Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris

Dan Graham, detail from "Homes for America" (1966-67). Twenty 35 mm slides and carousel projector, dimensions variable.

Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

Dan Graham, still from "Rock My Religion" (1982-84). Single-channel video, 55 min.

June 2009 Reviews

Cornelius Cardew and the Freedom of Listening

The Generational: Younger Than Jesus

Mira Schor

Sarah Crowner

Jefferson Pinder

Abel Auer

Madelon Vriesendorp

Dan Graham Dan Graham Dave Muller in Los Angeles John Miller in Los Angeles The Conceptual Art Father From Dietrich to Dunst BMWs and Beyond Paul McCarthy

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Over several decades, Dan Graham has turned his attention to how we see. At the center of his investigations are the body’s forays into contemporary space and the sites for art beyond the gallery. Graham first worked with art as a dealer, and quit to make art that would not be at home in the white cube. His two now-canonical magazine pieces, Figurative (1965) and Homes for America (1966), which introduce his work at the beginning of the exhibition at MoCA, address these concerns directly: the embodied and disembodied in conflation with then-emerging notions of suburbia. These crucial themes, revealed in the awkward materiality of cuts and pastes for the magazine layout (far from our contemporary digital means), are echoed again in the pivotal video Rock My Religion (1982-84), also awkwardly "homemade." In the video, long texts and voice-overs by Graham bring together a rough montage of images of teenage culture, postwar apocalyptic possibility, punk, and religious fanaticism — themes that are decidedly current, and which reveal contemporary bodies, in all their homelessness, searching for a fix.

A body wandering through the exhibition experiences her own homelessness, enticed to consider the experiential possibility of works that may be constructed, as in Public Space/Two Audiences (1976); screened, as in Lax/Relax (1969-1995); or exist as mere text, as in Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors on Time Delay (1974/1993). In two viewing stations for videos, New Space for Showing Videos (1986) and Three Linked Cubes/Interior Design for Space Showing Videos (1986), a body’s presence is mirrored and refracted through Graham’s use of reflective glass, which confuses the location of the screens as well. More conceptual reflection and projection also occurs when one encounters a room full of architectural models within the exhibition — spaces into which we cannot enter, and which may or may not exist in other modes. If indeed we are swirling dervishes of pent-up confusion about our bodies and their place in the world, as Rock My Religion suggests (despite being cordoned off in a cave where its raucous choruses do not really disturb), these works can seem to be part of a darkly comic process of frustration, as well as revelation.

The literal and figurative wanderings of Graham beyond the object and gallery space are also those of art — released from its familiar confines because it simply at times could not be comfortable there (all that looking at and being seen!). At the end of a decade that has been marked by what we do see (Abu Ghraib), what we do not see (caskets of soldiers), and of course what we still cannot believe we ever saw (9/11), Graham’s subtle insistence that how we see is linked to complex systems of social arrangements (particularly in architecture) and resides in the embarrassments of the body being seen (as in, for example, Alteration of a Suburban House, 1978) is particularly poignant. Indeed, if Figurative and Homes for America act as familiar anchors for the exhibition, around the corner lies perhaps a more ambiguous side of each, in two other contemporary publication pieces. Detumescence (1969) considers the body, not as a conceptual rubric but as a material entity with complex psycho-sexual-social coordinates that are inadequately defined, especially in the case of the "letdown" of detumescence. Income Piece (1969), in turn, suggests the artist’s body must be understood as a "situational vector" toward material means and income. Here the artist posits the need for continual "come-ons," an apt counterpoint to the letdown, of course. One has to wonder, as Graham inevitably seems to do, how these personal configurations of self in the world grapple with the ever more public, if not common, spaces of our lives (and the artist’s), such as the museum. These questions are particularly resonant in the instance of this exhibition at MoCA, an institution whose public value and private financial solvency have recently been at odds.

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.