Mic Moroney 

Dennis Oppenheim

Irish Museum of Modern Art Dublin Rating: ****
  
  


Thanks to foot and mouth disease, you have to walk over antiseptic-drenched matting to enter IMMA, but, once inside, there's fun for all the family in this well-attended event Land & Body, the show from the veteran US conceptualist Dennis Oppenheim.

All the work goes back to the 1960s and early 1970s, when Oppenheim, Smithson, De Maria and others marched out of the galleries and onto big landscapes.

Two VCRs, side by side, riffle through early "documentations" with some hypnotic forces-of-nature stuff (Landslide, 1968), or obscurer polemics such as his female assistant drawing on his back the Pollock satire he is drawing on the wall.

But Attempt to Raise Hell (1974) gets everyone going: a small aluminium man-puppet who, every 100 seconds, headbutts a bell, causing people to jump out of their skins and then laugh in nervous relief.

Theme For A Major Hit (1974) is a room populated by marionettes, each wearing the mask of their creator, and grooving foolishly to some rangy R'n'B from the artist and friends. Weirdly entertaining and deliciously sinister, this is the show's highlight.

Another noisy installation is the provocative Two Right Feet for Sebastian (1970-4), in which two miked-up motorised boots kick the walls, while two metal tubes droop asymmetrically from the ceiling like barometer rods.

Originally, this was a performance in which an amputee swapped his prosthetic leg for a piece of lead tubing, which Oppenheim's bunsen burner slowly melted from under him.

Disappointingly, this retrospective only includes Oppenheim's influential early work, with himself looking svelte in his bum-hugging bell-bottoms. What on earth has he been doing since 1975?

• Until April 22. Details: 00 353 1 6129900.

 

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