Geof Oppenheimer: Twentieth Century Hustlers

Geof Oppenheimer: Twentieth Century Hustlers. is an exhibition catalog published to accompany a 2020 video installation at the Columbus Museum of Art. The catalog includes photos of the exhibit along with essays by Tyler Cann, Anita Chari, and Richard Sennett.

Commissioned by the Columbus Museum of Art and shot in Dublin and Whitehall, Ohio, Geof Oppenheimer’s two-part video installation, Twentieth Century Hustlers., ruminates on how the post-industrial world has affected the physical, technological, and psychological conditions of labor.

Oppenheimer, a Chicago-based artist, has had work exhibited nationally and internationally which has been written about in Art in America, the New Yorker, and the Wall Street Journal.

In the first chapter of Oppenheimer’s video, a strange pink glow suffuses a late-model Lincoln Town Car as it glides between the mirrored buildings of an anonymous office park. Among the three archetypal characters in the back seat, business jargon becomes oracular poetry, and the powerful seem overtaken by a situation they do not fully comprehend.

The second chapter, set in a cafe, relays a middle-aged man’s enigmatic story of displacement, loss, and what it means to strive in an unstable world. The scene borrows structures and language from Ohio Impromptu, a short play by Samuel Beckett. Twentieth Century Hustlers. transposes Beckett’s tale of estranged love into one about the nameless, fearful symptoms of our economic and social reality.