Lighting Bolt Men（2001），Cast fiberglass, pigment, electric light，255 × 165 × 50 cm each，The Parkview Museum Collection

Dennis Oppenheim was an American artist known for his diverse earthworks, body art and sculptural art across various aesthetic disciplines. He believed that art was not a mere example of lived experience, but one that disturbs, threatens and confuses. Neither condemning nor absolving the confusion often evoked in his art, he sought to persuade the spectator to consider the resolute instability of the universe, as well as freeing objects from prescriptive associations.

In Lightning Bolt Men, the rigid pose of two male figures in suits pinned to the ground by lightning bolts resemble embalmed corpses. Suspending tenuously between ambivalence and irony, they are neither living nor dead, corpse nor sculpture. The bodies emanate light, as if simultaneously transferring and receiving energy to and from the dimmed-out lightning bolts—which are neither natural nor spears that cut through flesh, neither energising nor enervating. 

In this moment between death and rebirth, light and darkness, stillness and action, the combination of these objects effect an instability that plagues the integrity of fixed meanings.