Land Art: Annual Rings, Dennis Oppenheim

Today we are looking at Dennis Oppenheim’s “Annual Rings” (1968), a fantastic conceptual piece of land art that straddles the Canadian and American border. Fittingly, as I write this post a day late at an hour I am unaccustomed to from a time zone that is out of step from most of the people I know, we are looking at a piece that reflects on time, boundaries, and how the two intersect.

Photo Source: The author’s website

The work is simple. Concentric circles shovelled out of the snow with a river intersecting them. The circles (and the title) evoke the growth of a tree, the river also serves as a political border between two countries, and also the marker between two time zones. The annual rings of the tree are at once natural and connected while also being artificially seperated by the arbitrariness of physical borders and political temporal decisions. The piece intersects natural and unnatural borders with the environment and forces us to examine why and how we seek to order the world.

Like the other land art considered this week, Oppenheim’s piece could not be owned, collected, or commodified - but unlike the works of Holt, Smithson, or Heizer, this piece was exceptionally temporary. While Heizer exacted his will on the environment, Oppenhein’s piece was literally at the mercy of the weather.