Dan Graham (1942–2022)

Theatre is an artist book that documents seven early performances by Dan Graham taking place from 1969 to 1977 with notes, transcripts, or photographs for each work. Originally published in 1978, and produced here in facsimile form, the publication focuses on several key works that interrogate or undermine the psychological and social space created by, or between, individuals inside the performance venue.

Like most of Graham’s work, they also serve as a critique of cultural norms, with many show more of the performances utilizing quotidian, social acts that are amplified over time. For example, in Lax/Relax (1969), Graham’s subversion of West Coast new ageism, the artist chants “relax” in sync with a recording of a woman saying “lax” in a meditative manner, which implicates the audience into a group breathing exercise or hypnosis over the course of 30 minutes.

Throughout the ’70s, the artist engaged in a series of works that subverted the prescribed roles of the audience and performer by creating conditions in which each simultaneously functions as both (creating a type of feedback loop). Remarking on another work form this period, Graham once stated, “It begins with Minimal Art, but it’s about spectators observing themselves as they’re observed by other people.”* This paradigm is extended even further in Performer/Audience Sequence (1975) and Performer/Audience Mirror (1977), in which the artist performs by describing the audience as well as himself, creating conditions whereby the audience is performing for the artist as well as themselves.

Like (1971), Past Future Split Attention (1972), and Identification Projection (1977) are also featured in the publication.

Dan Graham (b. 1942) is an artist based in New York. Since the 1960s, he has produced a wide range of work and writing that engages in a highly analytical discourse on the historical, social, and ideological functions of contemporary cultural systems. Architecture, popular music, video, and television are among the focuses of his investigations, which he articulates through essays, performances, installations, videotapes, and architectural/sculptural designs. show less

Dan Graham's body of art and theory--which dates from shortly after he moved to New York in 1964--has become a key part of the Conceptual art canon. He is a highly influential figure in the field of Contemporary art, both as a practitioner and as a well-respected critic and theorist. Best known for his large-scale installations incorporating mirrors--in which viewers become lost in a maze of reflections that they must navigate and interpret as they simultaneously see themselves and other show more viewers reflected--Graham has long examined the psychological relationship between people and architecture. This volume looks at Graham's key works and incorporates a collection of his seminal writings. A second edition, this important expanded monograph contains new material not found in the first. show less

The exhibition Walker Evans and Dan Graham took place at Witte de With and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. The two artists were considered simultaneously, yet separately, in order to bring attention to their similarities without hiding their differences.

American artists Walker Evans (1903-1975) and Dan Graham (1942) are separated by several generations as well as by the institutional divisions of art culture. Evans, considered one of the modern masters of photography, created show more the core of his oeuvre in the thirties. Graham belongs to the generation of conceptual artists which appeared at the end of the sixties. Both utilized photography to document and analyze architecture, urban life, and vernacular culture.

Walker Evans photographed American urban culture. In series such as American Photographs (1938), he systematically documented the archetypes and stereotypes of urban architecture, taking a special interest in the signs of the city and of commerce, and their violent hold on the environment. His work, documentary in style, resists commercial compromise as well as utopian and nationalist Modernism, aiming instead at sober, straightforward registrations.

Evans’s photography is related to the critical work Graham started in the sixties. Graham wished to return Pop Art to its place of origin, the media, and to synchronize artistic activity with its critical reception, and thus to identify the art object with its social production, where formalist doctrine tended to isolate it in a strict autonomy, carefully distanced from the sphere of media. The result was Homes for America, a photo essay published in Arts Magazine in 1966. In this work, the commentary is not a secondary reflection on a separate artwork; the work and the commentary are copresent in a single space of perception, which is that of information.

Graham’s photojournalism is indebted to Evans’s vision of America, with which he, like most artists of his generation, was very familiar. In Evans’s American Photographs, he recognized the paradigms of suburban urbanism: standardized houses, the architecture of commerce and communication in its mechanized form, common to the industrial world, and in its vernacular aspect specific to America. The very nature of the descriptive value of these images allows the assumption that Graham’s critical distance regarding conceptual art is analogous to the distance which Evans took from the documentary photography which was being practiced in his time.

The exhibition at Witte de With presented Dan Graham’s photographic work from 1965-1991, as well as his pavilion Interior Design for Space Showing Videotapes (1986). The exhibition at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen showed photographs by Walker Evans from 1928-1968.
Exhibition catalogue published in conjunction with show held at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, and at the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, both in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, August 29 - October 11, 1992. Traveled to the Musée Cantini, Marseille, France, November 6, 1992 - January 10, 1993 ; to the Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst and Kulturgeschichte, Münster, Germany, January 31 - March 21, 1993 ; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, December 17, 1993 - March 17, 1994. Essays by Jean-François Chevrier, Allan Sekula, and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh. Includes chronologies and selected bibliographies. Text in English, German, French, and Dutch. show less

Dan Graham (1942-2022) was a highly influential figure in the field of contemporary art, both as an artist and as a well-respected critic and theorist. He was the founding director of the John Daniels Gallery (1964–1965), where he presented Sol LeWitt's first solo exhibition and showed works by Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Robert Smithson. Graham is known for his early conceptual work for magazines, his groundbreaking video work, and his site-specific architectural pavilions.

Rassemble des show more textes sur l'architecture, le design, le cinéma, le théâtre et le rock. Il y est question de Brooke Shields, Dean Martin et Malcolm McLaren, tout autant que de Dan Flavin, Claes Oldenburg et Robert Venturi. Quant à la musique rock, elle est le prétexte à la définition d'un espace où s'imbriquent sectes religieuses, féminisme et rébellion musicale. show less