Gallery Transplant, Ithaca, New York

Part earthwork, part performance, part documentation, Dennis Oppenheim’s Gallery Transplant, Ithaca, New York (1969) upends our understanding of real time and space by displacing the boundaries of an interior gallery to a snowy expanse in Ithaca, NY. By documenting and displaying a record of this ephemeral, external action in a museum, Oppenheim prolongs his play with exterior and interior, space and time, and gallery and artist.

Dennis Oppenheim. Gallery Transplant, Ithaca, New York, 1969; photographs on panel; 73 x 161 in. Courtesy of the Detroit Institute of Arts.