Dan Graham Overview

Dan Graham's creative output includes performances, installations, video works, photographs, and architectural works. He tends to blur the conventional boundaries between architecture and sculpture to produce a kind of intentional ambivalence in his work. His glass and metal pavilions are Minimalist structures that deal with perceptual paradox. "Gift Shop/Coffee Shop" is a structure that is exhibited alongside three small-scale models, each model representing a different version of the main project. By situating the full-scale work within a museum's neutral, indoor exhibition space, Graham makes viewers choose the best way to approach the piece: as a sculpture within an exhibition or as, in Graham's words, "something real and permanent -- in short, an architectural work." For Graham, a piece is more interesting as a "structure of information" than as a physical object. To that end, he focuses on the spectator's perceptual experience within the gallery space and the effect (both aesthetic and economic) of the reproduction of art works in other mediums. In an investigation of the effects of art's technical reproduction, he creates Conceptual pieces -- including "Figurative," "Homes for America," and "Schema" -- meant to function solely as texts for advertising and editorial sections in a magazine. Resembing a Minimalist poem, "Schema" is simply a list of the technical specifications of its own presentation. Since these specifications change from publication to publication, "Schema" exists both as a purely conceptual "data field" and as a series of varying physical incarnations. Graham also examines the parameters of human perception through live performance and video. In "Roll," two video images dramatize the ambiguous relationship between two views of the same action: the disorienting, subjective, "private" vision produced by a rolling camera; and the more objective, "public" view of the artist's independent movements across the floor. Of all the themes that Graham explores, ambiguity remains his most consistent. In a technique called the "mirror effect," Graham combines clear, mirrored, and semireflective glass panes in order to frame a range of shifting social interactions. In both "Public Spaces/Two Audiences" and "Clinic for a Suburban Site," Graham forces spectators into a new self-awareness about themselves as individuals and as members of a social group.