Dan Graham - Models to Projects

Dan Graham is one of the most influential of the American Conceptual artists who first emerged in the mid 1960s as part of a generation that included the Minimalists Carl Andre, Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt, with whom he was closely associated during that period. While their work offered a critique of the gallery's white club and of the value of material, Graham began to question the art system itself and decided to operate outside it. From 1965-69 he produced a series of texts such as "Schema" (1966) which he inserted into mass-market magazines. The periodical nature of magazine production and consumption was clearly related to the experience of time and change - a theme central to Graham's work ever since. In 1966-67 he also made a series of photographs showing details of suburban housing projects, new shopping precincts, truck depots and roadside diners, titled "Homes for America". Alongside the photos Graham's texts "deconstruct" social architectural spaces in ways which were far ahead of their time. From 1969-78 Graham worked primarily with performance, film and video, focusing, for example, on the synchronization of speech and breathing patterns between the artist and his audience. From 1974, with the installation/performance "Present Continuous Past(s)", Graham began to use two-way mirror walls in relation to real reflections and time-delayed video projections. These works evolved into the socially-based architectural projects such as open air pavilions, for which Graham is most famous internationally. These have included a "Skateboard Pavilion" in Stuttgart in 1989 and in the same year "The Children's Pavilion" (with Jeff Wall) and the "Star of David Pavilion" (Vienna, 1991-96). All of Graham's projects are democratically rooted in everyday urban life and activity, particularly children's play. His work is thus as valuable to architects and town planners as to the art community