Dennis Oppenheim Device To Root Out Evil

Device to Provoke Censorship

Tom Bricker

Contemporary Art History

May 11, 2006

Journalist Allan Jenkins once said, "Censorship in any form is the enemy of creativity, since it cuts off the life blood of creativity: ideas." Censorship weakens a society's ability to produce provoking and interesting things, and ultimately results in a homogenized world where all is made bland in order to avoid offending anyone. Censorship is an all too common plight of the art community; pieces are censored because they are deemed offensive, irreverent, or just plain misunderstood. Dennis Oppenheim has first-hand experience with the wrath of censors; his artistic tenure has suffered from many of his adversaries' attempts to hide his works from the public eye.

When the President of Stanford University, John Hennessy, rejected Device to Root out Evil, an outdoor piece Oppenheim had made, Oppenheim suffered such censorship. The piece Stanford had intended to acquire was Oppenheim's second reproduction of a piece he created for the 1997 Venice Biennale. Stanford's director of the Cantor Arts Center, Tom Seligman agreed to purchase the piece from Oppenheim in 2002. In 2004, Stanford terminated this agreement, as the Dean for Religious Life informed the University of "potentially inflammatory elements"1 in the piece. When writing a letter as to why the plans for acquiring the art were terminated, Hennessy replied, "[Device to Root out Evil] was not an appropriate addition given our long-term goals for outdoor art."2

In order to understand the controversy surrounding the device, one must understand its background and implications. Device to Root out Evil was originally envisioned in 1996 and was to be built in Public Art Fund in the city of New York last year on Church Street. However, the director of the Public Art Fund felt the name of the piece, Church, would elicit a backlash from the religious community. Not wanting the piece to get buried in a sea of controversy before it was even made, Oppenheim changed to name to something more subtle: Device to Root out Evil. At this point, however, the piece was no longer wanted by New York.

The Venice Biennale, located in Marghera just south of Venice, found the piece to its liking. Oppenheim created the main portion of Device to Root out Evil out of Galvanized structural steel and anodized perforated aluminum, adding transparent red Venetian glass to serve as the church's roofing, all set on a concrete foundation. The final structure stands 25 feet tall by 15 feet wide by 12 feet deep. The original piece still stands outside the warehouse of Oppenheim works in Marghera, with two reproductions being made by Oppenheim; one stands in Lincoln, Nebraska at the headquarters of Duncan Aviation, with the other, aforementioned Stanford-reject being showcased at the Vancouver International Sculpture Biennale Open Spaces 2005/2006.

Oppenheim has had different explanations for why he built Device to Root out Evil at different times. Shortly after the piece first premiered at the Venice Biennale, Oppenheim said this about it, "It's a very simple gesture that's made here, simply turning something upside-down. One is always looking for a basic gesture in sculpture, economy of gesture: it is the simplest, most direct means to a work. Turning something upside-down elicits a reversal of content and pointing a steeple into the ground directs it to hell as opposed to heaven." At the time he mad this quote, it was obvious that the piece was made in a response to certain questions about religion that lingered in Oppenheim's mind. When considering the piece, let us begin with the name. Device to Root out Evil. The connotation of the name alone suggests an exorcism of sorts. The ways the religious inundate foreign soil, on Ð''missions' to help, while really attempting to spread its ideologies. It also alludes to the way religion is used as a faÐ"§ade for advancing one's causesÐ'...the way people use God to justify their beliefs or actions, no matter how atrocious they may be, as long as you assert God's "seal of approval," you can do no wrong. As Bob Dylan once put it, "you don't count the dead, when God's on your side." Along with this is the suggestion Oppenheim's piece makes that the church has its head buried in the sand, unresponsive to changes in society, held back by the dogmatic and archaic.

Oppenheim has described the piece as a "country church" in the past. The simple look of the church itself draws parallels to the common people who might attend such an institution, taking in the words of a preacher, without evaluating the merit of the words, believing all with blind faith, with their heads in the sand. These people view them selves as instruments of the Lord and seek to Ð''root out the evil' of non-conformists.

Perhaps Oppenheim was making a critique of the whole system, both how religion is upside-down in general: being used by manipulative people to justify wrongful actions, and being used to manipulate people into being mindless drones. Although it is rarely considered in the world of contemporary art for its lack of controversy, another possibility is a pro-religion angle; perhaps Oppenheim is looking at events such as the many church scandals that have occurred throughout history, saying that many religious people need to bury their heads in the ground for preservationist means. If these people heard all of the insults levied at religious institutions in popular media, their faith could be irreconcilably, and often unnecessarily, shaken. Clearly, regardless of whether or not Oppenheim intended for there to be this many religious interpretations, the subject matter, along with the open-ended nature of the piece, and with his own vague comments all combine to leave a myriad of possibilities open concerning the religious implications of the piece.

While these interpretations do not give much insight into Oppenheim's reason for creating Device to Root out Evil, he has made other statements suggesting his desire to make the piece: "I was grappling with architecture as one discipline and with sculpture as another. I was focusing on the fusion between architecture and sculpture, rather than the separation between the twoÐ'...[A Church is] one of the few architectural examples where when you turn it upside down, it rises up on a vertical shaft and cantilevers a great mass, horizontally out into space. That was the only reason I considered it." In interviews that are more recent, he has noted that he turned the church upside down