Beyond. The first North American retrospective of the art of Dan Graham, examining his entire body of work in a focused selection of photographs, film and video, architectural models, indoor and outdoor pavilions, conceptual projects for magazine pages, drawings and prints, and writings. This exhibition traces the evolution of his practice across each of its major stages, while asserting ongoing themes, most notably, the changing relationship of the individual to society as filtered through American mass media and architecture at the end of the 20th century.
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), presents a major retrospective of the
work of American artist Dan Graham (b. 1942), widely considered one of the most significant and influential
artists of the past four decades. Dan Graham: Beyond is the first comprehensive survey of Graham’s career to
be mounted by a North American museum and will examine his entire body of work in a focused selection of
photographs, film and video, architectural models, indoor and outdoor Pavilions, conceptual projects for
magazine pages, drawings and prints, and writings. The exhibition is organized by MOCA and co-curated by
Bennett Simpson, MOCA associate curator, and Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz curator at the Whitney
Museum of American Art, New York. Following its presentation in Los Angeles, the exhibition will travel to the
Whitney Museum from June 25 to October 11, 2009, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, from October 31,
2009 to January 31, 2010.
“I know that the American arts community shares my excitement about this major presentation of
Dan Graham’s work,” said MOCA Director Jeremy Strick. “Dan has exerted a considerable
influence on visual artists as well as musicians since his multi-faceted career began in the
1960s. Dan Graham: Beyond is a long-awaited look at the depth and scope of this important
artist’s work—one that also serves to introduce his innovations to a broader audience.”
Dan Graham is one of the true pioneering figures of the contemporary period. Possessed of
deep humor and critical intelligence, his practice has been central to the development of art
since the 1960s—from the rise of minimalism, conceptual art, and video and performance art, to
explorations of architecture and the public sphere, to collaborations with musicians and the
culture of rock and roll. Dan Graham: Beyond will trace the evolution of Graham’s work across
each of its major stages, while asserting the motifs and concerns that underlie his entire oeuvre:
most notably, the changing relationship of individual to society as filtered through American
mass media and architecture at the end of the 20th century.
Graham was born in Urbana, Illinois, in 1942 and grew up in suburban New Jersey, a landscape
that would serve as the inspiration for one of his earliest projects, Homes for America (1966–67).
While riding the train back to his parents’ house from New York City, Graham took numerous
photographs of the tract housing he passed through, using a Kodak Instamatic camera.
Highlighting the repetition, mass production, and reductive logic of this landscape, these
images echoed many of the central concerns of minimalism and led Graham to conceive of his
work as a “structure of information.” Presented as a slide show as well as a magazine layout
incorporating text, Homes for America is considered one of the seminal artworks of the 1960s. It
announced a conception of art grounded in the everyday—in common architecture, in the
language of advertising, and made with cheap, disposable tools for mass circulation—and it
merged Graham’s interest in cultural commentary with art’s most advanced visual modes.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Graham was also at the forefront of a move by many
cutting-edge artists into performance, film, and video works as a means of resituating the
individual body within the political terms of conceptual art. In 1969, he commenced a series of
time-based works, first in film and performance, later in video, that were inspired by the
perceptual conditions—feedback, looping, delay—accompanying these new modes of art
experience. The most culturally profound invention of the postwar era, television, had made an
enormous impact on Graham’s generation, and at the heart of his new work was an investigation
of the performer-audience relationship as it was filtered and distorted by the technology of the
camera. In the dizzying, counter-intuitive vantages of films like Roll (1970) and Body Press
(1970–72), Graham second-guessed the supposed objectivity of the camera by giving the
device to actors who performed simple reductive movements (rolling across the floor, circling
one another).
At the same time, Graham was closely involved with underground music, writing a series of freeranging,
yet historically rigorous speculations on bands like the Kinks, the Fall, and the Sex
Pistols. The attempt by youth culture to shake off social control—to get free from the ideological
norms of postwar life—rhymed easily with the artist’s own work in conceptual and media art.
Rock My Religion (1982–84) is an hour-long “video-essay” in which Graham traced a continuum
between the Shakers, the early-American religious sect that sought spiritual transcendence
through collective dance and song, and hardcore punk music. In the latter’s cathartic noise and social rites, Graham located an ongoing, if latent, spirit of separatism that has demarcated
American culture from its origins. With its bracing footage of Patti Smith, Sonic Youth, and Black
Flag mingled with historical images of a rapt Ann Lee, founder of the Shaker religion, the work is
a classic of underground video and one of the most penetrating commentaries on American
youth culture ever made.
For more than 40 years, Dan Graham has been at the center of the most vital revolutions in
American art and culture. His works stand on their own terms, but they also read as complex
analyses layered with critical reference, anarchistic humor, and an appeal to the broader
culture. Resonating with a general attempt of the 1960s to leave the safety of high culture by
going into the field—whether that of suburban sprawl, urban planning, or rock and roll—
Graham’s art invites the engaged participation of the viewer and, at its core, attempts a physical
and philosophical intervention in the public realm.
About the Artist
Dan Graham has had numerous solo exhibitions throughout North America, Europe, Japan, and
Australia, including Dan Graham (1998), Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, Spain; and Dan
Graham: Works 1965–2000 (2001), a major retrospective organized by the Museu de Arte
Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, Portugal. His group exhibitions have included Information
(1970), The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Documenta (1972, 1977, 1982, and 1992),
Kassel, Germany; the Venice Biennale (1976 and 2003); the Whitney Biennial (1997 and 2005),
New York; 1965–1975: Reconsidering the Object of Art (1995), The Museum of Contemporary
Art, Los Angeles (MOCA); A Minimal Future?: Art as Object 1958–1968 (2004), MOCA; and
Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970 (2005), Tate Modern, London. Graham is also a widely
published critical and cultural commentator. His essays and articles—touching widely on topics
ranging from Gestalt psychology to Dean Martin—constitute one of the most prescient voices of
the time and announced a mode of cultural observation influenced by French philosophy, Karl
Marx, and Sigmund Freud. Graham lives and works in New York.
Catalogue
Dan Graham: Beyond is accompanied by a fully illustrated scholarly catalogue that references a
magazine format in recognition of the artist’s early work in that medium. Designed by Michael
Worthington and co-published by MIT Press, this unique publication includes essays by
exhibition co-curators Chrissie Iles and Bennett Simpson, along with essays by Rhea Anastas,
Beatriz Colomina, Mark Francis, Alexandra Midal, Philippe Vergne, and Mark von Schlegell; and
interviews with musician Kim Gordon, artist Rodney Graham, and artist Nicolás Guagnini.
Graham’s own well-known writings—on his own work, that of his peers, and aspects of popular
culture such as design—are also featured in a special section, highlighting his accomplishments
as a critic. An essential and comprehensive volume on this highly respected American artist,
Dan Graham: Beyond is available at the MOCA Store, as well as moca.org.
Media contact:
Lyn Winter Tel 213/633-5390 lwinter@moca.org
Jessica Youn Tel 213/633-5322 jyoun@moca.org
Mambers opening febr 14, 2009
MOC
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