Dan Graham, View Interior, New Highway Restaurant, Jersey City, NJ, 1967/1993. Two ektacolor photographs mounted on museum board; 55.00 x 42.50 inches, 139.7 x 108 centimeters. Edition of 30. Signed, dated and numbered.
Dan Graham (American, b. 1942) is a New York-based conceptual and environmental artist working in many media and known for his glass pavilions. He is also known as a critic and cultural theorist. His associates and friends have included Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta-Clark, Vito Acconci, Dan Flavin, Sol Lewitt, and others.
As an early example of Dan Graham’s photographic work, “View Interior, New Highway Restaurant, Jersey City, NJ” is suggestive of Graham's long-term preoccupation with architecture and the city plan. The influence of minimal artists such as Donald Judd is readily apparent in the doubling, indeed stacking of the two images, and in the sequencing and shifting in the focus on the metal stools in fixed positions along the angled sides of the counter. Taken at the end of the period of the “Homes for America” photographs as well as text pieces such as “Schema”, both intended for magazine distribution, Graham’s initial interest in the medium of photography came partly out of a reluctance to accept the sequestering of art within the gallery system, whose “containers” had been highlighted by minimal art’s emphasis on the materiality of the art object. As part of a larger discursive practice that stretches across writing, performance, video, models and pavilions, Graham’s photographs could be seen as visual “think pieces” within a medium that offers immediate responses to elements of the built environment that are representative of his line of thought, and have proven highly influential on younger generations of artists who have taken up the problem of art’s relationship to architecture.
Dan Graham has exhibited internationally since the late sixties. His work has been included in four Documentas (1972, 1977, 1982 and 1992) as well as exhibitions at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Fundação de Serralves, Porto. A 2001 retrospective covering thirty-five years of his career traveled to the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris, Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterlo, Holland, and Kiasma Museum in Helsinki, Finland.
A major touring retrospective of Graham’s work opens at Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in February 2009 and travels to the Whitney Museum and the Walker Art Center.
Among his many publications are two collections of his writings: Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham on His Art (MIT Press, 1999) and Rock My Religion: Writings and Projects 1965-1990 (Writing Art) (MIT Press, 1993).
