Dan Graham

68

Dan Graham : biography

March 31, 1942 –

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. Hauser & Wirth, Zürich. 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.Blake Gopnik (September 3, 2009), Washington Post 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. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Related works include Children’s Pavilion (Chambre d’Amis) (1986), Skateboard Pavilion (1989), and Funhouse for the Children of Saint-Janslein (1997–99). Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

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.