Be My Mirror

1 “Interview with Dan Graham by Kim Gordon,” in Dan Graham: Beyond, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art and Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2009, p. 169. 

2 In her excellent and detailed catalogue essay, “Minimal Difference: The John Daniels Gallery and the First Works of Dan Graham,” Rhea Anastas relates the critical reception of early work shown by LeWitt and Smithson at the Daniels Gallery to Graham’s early conceptual projects of the 1960s, “Homes for America” (1966-1967) and Schema (1966). In Dan Graham: Beyond, pp. 110-26.

3 Lucy Lippard, “Intersections,” in Olle Granath, ed., Flyktpunkter/Vanishing Points, Stockholm, Moderna Museet, 1984, p. 12.  Quoted in Rhea Anastas, “Minimal Difference,” p. 115. 

4 “A Conversation between Dan Graham and Nicolás Guagnini,” Dan Graham: Beyond, p. 279. 

5 Philippe Vergne, “Don’t Trust Anybody,” Dan Graham: Beyond, pp. 139-40. 

6 “A Conversation between Dan Graham and Nicolás Guagnini,” p. 280. 

7 Dan Graham, “Homes for America,” Arts magazine, December 1966-January 1967, pp. 20-21. 

8  In an important discussion of “Homes for America,” Thomas Crow has noted that Graham’s linkage of postwar development housing and Minimalism can’t be reduced to “patent likenesses of appearance”; rather, the relationship relates to “larger conditions in the common life of society which have undercut characteristically modernist affirmations of possession and individuality, rendering them archaic and unrealistic.  Minimalism, one sees, gains its pertinence by concentrating and enacting the logic of those conditions, ones equally on view in a systematic analysis of the postwar housing industry.”  Thomas Crow, “Simple Life: Pastoralism and the Persistence of Genre in Recent Art,” in Modern Art in the Common Culture, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996, p. 185. 

9 “Interview with Dan Graham by Kim Gordon,”  p. 171. 

10 Performer/Audience/Mirror and the video Rock My Religion can both be viewed at www.ubu.com  

11 Dan Graham, “Garden as Theater as Museum,” Dan Graham: Beyond, p. 251. 

12 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 1991, p. 42. 

13  “A Conversation between Dan Graham and Nicolás Guagnini,” p. 283.

"Dan Graham: Beyond,” organized by Bennett Simpson and Chrissie Iles, is at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles [Feb. 15-May 25] and travels to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York [June 11-Oct. 11], and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis [Oct. 31, 2009-Jan. 31, 2010]. It is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Rhea Anastas, Beatriz Colomina, Mark Francis, Alexandra Midal, Mark von Schlegell and Philippe Vergne as well as by Graham, Iles and Simpson. An exhibition of new work by Graham was on view at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York [Mar. 3-28].

Kirsten Swenson teaches art history, criticism and theory at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.