Dan Graham

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Dan Graham : biography

March 31, 1942 –
  • 1986, Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York
  • 1981, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center / Institute for Art and Urban Resources, Long Island City, New York
  • 1977, Stedelijk Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven

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 a wide-ranging artist. His 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.Dan Graham (October Files), Alex Kitnick, MIT Press, 2011. Ch.1. Other works include Site Effects/Common Drugs (1966) and Detumescence (1966).

After this Graham broadened his conceptual practice development with performance, film, video 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.

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.

Like LeWitt, Morris, Smithson and Flavin, Graham has worked at the intersection of minimalism and conceptual art. Graham exhibited a predominantly minimalist aesthetic in his earlier photographs and prints. His prints of numeric sequences, words, graphs, and graphics strongly reflect his minimalist qualities. His later works have become very conceptual, and examine the relationships between interior space, exterior space, and the perception of the viewer when anticipated boundaries are changed.