Words & Mirrors / Dan Graham - Beyond

Dan Graham performing Performer/Audience/Mirror at deAppel arts centre, Amsterdam, 1977, Photo courtesy of the artist

By Ernesto Menéndez-Conde

Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate the universe.

Jorge Luis Borges, 1940.

 “Dan Graham: Beyond,” the retrospective organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), and currently shown at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, is, so far, the most important recognition of Graham’s career in American museums. Compared to some figures of his generation, like Sol Le Witt, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Donald Judd or Dan Flavin –artists with whom Graham collaborated at the beginning of his career- this homage comes a little bit late, as happens when an artist develops a poetic whose unity or identity is hard to grasp, or is focused in fields of research that are oriented in unusual directions. Even though Graham was deeply involved in the most advanced artistic experiments of his time, his works were so peculiar, so different, and somehow so prophetic, that he seems to be rather a loner in the artistic scenario of the mid-sixties and seventies.

 It is almost impossible to reduce Graham’s works to a well-defined set of features. One of the complexities of “Dan Graham: Beyond” consists in the display of these diverse and sometimes apparently unrelated artistic productions. The show combines documents of some of his most significant projects (including videos and his remarkable documentary film Rock My Religion) with artworks in which viewers can be inside the pieces, not only participating in them, but also experiencing themselves as the main characters of the installations.

 Many of Graham’s artworks and performances are about mirrors, reflections, projections, and generating images of the viewers/participants who attend his artistic events. However, rather than multiply, and disseminate the universe, as in Borges’ apocryphal quotation, they aim at producing a self-awareness of the body, or creating environments in which viewers, as Beatriz Colomino wrote, “could see themselves seeing themselves (2009,193).” In one of his first pieces, conceived as an advertisement for a magazine, Graham was searching for someone (a medical writer) to provide scientific descriptions of the male body’s reactions after orgasm. This peculiar note was intended to show that, by that time, even in medical literature, there was not enough information related to this particular topic. Placed on a page on which sexual advertisements have significant importance, Graham tends to blur the boundaries between medicine and eroticism. It was also a way of creating awareness in the reader about his personal and physical reactions after orgasm. The written words were, therefore, ways of evoking images of oneself, ways of seeing one’s own body. To a certain extent, the written words for the magazine were a prelude to his later performances and projects in which he uses architectural models. In Two Consciousness Projection(s), a woman sits in front of a monitor that projects her own image –and therefore the monitor works as a mirror- while she describes whatever comes to her mind, whereas the man filming her is thinking aloud about what he sees through the lens. The audience watches this exchange of stream of consciousness. The performance was conceived as a system of mirrors in which the seer describes the act of seeing and being seen.  In Two Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors on Time Delay, there are two mirrors facing each other and a couple of cameras which are continuously filming them. The viewer’s image in front of the mirror is echoed by the one taken by the video recordings, which are also reflected in the big mirrors. There are few seconds of delay in the images projected by the camera. This time delay proposes a dialogue between the present and the immediate past. These overlapped experiences of time could be compared to Futurism’s attempts to represent movement or to Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. The viewer’s self-awareness through mirrors (or mirror equivalences) becomes the art piece. Graham’s work consists mostly of setting down the conditions under which the viewer can turn revelations about him/herself into the main content of the installation.

 This self-awareness is an act of communication as well. Mirrors might be abominable, as Borges ironically says in his short story, Tlön, Ubqar, Orbis Tertious. As everyone knows, it is sometimes uncanny to stare at oneself in a mirror, picture or footage. There is a little bit of that in Graham’s artworks, but all these duplicated images are mostly a means of producing dialogues between viewers and performers. Communication among participants is frequently established not through direct contact, but through the mediation of technology (video, mirrors, pictures, sound recordings, and even TV programming, as in his installation Video Projection Outside Home, 1978), used in unconventional ways, quite different from our new dubious tools for socialization, which include the Internet, cell phones, and other contemporary devices. Technology and images produced by technology are subversively turned into a language for physical contact. In Body Press (1970-1972), for instance, a male and a female, naked, enclosed inside of a circular, semitransparent wall of glass, must take snapshots of each other. The act of communication consists of the act of producing pictures of the other’s body, while silence stresses the erotic magnetism of the movements and physical approaches. In Public Space/Two Audiences (created for the Biennale di Venezia in 1976), before entering the rooms, visitors agreed to remain in that space for thirty minutes. This period of time, perhaps a little too long for staying in an empty room with other (most likely unknown) viewers, induced one to communicate beyond words, since the spaces, divided by a wall of glass, made any exchange of sounds impossible. There was also a mirror in the back, which duplicated the locale. Minimalism might have had a powerful influence on Graham; however, he took advantage of Minimalism’s structures in very unconventional ways, which are, perhaps, more related to a relational aesthetic.

 From the very beginning of his career, written or spoken words were another important ingredient in his creations. One example, among many others, is Lax/Relax. A woman inhales and repeats the word Lax while exhaling, whereas the artist echoes her by whispering the word Relax. Breathing, repetition, and rhythm are ways of producing a collective mood in the audience. Words and mirrors are a means not only of blurring the spheres of the public and the private, but also, above all, a means of exposing the private as artwork. 

 Through words, Graham has explored different media, from written essays to documentary films and performances. During the last forty-five years, the artist has produced very heterogenic creations. In the catalogue of the show, there is a collection of individual essays, devoted to several dimensions of this plural artist (essays focused on Graham’s relationship with music, performance, minimalism, written words inserted in magazines, public spaces, and architectural models), as if there were many fragments, or faces of the artist. Graham, as the retrospective shows, is continuously reinventing himself.

 Works cited

Colomino, Beatriz. “Architecture as a Machine to See.” In Dan Graham:Beyond. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: The MIT Press, 2009.