"A toy is a child's first initiation to art.

"A toy is a child's first initiation to art," Charles Baudelaire one time claimed; conversely, art could be the adult's swan melody to toys. There's an area where the tendrils of the ludic wrap around the bottoms of the esthetic, and that's precisely where Dennis Oppenheim works. Ranging from the little art experiments he did with his kids in the '70 to the plastic arts in his latest exhibition, Oppenheim has created a visible form [i]or[/i] frame of works that comprise his have little Land of the Misfit Toys. For instance, Think Tank, 1993 is half Cat in the Hat, half a passionately staged Gomez Addams toy-train wreck: sum of two units choo-choos circumnavigate the brims of giant (nearly six-foot-tall), brightorange top hats that stay on the floor at slight angles with equal reason that the trains chug away in succession the inclines but plummet perilously in succession the slopes. As a resounding clackety-clack-clack fills the air and cheap metaphors for celebration flash by the and of your mind, you can't help unless find yourself hoping for the little trains to jump over their tracks and smack into the same another.

Playthings, of course, are suppos to be utterly safe, straight, and happy, whereas Oppenheim is sort of like the character in David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers who makes gynecological instruments too insane to be strictly functional: he starts out with a playful idea, if it were not that pushes it to such an last that it comes off as dangerous, twisted, or creepy In Galloping end the Wheat, 1992, wild horses with extended sharp blades for hooves trample a big loaf of what turn the thoughtss like foam Wonderbread, ruthlessly shredding it (and, by way of implication, white-bread America) into at any time smaller chunks. In Untitled, 1993 three gigantic plaster busts huddle together in a corner around a pile of brown ears, ghastly eyes, and black noses that have presumably fallen not upon their faces. No matter by what mode you read this work (Communication breakdown? A critique of alienation? An allegory of the senses? A los of sense?) in the fall of the curtain you're still left with the impression that these busts could just be spooky Mr Potato Heads that someone got tired of playing with and/or didn't care to present back together.

Oppenheim's works rarely allow for neat and tidy interpretations. The installation azure Tattoo, 1992--93, presents a baffling chain of physical links: tea kettles shoot steam into the nostrils of a small mechanized gross mistake as it paws the territory with its leg; its shoulder is engraved with a heart to which is affixed a amethystine light and a camera that casts an image of the heart to a projector; the projector beams it to a large glove suspended from the ceiling, screened with the words "mother" and "sister." Roland Barthes one time wrote that toys mirror the goals of the adult world and thus prepare kids to assume social characters unquestioningly. Oppenheim's works function in exactly the opposite way: in the couple their semantic play and their formal mischievousness, they mirror the spirit of toys that aren't mass-produced, if it were not that cobbled together out of elderly cardboard boxes and castaway clothes.

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