Dan Graham
Figurative
1965 (reproduced in 1994)
Two silver-gelatin Prints
14 x 11 inches
Figurative evokes a life of unending nickel and diming. Into the illusory world of a magazine devoted to female beauty and several kinds of desire, Graham insinuates a harsh, belittling note of reality.
Dan Graham
Alteration to a Suburban House
1978
Painted wood, textile, plastic, fiberboard, paper, and glass
Sculpture
Together with the reflections on repetition and banality typical of his early work, Graham introduced a critique of the modernist trope that the literal transparency of glass in architecture would lead to social transparency.
Dan Graham
Rock My Religion
1982-1984
b&w and color
Sound (55:27min)
In relation to his wider body of work and to the broader culture of the time, Graham analyzes the emergence of rock music as religion with the teenage consumer in the isolated suburban milieu of the 1950s, locating rock’s sexual and ideological context in post-World War II America.
Dan Graham
Two-way Mirror Punched Steel Hedge Labyrinth
1994-1996
Sculpture
Minneapolis Sculpture Garden
Two-way Mirror Punched Steel Hedge Labyrinth installed outdoors in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and informed by Graham’s interest in Renaissance, Mannerist, and Baroque gardens, embodies the modernist marriage of architecture and nature in a maze where the glass walls not only reflect nature, but are nature themselves (arborvitae). The maze is less architectural than perceptual, in which artifice and nature are confounded.
Dan Graham
New Space for Showing Videos
1995
Sculpture
84 × 160 × 213 inches
New Space for Showing Videos carves out spatially the concept of seeing and being seen, a strategy familiar to corporate surveillance architecture. The space reinforces the idea of a social contract on which was born the very notion of the public museum.