The Conceptual art of Dan Graham

Associated media

Dan Graham

Edited by Alex Kitnick

In the histories and reflections on the field of post-war American art, the work of the Conceptual artist Dan Graham continues to increase in status.  This recent collection of 11 essays on Graham goes a long way toward cementing the primacy and authority of his work, especially in its relation to the Conceptual and Minimalist art of the 1960s and ’70s. 

Graham’s seeming kinship with Minimalist art is adroitly sketched in the opening of Alex Kitnick’s essay, where he re-tells the story of one of Graham’s first artworks, an article titled Homes for America, published in Arts magazine in 1966, accompanied by Graham’s photos of the sprawls of semi-detached housing on Staten Island and in New Jersey.  As Kitnick explains, ‘Graham’s discussion of American tract-home construction easily rhymed with the rhetoric of American minimalism then prevalent…Both practices, Graham’s article suggested, adhered to a similar mandate, and Donald Judd’s famous imperative for art-making – place “one thing after another” – could be seen as the operation underlying both’.  Graham’s Conceptualism thus exposed seriality as a feature not exclusive to the artistic practices of Minimalism but rather as something systemic within the very forms of modern life.

Indeed, to consider seriality across the whole range of post-war art, and acknowledge the centrality of the strategies of repetition and reproducibility for a great deal of that art, we then might spy a key affinity between Minimalism and its contemporary: the multiples of Warhol.  Or, as the artist Jeff Wall, in one of the very best and most sweeping essays in this collection, comments: ‘Graham’s intention with this work is to reveal the structural and historical isomorphism of minimal and pop art, and the consequences for both trends of the repression of historical memory he perceives in their methods’.  Wall explains how Graham’s Conceptualism is rooted in a critique of Pop and Minimalist art, and in the desire to remake the very conditions out of which a new kind of art might emerge.  In this light, Conceptual art is less the assertion of a new kind of art and more the preparatory clearing the air of the misleading, politically regressive, and complicit practices of Minimal and Pop art.  One might hazard that Conceptual art was a form of consciousness-raising in regard to the limitations inherent in Pop and Minimalism, the two most prevalent forms of art of the time.  From the point of view of Conceptual art, Minimal and Pop art not only failed to understand the boundaries within which they occurred, but worse still, not knowing their limitations served to make them ever more bound up with the social, political, and intellectual limitations of the post-war consumer society that so readily embraced them.

Graham’s wide-ranging work of the last 40 years has most persistently situated itself in relation to architecture.  Graham has made, or made plans for, numerous pavilions, installations, and what are best described as interventions in suburban housing.  Architecture provides Graham with an already established context and set of viewer expectations.  Graham’s works set out to intervene in and disrupt those expectations.  His pavilions and interventions provide alternative encounters with built space while re-orienting the vision of both public space and life.  As Kitnick so well explains: ‘Where Homes for America pressured minimalism into a discussion of social life through a rereading of systems and surface, then, Graham’s later works continue to do something similar except that they seek to engage social life itself’.  This collection of succinct essays provides an important basis for thinking through  – via Graham’s own confrontations with – some of the significant theoretical concerns swirling around in what is considered to be the most fruitful phase of post-war American art.

It’s important to note how entirely apt it is for this volume to appear in the October Files series (an offshoot of the distinguished journal of the same name), which describes its brief as offering ‘resistance to the amnesiac and antitheoretical tendencies of our time’.  The series, each volume of which concerns a single postwar artist, seeks to re-examine not only the work of significant postwar art, but more importantly, the ‘critical discourse’ surrounding it.  This collection on Graham’s work thereby becomes perhaps the best exemplar of an artist whose work is – as the series would have it – ‘theoretical in its own right’.  Nine authors contributed to the volume, Benjamin Buchloh and Alex Alberro have two essays each.  All the essays, save one by the editor of the volume, Alex Kitnick, were published between 1978 and 2008, though only two of them appeared originally in October.

Dan Graham edited by Alex Kitnick is published by the MIT Press, 2011. 218 pp., 28 mono illus. ISBN 978-0-262-51577-1