UCLA

This paper is a study of Gallery Transplant [Gallery #1, A.D. White Museum of Art] (1969), a work by the American artist Dennis Oppenheim (1938-2011), which was executed for the 1969 exhibition "Earth Art" held at the Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art at Cornell University. The dual structure of a "conceptual act" (a term I introduce in this essay) and a photo-based panel that comprises Gallery Transplant inspires this paper's critique of a prevailing discursive framework, first emergent in the early critical reception of Conceptual Art, which separates and places in opposition the concomitant use of these two elements by Oppenheim and other artists of his generation.

Hypothesizing that the dual structure of Gallery Transplant is an integrated, non-hierarchical relational structure, this paper offers an alternative reading of the work. Attention to the ways in which the conceptual act and photo-based panel of Gallery Transparent are continuous or in correspondence with each other reveals that the work's conditions of temporality and site may be differently understood. This alternative framework and account, thus, urges a reconsideration of our understanding of Conceptual Art, photography, and their coupling in the late 1960s and early 1970s.