Alex Kitnick on Dan Graham

I Didn’t KNOW Dan Graham properly. I fulfilled him a handful of periods in the mid-2000s when I was a graduate scholar at Princeton University. I desired to compose my dissertation on Dan, but I was much too youthful and also terrified to do it. As soon as, when I met him in his loft on New York’s Spring Road, he threw a in good shape mainly because I did not know the function of the Japanese architect Itsuko Hasegawa. I was wet at the rear of the ears and could not locate my angle—I was way too sympathetic to his situation, which was at after ardent, skeptical, and laced with wry humor. With Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, we took an architectural tour of New Jersey, the artist’s home point out, and Dan snapped pictures of the octangular buildings of Paterson, Alexander Hamilton’s industrial utopia, exactly where Graham’s compatriot Robert Smithson had also rummaged, and of the floppy inflatable figures flailing all-around exurbia-on-Hudson. When I invited Graham to Princeton, he screened a documentary on his function, narrated by the artist. Graham spoke around the soundtrack for an complete hour, presenting a actual-time voice-around that uncannily mirrored the historic record. Like David Antin (a modern day), Dan was 1 of the art world’s good talkers, and however what he said was neither stream of consciousness nor off the cuff—rather, it was the result of a life committed to thinking, and considering all over again, about “real life” and the techniques that animated it. Just one could get in touch with these forces culture, but for Dan lifestyle was much from the Arnoldian idea of the very best which has been assumed and claimed. The most generative web site was that middle place of pop music, dating services, developers’ architecture, and corporate arcadias, a lesson Graham realized, in element, from his research of Pop figures which include Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Venturi. But if society served as the artist’s item of inquiry, artwork supplied the space from which to search at it, supplying an outside angle that permitted for believed. For Graham, artwork and lifestyle existed in bizarre pressure with each other. He resided someplace in between those people two poles.

Graham arrived to be recognised as a talker, a figure—indeed, a identity—but he 1st offered himself as a author, with a series of articles that appeared in Arts Journal in the mid-1960s. These texts are now considered founding documents of Conceptual artwork, but I’m not certain that was in any way clear on their to start with visual appearance (for quite a few many years, it was not even obvious that Graham was an artist). And nonetheless, with their deadpan language borrowed from preferred sociology, they acted in a different way from the normal art protection of the time. Was this man serious, with his examination of suburban tract homes and their flooring plans, named The Concerto, The Nocturne? The context prompt that the writer labored through implication, that his actual subject matter was in other places, throughout the river in New York, or maybe someplace between the art galleries of Manhattan and the tract residences of New Jersey, in the morass of lifestyle itself. The superior-h2o mark of Small art was 1966, and Graham implied that Minimalism and tract homes shared a logic of repetition. It was not that a single was riffing on the other, but that a similar spirit bubbled beneath each, and that the social relevance of artwork could possibly most effective be glimpsed by producing this kinship obvious.

Graham may well have been Marx-ish, but he was no Marxist. He hardly ever claimed that a capitalist foundation identified a cultural superstructure. Culture was built by quite a few forces, and it supplied uncooked substance for creating a little something else. Definitely, a single of Graham’s terrific works of cultural criticism is his 1982–84 online video essay Rock My Faith, which started off as a series of texts sprinkled as a result of the artwork push. Graham starts with concert footage of Black Flag and rapidly segues to the Shakers, Patti Smith, and the Lakota Ghost Dance, producing a constellation, or key historical past, of energetic resistance to patriarchy, adulthood, and the powers that be. Rock, Graham claimed, supplied short-term moments of communal liberation, transcendence, and pleasurable in tradition. It was a sonic utopia available both equally over the airwaves and in the club. Perhaps, he implied, art may possibly at the time yet again do that much too.

Graham’s serious subject was in other places, possibly somewhere involving the artwork galleries of Manhattan and the tract properties of New Jersey, in the morass of lifestyle by itself.

The functions of Graham’s I battle with most are his “laboratory experiments” of the 1970s. In a series of clinically white cubes, Graham produced environments comprising mirrors and video clip that current the self as fractured and mediated. Inside of, a person jumps and sees oneself leaping, and then eight seconds afterwards 1 sees oneself leaping yet again, and then once more and again in infinite regress. Just as Lacan spoke of the mirror phase as important to one’s self-picture, Graham claimed the online video stage as equally essential, and that it may also be utilised to forged off the picture we had been preset with by the so-referred to as mirror. And still I usually felt poked and prodded in these areas, which now surface, as do quite a few performs from the period, as medicalized premonitions of the Kusamaesque art-encounter-scape we inhabit right now. Graham’s lesson was more helpful, I believe, when he located very similar units in the house of the each day planet. Alteration to a Suburban Residence, 1978, is a spare model of a domestic scene in which a home’s facade is replaced by a massive glass panel and the interior bisected with a reflective area. The notion listed here, all over again, was not that Lacanian dynamics of topic formation underlay suburbia but that suburbia alone experienced developed a split within just the topic. Dan was obsessed with subject formation and the distinct systems of classification that induced it, no make any difference how specious race and astrology were each analyzing fictions, but they experienced to be taken critically for the reason that they produced the body as a result of which quite a few see the world. He had small time for essential identities and reliable expressions, but he seemed shocked by the unique strategies a matter may well be rendered, in fact institutionalized. Ideology occupied everything—we were always getting hailed—but Graham refused the bravura of social-practice art and its guarantee of fast antidotes. He sought not so much to adjust the environment as to make space inside of it. A person way to do so was by having the piss.

In the course of the very last forty-plus years of his vocation, Graham created a sequence of pavilions that positioned the glassy materials of the company planet in pastoral configurations. These perfunctory functions of architecture ended up meant as areas not for forgetting or escape but for contemplating relationally among metropolis and country—and in time, they asked us to believe relationally amongst them, way too. Graham manufactured so a lot of of them, on web-sites ranging from Kunst-Werke in Berlin to MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from Brazil to Israel to Japan, that they marked the artwork world’s geography as its footprint expanded to properly global proportions. I pranced around a person in a castle in Austria with a pal after and had authentic childlike fun, but other folks had been rote, banal, even unexciting (the fantastic, now-dismantled pavilion–video café atop the aged Dia setting up on New York’s West 20-Next Street was a startling exception). As Graham and his workforce erected these mirrored follies, Dan rose, considerably miraculously, to occupy a beatified position in the art globe. He was the kooky uncle of Conceptual artists, a role he played, I think about, in aspect at the behest of the art world’s PR machine and the many artists he supported and fostered. (The portraits carried out by his spouse, Mieko Meguro, contributed to the impression of an artist who played the wild gentleman blues.) It helps make me ponder about the artist’s legacy and the legacy of Conceptual artwork more commonly, primarily supplied the passing, in December, of Lawrence Weiner, idea art’s irascible linguistic pirate. (It is value noting that both of those Weiner and Graham have been autodidacts. Neither attended higher education.) Probably Conceptual art’s suggestions normally floated on a cloud of celebrity—it’s astounding how the portrait handles of Avalanche journal (1970–76) glance like vinyl albums—but I imagine we can see now that the ethos of the movement lay considerably less in a aspiration of dematerialization than in an desire in facts and the means it may possibly be shared and embodied, irrespective of whether by publication, video, exhibition, collaboration, training, or friendship. In the long run, Dan’s medium was discourse the dialogue he served initiate carries on to grow currently.

Alex Kitnick teaches artwork history at Bard College in Annandale-On-Hudson, New York.