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28/5/2009

Dan Graham presents New Jersey

Portikus, Frankfurt

Curator Melanie Ohnemus

Dan Graham was born in 1942 in Urbana, Illinois, and grew up for a while in New Jersey. Since the beginning of the 1960s, he has been living in New York and ranks among the most influential artists of his generation. Dan Graham’s career as an artist did not progress in the classical sense. In 1964, for instance, he founded the John Daniels Gallery with friends, where the first shows of Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt, among others, were on view. A year later, after the gallery was closed, Graham began with his own artistic work. From the very start, his artistic career was shaped in a very interdisciplinary way, since he simultaneously worked as a music journalist, photographer, art theorist, and culture critic. Insights from all these fields had a direct impact on his artistic work. After studying philosophy at Columbia University in New York, he additionally took on teaching positions from 1969 to 1971 at the University of California in San Diego and the Nova Scotia College of Art in Halifax. Dan Graham’s works were shown at the Documenta 5 in Kassel as early as 1972 and at the Biennial in Venice in 1976. Since the 1970s, he has consistently exhibited in almost all important international exhibition projects.

Dan Graham’s art is concerned with complex issues of cultural ideologies and ordering principles, with the reflection on the question related to the autonomy of the artwork playing a significant role. For example, he deals with punk rock, in particular, and pop culture, in general – and, of course, with the role of architecture and its significance in postmodern society. Urban surfaces, architectural décor and the discourse on forms, in general, are at the fore of his considerations. He always makes reference to concrete elements of everyday culture, combining minimalist forms with playful humor. He is also strongly dedicated to the relation of the subject to postmodern developments and architectures.
In a certain respect, Graham’s free and eclectic professional development constitutes the foundation for these endeavors. Graham is probably best-known for his minimalist pavilion structures made of steel and mirror glass, in which visitors enter into a direct relation to the architectural forms, enabling a close examination of them. He repeatedly includes other media in his work, such as performance, installation, film, photography, and theoretical debate. Chronologically listed, this has resulted in first conceptual works including Schema (1965) and another important piece, the photo- and text-based essay, Homes for America (1966), which initially appeared in periodicals and magazines. The aim of these and similar works was to reveal the relationship between visibility and the acknowledgement of art, while at the same time undermining the market mechanisms associated with it.
In early films such as Body Press (1970) and in performances like Performer/Audience/Mirror (1975), Graham addresses thoughts on the perception of space and time based on psychoanalysis and examines the awareness of corporeality in media-related interaction.
At the end of the 1970s, he created his first pavilion architectures, e.g., Two Adjacent Pavilions (1978-82). A further important component of his oeuvre is the dialog with music and pop culture, like in the video Rock My Religion (1982-84) or in cooperation with musicians such as Glen Branca and Sonic Youth.

The show at Portikus – Dan Graham Presents New Jersey – displays new photographs by Dan Graham, produced in collaboration with the architecture faculty of Columbia University in New York, alongside photos of the series Homes for America from 1966. The photos were already taken in the early 1960s in the style of an amateur or photojournalist with an inexpensive and wieldy Kodak camera. They depict suburban homes, commercial premises and urban fringe zones in New Jersey, places that show the common and unspectacular, but also uniform America. Graham notes: “I bought an Instamatic, the cheapest fixed-focus camera. At one point the gallery was running into debt and I had to leave and stay with my parents outside of New York. On the way, the train went through a low-income suburban area. It struck me that with no money I could still walk along the railroad and photograph what I saw. I was always interested in ‘upper-‘ and ‘lower-class‘ housing, because I grew up in a similar situation.” In 1966, pictures of this series were shown for the first time as a slide show in the exhibition Projected Art at Finch College Museum of Art in New York. “Suburbia was discussed a lot in the early 1960s in magazines like Esquire. Sociologists like David Reisman talked about the ‘lonely crowd‘, people who were conformist and unhappy in small suburban towns. In music this was reflected in the Kinks’ song ‘Mr Pleasant’ and The Beatles’ ‘Nowhere Man’,” Graham continues. As already mentioned, Homes for America was published that same year as a photographic essay with text elements commenting on parts of the pictures in the American Arts Magazine and then in Esquire. A decision, through which Graham, on the one hand, attempted to achieve the widest possible distribution of his photos and, on the other, countered the monopoly of established institutions and galleries in a targeted way.

The photo series from 1966 is now reflected by a four-day excursion through New Jersey with the architecture faculty of Columbia University New York. For this series, Dan Graham visited some of the same places in suburban New Jersey adjacent to New York City that can be seen in his photographs from the 1960s. With these works, Graham captured a zeitgeist that could also be seen in works of his artist colleagues and gave rise to a permanent situation of mutual influence: “…the fact that Minimal Art was just emerging. In Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and in a certain sense also in Sol LeWitt, I saw an important manifestation of suburbia. So I wanted to draw attention to the current situation in the suburbs and noticed especially with Sol LeWitt that he alluded to the geographical network of the city. I also believe that the influence of Godard and Antonioni was very big.”
The focus of both the older and more recent photographs is on dealing with seriality, standardization and continuity. The recurring interest in revaluing the everyday finds its precise form here, tied to question related to the individual perception of social space and the creation of space by social groups. In Graham’s works, architecture is presented as the manifestation of societal space. He uses the urban surface as an information medium: “The context is very important. I wanted my piece to be about place as information which is present.”

Image: Untitled, Asbury Park, NJ, 2006. Courtesy of the Artist

Organisation:
Julia Jung Tel +49 69 9624412 Fax +49 69 9624424 email julia.jung@portikus.de

Opening: May 29, 2009, 8 p.m.
Lecture by the artist at Portikus: May 31, 2009, 5 p.m.
Conversation with the press: May 29, 2009, 11 a.m.

Portikus
Alte Brücke 2 / Maininsel 60594 Frankfurt/Main Germany
Hours
Tuesday - Sunday 11 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Wednesday 11 a.m. - 8 p.m.
Monday closed
Admission free

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