Dan Graham, who was one of the leading lights of the 1960s conceptual art – despite his reluctance for the term – has died. The artist’s works spanned film, video, photography, performance, writing and, perhaps most notably, from the late 1970s onwards, a series of glass, mirror and steel architectural pavilions. These, the artist said, subverted the aesthetic of corporate architecture, instead imbuing the materials with a sense of fun and performance.
‘My pavilions derive their meaning from the people who look at themselves and others, and who are being looked at themselves,’ the artist said of his architectural works. ‘Without people in them, they might look a bit like minimal-art sculptures, but that’s not what they’re meant to be.’
These built on earlier works including his 1966 photographs of housing estates, storage tanks, warehouses, motels, trucks and restaurants, subjects he passed on the train on his way into New York, as well as performance works including Performer/Audience/Mirror (1975) in which an audience was seated in front of a wall-length mirror. Over the course of twenty minutes Graham then describes the movements and appearance of the audience and himself in the mirror.
Likewise, this sense of looking and voyeurism is explored in Two Consciousness Projections(s) (1972). A nude woman sits in front of a video monitor which is showing a live feed of the same scene, filmed and live streamed from behind the monitor by a clothed man. Both performers then start to describe the moment – the woman saying what is going on in her ‘conscious’’ mind, the man merely narrating what he is seeing.
Graham’s interests were inexhaustible; he wrote on the work of other artists, astrology and punk music – the latter the subject of his film Rock My Religion (1982–84), a 52-minute love letter to rock and punk culture.
