However, the shift toward a more architectural mode of making, which Graham has explored in the past two decades, presents its own perils. Already regulated and regulatory, as well as commodified on a bodily scale, per square foot, architecture is a site ripe with come-ons and letdowns in the intellectual and aesthetic realm. Graham’s work both acknowledges this possibility (particularly in the use of models) but also at times demonstrates an almost eager insistence that his designs, for a swimming pool for example, might adequately invigorate the public realm. Such propositions need the museum to remain viable; otherwise, works such as a design for the Liza Bruce Boutique (1997) threaten to spiral into the pitfalls of lifestyle design, and the realm of the only pseudopublic. Within a retrospective of Graham’s work, with rock ’n’ roll choruses faintly echoing through the air, we must consider then how he, having returned to the institution, has in some ways arrived, but in others has fallen flat; how he has somehow come full circle but, through his insistence that the viewer recognize herself both as seer and surveilled, can still leave us spinning.

"Dan Graham" originally appeared in the Summer 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' Summer 2009 Table of Contents.