Protagonist of conceptual art, he moved in a total perspective between different media: sculpture, installation, photography, video, architecture. He was 79 years old
was an intimately twentieth-century artist, Dan Graham (passed away on February 19 at the age of 79). Heir to the avant-garde utopias – celebrated with anthologies by the Moca of Los Angeles and the Whitney Museum in New York, repeatedly present at the Documenta in Kassel, at the Venice Biennale and at the Skulptur Projekte in Mnster and awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters of New York – yes always moved in a total perspective, heedless of the barriers between places, worlds and genres. Artist, but also critic, curator, gallery owner. Fascinated by the possibility of passing between distant practices and non-contiguous territories.
Between 1964 and 1965 Graham directed the Daniels Gallery in New York, where it hosts exhibitions of, among others, Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd and Robert Smithson. His first works date back to a few years later, rich in consonance with conceptual poetics. First, the photographs printed in magazines, such as Figurative (1965) e Schema (1966). Then, Income (Outflow) Piece (1969-1973). An investigation into the artist’s value: a typescript summarizes the different steps of an operation through which Graham himself formalized his activity in a joint stock company.
Unlike most of the conceptual protagonists, however, Graham loves to perform raids between different media, moving from sculpture to performance, from installation to photography, from video to architecture. Indifferent to respect for the specificity of different languages, in a restless dialogue with Body Art and performance, animated above all by an analytical tension: he questions the internal functioning of each device used and the relationship between the work and the viewer.
Remember Roll (1970). A structured performance depending on the film shooting. Graham uses two cameras: one on the ground, fixed and objective; the other attached to the eye. The subjective shooting contrasts with the objective one. The artist-actor rolls in the space framed by the motionless camera, continuously reorienting his lens on it. A bold way to visualize the gap between how we see ourselves and how we are seen.
The same analytic tension can be found in the Pavilions made since the 1980s. Iron and glass structures built in public places. Exercises to design liminal spaces within which the boundaries between sculpture and architecture dissolve. Hybrid territories, in which the viewer is confronted with the concepts of space and time, internal and external: dimensions that Graham alters and remodels thanks to a opaque or reflective glass system, which determine perceptual loss in the public. Prelude to these encroachments, Time Delay Room (1975). Two connected rooms: at the transition point between the two rooms, two closed circuit cameras record what is happening and transmit the images to monitors placed in the two spaces. These shots, however, are broadcast with an 8-second delay, leading the audience to live an alienating space-time experience.
In conclusion, Time Delay Room it speaks to us of the profound identity of this avant-garde artist. Elusive and impregnable, like a game of mirrors.
February 20, 2022 (change February 20, 2022 | 16:05)
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