incursion by human bodies as if it were a sacred or hellish place； whether the space was being protected from the humans or the humans from the space was debatable. Twelve trained German shepherd attack dogs were tethered to stakes around a rectangle of ground near, but outside of, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The dogs, if they were all lunging at the ends of their tethers, could not quite manage to bite a person walking in and out of the protected space with an exact knowledge of the dimensions involved. (During the realized piece, the dogs mostly slept.) The elaborate security system was in place to protect an inner space that held nothing, that had no reason to be protected, in parody of the nearby museum, with its elaborate protection system for artworks. It was a condemnation of the museum as a place dedicated to an incorrect view of art as an eternal commodity to be sheltered from change and incursion.”