Dan GrahamAmerican, b. 1942

Commissions

Two-way Mirror Punched Steel Hedge Labyrinth (1994–1996)

Exhibitions

Artists’ Books (1981), Let’s Entertain (2000; catalogue, tour);

American Tableaux (2001; publication, tour); The Last Picture Show:

Artists Using Photography, 1960–1982 (2003; catalogue, tour)

Holdings

3 sculptures, 3 photographs, 2 videos, 2 edition prints/proofs,

1 book, 2 periodicals, 1 model

It is difficult to imagine the state of art, music, architec-ture, or criticism in the United States without the influ-ence of Dan Graham. As an art dealer, a filmmaker, a performer, a photographer, an art critic, a music pro-ducer, a writer, a poet, and the author of a rock opera, Graham is a different kind of artist—one whose ultimate goal is to explore and expose the relationships between the different disciplines that constitute the mechanism of perception in a cultural system. Deeply influenced by the writings of anthropologist Margaret Mead and by psychoanalysis and ideological criticism inherited from the Frankfurt School via Herbert Marcuse, he has over the years produced a body of work that can be seen as an essay on the condition of human life in a postmod-ern, postindustrial era. Whether his artistic interventions take place in a gallery, between the pages of a maga-zine, on a stage, in a movie theater, on television, or on the streets, Graham continues to deconstruct, clarify, and expose the nature and condition of an individual’s status and behavior within a public sphere dominated by the logic and integrated spectacle of corporate capi-tal and politics. In 1964, Graham opened the John Daniels Gallery in Manhattan with friends.1 He organized exhibitions of work by artists with whom he shared intellectual and aesthetic affinities, such as Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and Robert Smithson. Financial chal-lenges overshadowed the artistic program, and the gal-lery closed in 1965. Graham escaped his creditors by moving to New Jersey. There he began a photographic series that is still developing as a matrix of his concerns and his oeuvre. Using a cheap Kodak camera, he pho-tographed the housing environment of New Jersey. His goal was to create images that anyone could pro-duce. First shown as a slide projection, the work, titled Homes for America, is a series of images outlining a typology of all possible variations on decorative motifs or materials.2 Through the photographs, Graham draws a critical parallel between the housing industry and the seriality inherited from the aesthetic of Minimal Art. In December 1966, Homes for America was pub-lished in Arts Magazine, accompanied by an article written by the artist.3 The original design by Graham included a text about the nature of suburban housing developments, illustrated by photographs stressing their mass-produced and serial quality. In the pages of the magazine, Homes for America was not a mere reproduction of an artwork; it was an artwork informed and distributed by the means of information itself, by

the medium of the magazine as a public space. It was not art about the media (like Pop Art) but art as media, art as information. Graham used information as an aes-thetic and the media as a vernacular form appropriate to the nature of his discourse. The quotidian and serial nature of the magazine was the perfect conduit for a critique of the seriality of Minimal Art through an anal-ysis of vernacular suburban architecture. Embedded in Graham’s work is the use of mirrors and glass as critical tools as well as an ongoing fasci-nation with the suburbs as a homogenizing location of social climbing. This is at the heart of Alteration to a Suburban House (1978/1992). The work seems to be a direct extension of Graham’s 1977 action Performance/Audience Mirror in which the artist stood between a large mirror and the audience. He first described himself facing the group, then turned and described himself in front of the mirror, facing the image of a pub-lic observing a performer in the unfathomable depth of its own reflected image. Alteration is an architectural model of a suburban street in which one house faces two others. The dwelling’s normally solid facade has been replaced by a glass wall; in the back, parallel to the wall, a mirror divides the public living areas from the private. The glass wall opens the living area to the public gaze, like a shop window or a living billboard advertising a very specific lifestyle and decor. The mirror reflects not only the inside of the house, but its immediate surroundings: the neighboring houses, passersby, and cars are projected into the private environment of the living area, where voyeurism and surveillance merge. Alteration does not comment only on vernacular architectural codes. Just as Homes for America implies a critical take on Minimalism and Pop Art strategies, this series of models presents the glass wall as the icon of “noble” modernist architecture as developed by Mies van der Rohe, among others. To the Arcadian reconciliation of nature and culture made possible by the glass, Graham adds here a third party: the contextual complexity of the urban space, as outlined in architect Robert Venturi’s 1966 essay Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Venturi challenged the orthodoxy of modernism by champion-ing an architecture that promoted richness and ambiguity over unity and clarity, contradiction and redundancy over harmony and simplicity, answering van der Rohe’s “less is more” with his equally famous “less is bore.” Not allying himself with either of these theoretical models, Graham combines both in order to understand where and why each of them might have failed their users. Drawing on French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s theory of the “mirror stage” giving rise during child-hood to the mental representation of the subject, Graham started in the 1980s to build architectural pavil-ions informed by his former investigations into modern-ist, vernacular, and corporate architecture as well as his experimentation with audience behavior. The sculp-tures Two-way Mirror Punched Steel Hedge Labyrinth (1994–1996) and New Space for Showing Videos (1995) belong to this generation of works. These two pieces, conceived on comparable premises, address the insti-tutional context of a sculpture garden and an art center.

244 DAN GRAHAM

Two-way Mirror Punched Steel Hedge Labyrinth, installed outdoors in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and informed by Graham’s interest in Renaissance, Mannerist, and Baroque gardens, embodies the mod-ernist marriage of architecture and nature in a maze where the glass walls not only reflect nature, but are nature themselves (arborvitae). The maze is less archi-tectural than perceptual, in which artifice and nature are confounded. New Space for Showing Videos is an indoor environment, made of alternating standard and two-way mirrors, that carve out spatially the concept of seeing and being seen, a strategy familiar to corpo-rate surveillance architecture. In this maze of bays are video monitors and casual seating that create a conviv-ial social atmosphere in which watching and being watched are confused. The space reinforces the idea of a social contract on which was born the very notion of the public museum. Media and popular culture have been other systems of signs and ritual ripe for scrutiny within Graham’s own “comparative anthropology.” The video docu-mentary Rock My Religion (1982–1984) applies to rock music what curator Jean-François Chevrier has called a “montage of dissimilar historical moments” to define Graham’s practices.4 In Rock My Religion, the artist drafts a history that begins with the Shakers and their practices of self-denial and ecstatic communal trances and ends with the emergence of rock music as the religion of the teenage consumer in the isolated subur-ban context of the 1950s. He identifies rock’s sexual and ideological context in postwar America as a form of cathartic and secular religion. Pedagogical, spectacular, and playful all at once, Graham’s work has always attempted to expose the mechanism of alienation by analyzing the impact of social codes—propagated by the media or archi-tecture—on the individuation process. Less a dog-matic criticism than an incitement to remain alert, his practice is, as critic Thierry de Duve wrote, a “stocking of utopia.”5

P.V.

Notes1. The gallery’s other partners were John Van Esen and Robert Tera.2. As a slide show, Homes for America was shown in 1966 in the exhibi-tion Projected Art at the Finch College Museum of Art, New York.3. Unfortunately, the article was inadvertently illustrated with an image of a wooden house in Boston taken by photographer Walker Evans. Graham’s intended illustrations appear in a lithographed edi-tion of the original design for Homes for America realized between February 19 and May 20, 1971, at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. The lithograph is in the Walker’s collection.4. Jean-François Chevrier, “Dual Reading,” in Jean-François Chevrier, ed., Walker Evans and Dan Graham, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), 16.5. Thierry de Duve, “Dan Graham et la critique de l’autonomie artistique (Dan Graham and the Critique of Artistic Autonomy),” in Christine van Assche and Gloria Moure, eds., Dan Graham, exh. cat. (Paris: Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, 2001), 49–67.

Dan Graham Rock My Religion 1982–1984 videotape (black and white/color, sound); unlimited edition 55:27 minutes T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1999 1999.74

DAN GRAHAM 245

Dan Graham New Space for Showing Videos 1995 two-way tempered-mirror glass, clear tempered glass, mahogany 84 x 160 x 213 in. (213.4 x 406.4 x 541 cm) T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2002 2002.216

246 DAN GRAHAM

Dan Graham World War II Housing, Vancouver, B.C./View from Window of Highway Restaurant, Jersey City, NJ 1974/1967 chromogenic prints mounted to board 34 5/8 x 24 15/16 in. (88 x 63.4 cm) Justin Smith Purchase Fund, 2002 2002.27

Dan Graham Living Room in Model Home/Tudor Style Housing Project 1978 chromogenic prints mounted to board 34 1/2 x 24 15/16 in. (87.6 x 63.3 cm) Justin Smith Purchase Fund, 2002 2002.28

Dan Graham Two-way Mirror Punched Steel Hedge Labyrinth 1994–1996 stainless steel, glass, arborvitae 90 x 206 x 508 in. (228.6 x 523.2 x 1290.3 cm) Gift of Judy and Kenneth Dayton, 1996 1996.133

Dan Graham Alteration to a Suburban House 1978/1992 wood, felt, plexiglass 11 x 43 x 48 in. (27.9 x 109.2 x 121.9 cm) overall installed Justin Smith Purchase Fund, 1993 1993.52

DAN GRAHAM 247

WALKER ART CENTER COLLECTIONS

Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole: Walker Art Center Collections is published on the occasion of the opening of the newly expanded Walker Art Center, April 2005.

Major support for Walker Art Center programs is provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, The Wallace Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation through the Doris Duke Fund for Jazz and Dance and the Doris Duke Performing Arts Endowment Fund, The Bush Foundation, Target, General Mills Foundation, Best Buy Co., Inc., The McKnight Foundation, Coldwell Banker Burnet, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Arts, American Express Philanthropic Program, The Regis Foundation, The Cargill Foundation, 3M, Star Tribune Foundation, U.S. Bank, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the members of the Walker Art Center.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Walker Art Center Bits & pieces put together to present a semblance of a whole : Walker ArtCenter collections.-- 1st ed. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-935640-78-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Walker Art Center--Catalogs. 2.Arts--Minnesota--Minneapolis--Catalogs. 3. Walker Art Center--History. I.Title: Bits and pieces put together to present a semblance of a whole. II.Title: Walker Art Center collections. III. Title. N583.A53 2005 709’.04’0074776579--dc22 2004031088

First Edition © 2005 Walker Art CenterAll rights reserved under pan-American copyright con-ventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means—electronic or me-chanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage-and-retrieval system—without per-mission in writing from the Walker Art Center. Inquiries should be addressed to: Publications Manager, Walker Art Center, 1750 Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55403.

Available through D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers 155 Sixth Avenue, New York, NY 10013

Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

Wayne Koestenbaum, “Jackie and Repetition,” from Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), © by permission of the author.

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Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole: Walker Art Center CollectionsJoan Rothfuss and Elizabeth Carpenter