American beauty.

Dan Graham: Beyond

Museum of Contemporary Art

Los Angeles

February 15-May 25, 2009

Dan Graham is one of the artists in the United States that, until comparatively recently, has been least lionized on his home turf, instead serving as a kind of intellectual gadfly/public artist-in-exile, representing American art abroad without being either well-integrated into its canon or at ease with many of its stylistic premises. Graham's long career and variegated output is thus both paradoxical and problematic. A prolific writer of some of the most fascinating essays by any twentieth-century artist, his texts are characterized by their eclectic and hybrid sensibility, turning from punk rock to European gardens, political unrest to the phenomenology of perception. While this synthetic approach with its hyperkinetic curiosity could easily be considered utterly American, the most recent large retrospectives of Graham's work have been mounted in locations like Barcelona, Paris, and Vienna--not in the good old U.S. of A.

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Perhaps this is in part because Graham is unsparing in his analysis of the American social landscape. His landmark magazine piece Homes for America (1966-67) plotted the path between the "little boxes" in which many of the Minimalist artists were raised in postwar suburbia and the angular geometric constructions later exhibited by Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, and company. What is it about the mesmerizing ubiquity of these spare shapes? Graham's incorporative yet skeptical views are more in line with those of his friend and colleague, the late Robert Smithson, who was also entranced with New Jersey locales as subject matter, in creating his "non-sites," writing on "slurbs," and documenting of "the monuments of Passaic."

Try to find a more brilliant appraisal of popular music and its relation to audience than the video Rock My Religion (1984), today a magnificent time warp, which features a rigorous and funny narration colliding with footage of hippies, television advertising, early Patti Smith, and religious fanatics, the mix becoming in turn sensitive, scathing, and scarifying. As is the hilarious documentation nearby of Minimalist composer Glen Branca, pompadour flying and guitars hammering. and one-time D.C. punk avatars Minor Threat--their testosterone aggression now softened in retrospect by a nostalgic sweetness. Akin to a less pervy Larry Clark, Graham seeks the reflected, abundant energies of youth, that is, via cultural constructions thereof--skateboarding, pop music, and amusement parks rather than in their actual embodied selves.

Unfortunately, the dryness of Graham's analytic procedures can make this formidable presentation of his art at times drearier and more academic than one might hope for, given his diverse inspirations and sources. Maquettes for the public works sometimes appear as slight sketches of mild-mannered quasi-architecture. This impression is countered quickly by confronting the many full-scale installation works, shimmering funhouse pavilions that linger in their undeniably evanescent but still potent effects. It is almost as if unseen forces command one to turn, do a double take, wander about, and simply revel in the demanding weirdness that accumulates along with the manifold reflections.

The early film installations lavishly repay viewers' concentrated attention. Body Press (1970-72), a rarely seen work, involves two protagonists "rolling" movie cameras around their naked torsos while standing in a mirrored cylinder. For the final presentation, each of these specific vantage points was then projected directly across from one another in the space, as the twin projectors loudly rattle away. Throughout Graham's film projects, he treated the camera as a prosthetic bodily extension. The multiple views with which he was experimenting funneled directly into the later two-way mirror pavilions.

Dan Graham was early and exacting in his dissections of temporality, surveillance, and mediation. In surveying Graham's multi-layered practice, we see the clear precursor to so many "relational" and "neo-conceptual" works from Douglas Gordon to Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. Beyond is an entirely apt title for this exhibition as the artist so often pursues notions that are difficult to grasp, measure, or observe without the aid of the time-based media and architectonic structures that elucidate them, making such ideas less abstract and more accessible. By intricately weaving together the spatial and temporal, and simultaneously evincing a great critical acuity concerning both popular culture and the public sphere, Graham has interrogated the contemporary with unerring subtlety and insight. Such a vision is altogether rare and this unusual opportunity to encounter a large selection of the artist's works gives us the possibility of contending with them, so they might yet again inform and invigorate our current artistic context.

MARTIN PATRICK is Senior Lecturer in Critical Studies and Acting Director of Postgraduate Studies at the Massey University School of Fine Arts in Wellington, New Zealand.

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