The train journey, which ends or begins something, has been a literary motif since trains have existed. So it’s not surprising that Dan Graham’s career as an artist is linked to such a journey. The 23-year-old, whose gallery in New York just went bankrupt, travels back to his parents in New Jersey in 1965 when his gaze wanders over the boxy facades of the suburbs. The studied philosopher recognizes the similarity to minimal sculptures, he has exhibited Donald Judd and Sol Lewitt as gallery owner.
His photographs “Homes for America” (1966) then emerge from this familiarity with contemporary art. They look like snapshots and are now considered one of the most important works of conceptualism. A few years later, the autodidact was invited to the fifth Documenta and the sculpture projects in Münster. Even if Dan Graham says of himself that throughout his life he saw himself more as an author or architect and only cultivated art as a “passionate hobby”, he is considered one of the most influential artists of the turn of the millennium.
The fact that Dan Graham, who died in New York last Saturday at the age of 79, did not want to commit himself to one discipline resulted in an oeuvre that stands out even in the experimental seventies. He writes and photographs, films, sketches, performs, assembles glass and steel installations, and plants large TV screens in suburban front yards to broadcast whatever program is currently playing in the living room.
Brecht and Dean Martin, Godard and “Sonic Youth” in one breath
While his video installations outsmart time, the inside and the outside interpenetrate in the installations: he assembles frames with semi-transparent mirrors, window glass and the ground glass of television monitors into cabinets and visual experiences, scatters them in parks and inner cities ” like “punctuation marks” that momentarily halt the experience of physical space. In Germany, in 1993, Stuttgart afforded one of these elegant pavilions, the “Gate of Hope”, and his “Café Bravo” was located in the inner courtyard of the Berlin artworks. In Europe in the 1990s, the American became the focal point of an art discourse in which philosophy, sociology and media studies met. He exhibits in Vienna and Graz, in Eindhoven, London and a total of five times at the Documenta in Kassel. In the US, where he has lived forever in a cheap apartment on the Lower East Side, his first retrospective was held in 2009 at New York’s Whitney Museum, the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
Perhaps it was his restless spirit that made the museums there cringe. Dan Graham, who insisted that “all of my intellectual ideas come from popular culture,” also made an appearance SonicYouth or interpreted Dean Martin’s television shows in the same breath as Brecht and Godard. A critic of New York Times once wrote, disturbed, that the artist would make no distinction between Ludwig Wittenstein and Britney Spears. With Dan Graham, art loses a spirit that is disturbing in the best sense of the word.