Influence of Daniel Graham

As an art dealer, a filmmaker, a performer, a photographer, an art critic, a music producer, a writer, a poet, and the author of a rock opera, Graham is a different kind of artist—one whose ultimate goal is to explore and expose the relationships between the different disciplines that constitute the mechanism of perception in a cultural system. Deeply influenced by the writings of anthropologist Margaret Mead and by psychoanalysis and ideological criticism inherited from the Frankfurt School via Herbert Marcuse, he has over the years produced a body of work that can be seen as an essay on the condition of human life in a postmodern, postindustrial era. Whether his artistic interventions take place in a gallery, between the pages of a magazine, on a stage, in a movie theater, on television, or on the streets, Graham continues to deconstruct, clarify, and expose the nature and condition of an individual’s status and behavior within a public sphere dominated by the logic and integrated spectacle of corporate capital and politics.

Daniel Graham in the Context of 1960s and 1970s

Since the mid-1960s, Dan Graham has produced an important body of art and theory that engages in a highly analytical discourse on the historical, social and ideological functions of contemporary cultural systems.

Graham began using film and video in the 1970s, creating installation and performance works that actively engage the viewer in a perceptual and psychological inquiry into public and private, audience and performer, objectivity and subjectivity. Restructuring space, time and spectatorship in a deconstruction of the phenomenology of viewing, his early installations often incorporate closed-circuit video systems within architectural spaces. The viewer’s perception is manipulated and displaced through such devices as time delay, projections, surveillance and mirrors.

In installations focusing on the social implications of television, as articulated in private and public viewing spaces, Graham refers to video’s semiotic function in architecture in relation to both window and mirror. Graham has also published numerous critical and theoretical essays that investigate the cultural ideology of such contemporary social phenomena as punk music, suburbia and public architecture.