Mt. Cotopaxi Transplant

Dennis Oppenheim is best known for his temporary outdoor sculptures created through interventions into urban and natural environments, known as "land art" or "earthworks." In his first solo exhibition at John Gibson Gallery, New York in 1968, he presented a proposal to "transplant" Ecuador’s Mount Cotopaxi to Kansas by incising a topographical map of the active volcano into the wheat fields of that Midwestern state. That same year, as part of the landmark exhibition Earthworks at Dwan Gallery, New York, Oppenheim displayed this model for the project, thus closing the distance between the gallery and the actual site that the maquette represents.

Mt. Cotopaxi Transplant consists of both a collaged map and a small floor-based replica of the volcano’s topography executed in Cocoa mat—a type of rug made from coconut husk fibers—to simulate the color and texture of a wheat field. Though Oppenheim’s ambitious proposal to plough a map of the South American volcano into the plains of Kansas remained unrealized, he was able to produce a short-term, scaled-down version in the swampy terrain of Connecticut. Oppenheim said of the project: "Altitude lines on contour maps serve to translate measurement of existing topography to a two-dimensional surface…I create contours which oppose the reality of the existing land, and impose their measurements onto the actual site, thus creating a kind of conceptual mountainous structure on a swamp grid."

Oppenheim’s choice of site for his monumental landscape "transplant" drew inspiration from a suite of ten massive canvases depicting Mount Cotopaxi by the nineteenth-century artist Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), thus linking the work to a grand tradition of American landscape painting and its idealized images of unspoiled wilderness. Oppenheim aimed to recreate the sublimity of Church’s awe-inspiring scenes by transporting his visions of the Ecuadorian mountain in physical form to the United States. The artist even planned to approximate its geographic location: his proposal called for the center of the volcano, situated near the earth’s Equator, to be metaphorically transferred to Smith Center, Kansas, the geographical midpoint of the United States.