Dan Graham

Daniel Graham was an American visual artist, writer, and curator in the writer-artist tradition. In addition to his visual works, he published a large array of critical and speculative writing that spanned the spectrum from heady art theory essays, reviews of rock music, Dwight D. Eisenhower's paintings, and Dean Martin's television show. His early magazine-based art predates, but is often associated with, conceptual art. His later work focused on cultural phenomena by incorporating photography, video, performance art, glass and mirror installation art structures, and closed-circuit television. He lived and worked in New York City.

Graham began his art career in 1964, at the age of 22, when he founded the John Daniels Gallery in New York City. He worked there until 1965, when he started creating his own conceptual pieces. During his time at the gallery, he exhibited works by minimalist artists such as Carl André, Sol LeWitt-LeWitt's first solo gallery show, Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, and Dan Flavin.

When making his own work, Graham proved himself to be a wide-ranging post-conceptual artist who worked at the intersection of minimalism and conceptual art. His work consisted of performance art, installations, video, sculpture, and photography. Commissioned work included Rooftop Urban Park Project for which he designed the piece Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and Video Salon (1981-1991). Some other commissions in the U.S. are Yin/Yang at MIT, the labyrinth at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, and at Middlebury College, and in Madison Square Park.

Graham's work was always firmly based within conceptual art or post-conceptual art practice. Early examples were photographs and numerological sequences, often printed in magazines, such as Figurative (1965) and Schema (1966). With the latter, Graham drew on the actual physical structure of the magazine in which it is printed for the content of the work itself. As such the same work changes according to its physical/structural location within the world. His early breakthrough-work however was a series of magazine-style photographs with text, Homes for America (1966-67), which counterpoints the monotonous and alienating effect of 1960's housing developments with their supposed desirability and the physical-geometry of a printed article.

Graham's other works include Side Effects/Common Drugs (1966) and Detumescence (1966).

After this Graham broadened his conceptual practice with sculpture, performance, film, video including perhaps his best known works Rock My Religion (1984) and Performer/Audience/Mirror (1975). His installations, such as Public Space/Two Audiences (1976) or Yesterday/Today (1975), further inspired his working on indoor and outdoor pavilions. His many conceptual pavilions, including Two Way Mirror with Hedge Labyrinth (1989) and Two Way Mirror and Open Wood Screen Triangular Pavilion (1990), increased his popularity as an artist. Graham's first sculpture building project was Café Bravo at Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. After a lecture at the Berlin University of the Arts, Klaus Biesenbach invited Graham to conceive the pavilion for Kunst-Werke, which Biesenbach founded, and he assisted Graham in the realization of the project.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023