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.