Oppenheim’s oeuvre functions as an extension of himself; even when he uses his own body in the work, it is an element of manipulation to reveal an extension of his "I." A search to cross borders, limits; an attempt to capture the impossible. His inquiry on the process and activity of art takes place in the visual and verbal domains, creating tensions and displacements between psychological and autobiographical contexts.

Tony Oursler’s video installations are based on a defined space of occurrences with live voice statements, in monologues or dialogues of the dummies on which are projected faces that cry, speak, scream and moan. The video becomes the "place" of body action, that is reduced and concentrated in the face, a fragmented projection of the body. Behind the faces, fertile terrain; the capture of the character’s variances of personality and the fragments of their psychic interior. Emotion in Oursler is a tool, instrumental in generating meanings, reflecting a state of mind which is an allusion to the dispersion and dissociation of individuals in our time.

The repetition of sound in Oppenheim’s installations from the ’70s constitutes a sort of contemporary ritual where the physical action is generated concomitantly with a visceral reaction. The work is understood as a communication load that is powerful enough to transcend its creator, killing him or making him impotent.

In Oppenheim’s Search for clues, 1976, a dummy is stabbed at the same time as its 7-year-old daughter calmly discusses the event in a corner, in the background, where a video with a soundtrack shows a knife being repeatedly thrown at an unidentified mass. Can art, strictly speaking, become a mechanism of self-cannibalization, while being self-consumption. . . ?

In his video performance Gingerbread man, 1970–71, Oppenheim eats a cookie with a human form; after that, the digestion of the cookie appears on a video that shows his stomach in the process of digestion.