Dan Graham
New York, NY
Dan Graham
Dan Graham (1942-2022), American artist, writer, and curator was born in Urbana, Illinois, and grew up in New Jersey. Having no formal education after high-school, Graham is self-educated. His work consists of performance art, installations, video, sculpture, and photography, firmly based within conceptual art practice. His ongoing series of free-standing sculptural objects referred to as pavilions, blur the line between art and architecture. These pavilions, expressly created for the public experience, made primarily of reflective and transparent glass or mirror, with steel, wood or other materials, displace viewers from their usual surroundings, disorienting them and creating an unusual perception of space.
Graham’s video profile was among the first created for The Artist Profile Archive and includes footage from his 2009 survey exhibition, Beyond, filmed at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Additionally, Graham was filmed in conversation with Chrissy Iles at the Whitney and Glenn Branca and Howie Chen at a panel for X Initiative, all in 2009. Dan also sat for an interview in his studio in the NoLiTa neighborhood in New York City.
Graham’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis among myriad other museums and collections worldwide.
Dan Graham - 05:30
“My work has always been spectacularly unsuccessful because it’s too early.
People don’t have an intellectual curiosity about my work. They stereotype me into a few areas. I think my work has always been a hybrid between different things….between art and architecture.”
“My work is really against conceptual art because conceptual art is pretentious philosophical. My work always had a humorous base…
All of my work is about what Lacan called ‘The Mirror Stage’ and actually, that comes from Jean-Paul Sartre in ‘Being and Nothingness’ where people have a sense of their ego as their child by being seen by somebody who they see at the same time….it’s like a funhouse mirror for children. I guess everybody becomes a child in my work.”
