Dan Graham

Wikipedia:

Born in Urbana, Illinois in 1942, Graham grew up in New Jersey. In 1964 he began directing the John Daniels Gallery in New York, where he put on Sol LeWitt's first one-man show, and in groups shows, exhibited works of Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Robert Smithson. Like these artists, Graham considered himself a writer-artist, publishing essays and reviews on rock music, Eisenhower's paintings, and Dean Martin's television show. His earliest work dealt with the magazine page, predating but often associated with Conceptual art. His work often focuses on cultural phenomena, and incorporates photography, video, performance, glass and mirror structures. He has exhibited and realized commissions all around the world, including participation at numerous international group exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale (1976, 2003, 2004 and 2005) and documenta V, VI, VII, IX and X (1972, 1977, 1982, 1992 and 1997). Major retrospectives of his oeuvre have been staged in Europe (2001–02) and in the U.S. (2009), showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Dan Graham lives and works in New York.

Childhood and early career

Dan Graham was born in Urbana, Illinois, the son of a chemist and an educational psychologist. When he was 3, Graham moved from Illinois to Winfield Park, New Jersey, and then to Westfield, New Jersey when he was fourteen. He had no formal education after high school and is self-educated. During his teens, reading included Margaret Mead, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the literary critic Leslie Fiedler and the French Nouveau Roman writers. He wanted to be a writer, loved rock music which he wrote about critically and because he couldn't afford art supplies his early art took the form of magazine "articles".

Work

Graham began his art career in 1964, at the age of 22, when he founded the John Daniels Gallery in New York. He worked there until 1965, when he started creating his own conceptual pieces. During his time at the gallery, he exhibited works by minimalist artists such as Carl André, Sol LeWitt—LeWitt's first solo gallery show, Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, and Dan Flavin.

In the past thirty years, Dan Graham has proved himself to be an all-encompassing artist. His wide variety of work consists of performance art, installations, video, sculpture, and photography. Few of Graham’s works have been commissioned or exhibited in the United States. In fact, the only major work commissioned in the U.S. in the last decade was the Rooftop Urban Park Project, in which he designed the piece Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and Video Salon (1981–1991). Some other commissions in the U.S. are Yin/Yang at MIT, the labyrinth at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, and at Middlebury College, and in Madison Square Park.

Graham's work was always firmly based within conceptual art practice. Early examples were photographs and numerological sequences, often printed in magazines, for example Figurative (1965) and Schema (1966). With the latter Graham draws on the actual physical structure of the magazine in which it is printed for the content of the work itself. As such the same work changes according to its physical/structural location within the world. His early breakthrough-work however was a series of magazine-style photographs with text, Homes for America (1966–67), which counterpoints the monotonous and alienating effect of 1960's housing developments with their supposed desirability and the physical-geometry of a printed article. Other works include Site Effects/Common Drugs (1966) and Detumescence (1966).

After this Graham broadens his conceptual practice development with performance, film and sculpture including Rock My Religion (1984) and Performer/Audience/Mirror (1975). His installations such as Public Space/Two Audiences (1976) or Yesterday/Today (1975) further inspired his move to the indoor and outdoor pavilions he most recently designs. His many conceptual pavilions including Two Way Mirror with Hedge Labyrinth (1989) and Two Way Mirror and Open Wood Screen Triangular Pavilion (1990) have increased his popularity as an artist.

In addition to his visual works, he has published a large array of critical and speculative writing.

Graham is represented by Hauser & Wirth and Lisson Gallery.

Influences

In Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer's publication Pep Talk in 2009, Graham gave "Artists' and Architects' Work That Influenced Me" (in alphabetical order): Michael Asher, Larry Bell, Flavin, Itsuko Hasegawa, LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Mangold, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Kazuo Shinohara, Michael Snow, Mies van der Rohe and Robert Venturi.

Writer Brian Wallis has said that Graham’s works “displayed a profound faith in the idea of the present, [he] sought to comprehend post-war American culture through imaginative new forms of analytical investigation, facto-graphic reportage, and quasi-scientific mappings of space/time relationships.” Graham's work has been influenced by the social change of the Civil Rights Movement, The Vietnam War, the Women's liberation movement as well as many other cultural changes. These prolific events and changes in history affected the conceptual art and minimalist movements.

Minimalist art stripped art down to only its fundamental and bare essentials. Rarely were pictorial or illustrative imagery seen in minimalist works. Minimalism focused on the experience the artwork created for the viewer. The artist purposefully disconnected himself from the artwork. Even in the face of a chaotic world, minimalism was a calm, cool, and stable art form. This minimalist aesthetic was seen not only in visual art but throughout the art world in literature, music, architecture, and fashion. Dan Graham exhibited a predominately minimalist aesthetic in his earlier photographs and prints. His prints of numeric sequences, words, graphs, and graphics strongly reflect his minimalist qualities.

Graham’s later works have become very conceptual. He has an extreme interest with interior and exterior space in the relational behavior of the viewer when anticipated boundaries are changed. He as been not only a participant but also a developer in the conceptual art movement. Conceptual art is more about the idea behind the work and the process of creating it than the actual finished product. The concepts behind Graham’s artworks engage the viewer in the artwork. His artworks explore architecture and space and the effects they have on the viewer.

Photography

Following the closure of his Manhattan-based space, the John Daniels Gallery, in the late 1960s, Graham turned to magazines as the primary venue for his art. In addition to contributing art and music criticism, Graham created text and photographic pieces often published between the magazines’ advertisements. These photographs question the relationship between public and private architecture and the ways in which each space affects behavior. Some of his first conceptual works dealt with different forms of printed artwork of numeric sequences. In 1965 Graham’s began shooting color photographs for his series Homes For America. All the photographs taken were of single-family homes, new shopping precincts, truck depots and roadside diners around the American suburbs. This photo series, one of the first artworks in the space of text, was published as a twopage spread in Arts Magazine. The "article" is an assembly of texts including his photographs. The photographs were also chosen for the exhibition "Projected Art" at the Finch College Museum of Art. In 1969, Graham focused on performance and film that explored the social dynamic of the audience, incorporating them into the work, leading to an 80 ft photo series, Sunset to Sunrise.

Performance and film

From 1969 to 1978, Graham worked primarily with performance, film and video, focusing, for example, on the synchronization of speech and breathing patterns between the artist and his audience.

In 1970, Graham created a video titled Roll. Graham created a video in 1972 entitled Past Future Split Attention, which documented a project in which he psychologically reconstructed space and time. From 1974, with the installation/performance Present Continuous Past(s), Graham began to use two-way mirror walls in relation to real reflections and time-delayed video projections. Also in 1974, he created an installation with a series of videos called Time Delay Room. Graham created the video Performance/Audience/Mirror in 1975. The video demonstrated the relationship between the performer and the audience and subjectivity versus objectivity. He made the more popular video Rock My Religion in 1982. In 1983, he made a video called Minor Threat documenting a rock band. His love for video was taken further when he started adding videos in installations. He incorporated mirrors, windows, surveillance cameras and video projectors in them.

The video Rock My Religion (1984) explores rock music as an art form and relates it to the development of the Shaker religion in America. The low quality image of the video is said to enhance the ideas within it. The video relates Rock and Roll to contemporary culture and the Shaker religion. It finds a way to draw a parallel between a Shaker family and the off balance family of rock. He observes the changes in beliefs and superstitions in the Shaker religion since the 18th century.

Another video of Grahams entitled Performer/Audience/Mirror explains the relationship between the audience and the performer. He demonstrates the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. Graham stands in front of a mirrored wall facing the audience. He describes the audience’s actions to them then turns to face his reflection in the mirror. This subjective and then objective perception is part of what makes Dan Graham’s artwork one of a kind.

Pavilions

Dan Graham’s artworks are said to blur the line between sculpture and architecture. Since the 1980s, Graham has been working on an ongoing series of freestanding, sculptural objects called pavilions; they represent a hybrid between a quasi-functional space and an installation that serves to expose processes of perception and certain expectations. Graham's popularity has grown since he started his walk-in pavilions and he has received commissions all over the world. His pavilions are steel and glass sculptures which create a different space which disorients the viewer from his or her usual surroundings or knowledge of space. They are made of a few huge panes of glass or mirror, or of half-mirrored glass that is both reflective and transparent. Graham often experiments with optics in his designs, utilising convex two-way mirrors, fish-eye lenses and, and small pools of water to reflect the pavilion’s interior, including the tondos, the visitors and the sky outside the pavilion. Wooden lattice and steel are other materials most commonly used in his work.

The MIT Art Center calls his pavilions rigorously conceptual, uniquely beautiful, and insistently public. The pavilions create a unique experience for the viewer. His pavilions are created for the public experience. His pavilions combine architecture and art. Dan Graham’s pavilion works have been compared to Ryue Nishizawa and Kazuyo Sjima’s work on the Kanazawa Museum. The glass wall of the structure reflects and distorts light much like Grahams sculptures. The layered, but simplistic quality is said to be very much like Graham's. The structures are similar in their study of space and light.

In 1981, Graham started work on a decade long project in New York City. The work Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and Video Salon was part of the Rooftop Urban Park Project. Graham worked on the piece in collaboration with architects Mojdeh Baratloo and Clifton Balch. This transparent and reflective pavilion transformed the roof of 548 West 22nd Street into a rooftop park. The pavilion captures the surrounding landscape and changes of light creating an intense visual effect with the sky. The Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and Video Salon has become one of his most well-known works throughout his art career.

After numerous commissions in Europe, the Children’s Pavilion (1988-93) was actually the first piece Graham was commissioned to do in the United States. A collaboration with Jeff Wall, the pavilion is a very conceptual piece relating to the children of the nation. It is a circular shaped room with an oculus that is both transparent and reflective at the top, so the viewers on the outside of the building could look inside as well. Wall's nine circular framed photographs of children belonging to many nationalities and ethnic backgrounds surround the room. Each child is shown half-length and viewed from below against the background of a sky. In each image Wall chooses a different sky. In 1991, the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art attempted to realise the pavilion on Rotterdam's Ommoord district; the plan was eventually abandoned in 1994. Related works include Children's Pavilion (Chambre d'Amis) (1986), Skateboard Pavilion (1989), and Funhouse for the Children of Saint-Janslein (1997–99).

The pavilion Girl’s Make-up Room (1997-00), which is related to projects that were created for the 1997 Skulptur Projekte Münster, is composed of two-way mirror glass with sliding doors made of perforated steel. Visitors are asked to enter the room and use make-up at a little table - the two-way mirror walls, however only produce a distorted reflection. The perforated steel walls are continuously producing changing ray patterns. Combined with the semi-mirrored glass these ray patterns create a "virtual world" that is changing with the light and is thus in a state of permanent flux.

Other realized pavilions by Graham include: Crazy Spheroid (2011), DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA; Kaleidoscope / Doubled (2010), La Rochelle, France; Half Cylinder/ Perforated Steel Triangular Enclosure, Kortrijk, Belgium; Two V's and 2 Half-Cylinders off-Alligned, Brussels, Belgium; One Straight Line Crossed by One Curved Line (2009) Novartis HQ, Basel, Switzerland; Two Half Cylinders (2008) at Bob Rennie's Rennie Collection, Vancouver, BC; Half Square/ Half Crazy at Casa del Fascio, Como, Italy; From Mannerism to Rococo (2007); Homage to Vilanova Artigas (2006), the São Paulo Biennial 2006; Bisected Triangle Inside Curve, Madison Square Park, New York (2002); Waterloo Sunset (2002–2003), Hayward Gallery, London; Yin/Yang Pavilion (1997/2002), MIT, Cambridge, MA (in Steven Holl's dormitory); Two-Way Mirror / Hedge - Almost Complete Circle (2001), K21 Ständehaus, Düsseldorf, Germany; S-Curve for St. Gallen (2001), Hauser & Wirth Collection, St Gallen; Rivoli Gate Pavilion (2000), Castello di Rivoli, Brescia, Italy; Curved Two-Way Mirror Triangle, One Side Perforated Steel (2000), Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; Two Different Anamorphic Surfaces (2000), Wanås Castle, Sweden; Star of David Pavilion (1999), Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Elliptical Pavilion (1995/1999), Michaelkirchstrasse, Berlin; Café Bravo (1998), Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Argonne Pavilion II (1998), Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Illinois; Triangular Solid With Circular Insert (1997), Chiba City Museum of Art, Hikari, Areba; Two Two-Way Mirrored Parallelograms Joined with One Side Balanced Spiral Welded Mesh (1996), National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; Two-Way Mirror Curved Hedge Zig-Zag Labyrinth (1996), Middlebury College, Middlebury; Two-Way Mirror Triangle with One Curved Side (1996), Vågan, Norway; 2-Way Mirror and Punched Aluminum Solid Triangle (1996), originally created for the garden of the Royal Shooting Club in Copenhagen, now at the Arken Museum of Modern Art; Parabolic Triangular Pavillon I (1996), Nordhorn; Two-Way Mirror Punched Steel Hedge Labyrinth (1994–1996), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Star of David Pavillon for Schloss Buchberg (1991–1996), Gars am Kamp; Double Exposure (1995/2003), Serralves Foundation, Porto; Cylinder Bisected by Plane (1995), Benesse House Museum, Naoshima; New Labyrinth for Nantes (1992–1994), Nantes; Triangular Bridge Over Water (1990), Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis; Star of David Pavillon/Triangular Pavilion with Triangular Roof Rotated 45° for Hamburg (1989/99), Hamburg; Triangular Solid with Circular Inserts, Variation D (1989), Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Triangular Solid with Circular Inserts (1989), Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Triangular Pavilion with Circular Cut-Out (1989-2000), various places; Skateboard Pavilion (1989), various places; Octagon for Münster (1987), Münster, Germany; Pavillion Sculpture II (1984), Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; and Rooftop Urban Park Project for Dia:Chelsea, New York (1981/91).

Dan Graham Pavilions: a guide, edited by Josh Thorpe, was published in 2009 by Art Metropole in Toronto. Six Sculptures/Pavilions for Pleasure (2001), created in collaboration with Hauser & Wirth, documents six different pavilions by Graham that are in public places and have different functions.

Writings

Dan Graham has made major contributions through his writing. He works as an art critic, writing revealing articles about fellow artists. He has contributed inquisitorial ads in newspapers and writings in magazines. Most notably, from 1965 to 1969 he produced a series of texts, such as Schema (1966), which he inserted into mass-market magazines. He has also written books along with other writers. Many of the books are a collection of essays about his works. The most read include Two Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham on His Art, Half Square Half Crazy, and Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll since 1967.

Collaborations

For the Performa festival in 2007, Dan Graham designed the stage set made for New York based band Japanther's performance. Graham has collaborated previously with Japanther on the rock puppet opera Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty: Entertainment by Dan Graham with Tony Oursler and Other Collaborators (2004).

Select artworks

Exhibitions

Graham's first solo show was held in 1969 at the John Daniels Gallery in New York. In 1991, an exhibition of his pavilions and photographs was held at the Lisson Gallery in London. Another important exhibition featuring Graham was "Public/Private", an exhibition that traveled to four different venues. The show, which included his pavilions, architectural photographs and models, performances, and video installations, had its opening in 1994 at the Moore College of Art and Design. In 2001, a retrospective was held covering his 35-year career. The museums holding the event included the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris, Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterlo, Holland, and Kiasma Museum in Helsinki, Finland. Also in 2001, Graham exhibited with Hauser & Wirth Zurich - something which he did again in 2002, with 'Ten Years' and in 2008, with his show 'More of the Same'. Graham's work has also been exhibited at documentas VII, IX, and X in Kassel, and at Skulptur Projekte Münster '87 and '97. Both the Lisson Gallery in London and Hauser & Wirth have been home to many of Dan Graham’s works. In 2012, Graham will stage a solo show at Hauser & Wirth Zurich, entitled 'Rock 'n' Roll Show. Unrealised Projects for Children and Boutique Architecture'.

Selected solo exhibitions

Bibliography