Dan Graham

Dan Graham

Born: March 31, 1942
Died: February 19, 2022
in Urbana, Illinois, USA
Daniel Graham (March 31, 1942 – February 19, 2022) was an American visual artist, writer, and curator in the writer-artist tradition. In addition to his visual works, he published a large array of critical and speculative writing that spanned the spectrum from heady art theory essays, reviews of rock music, Dwight D. Eisenhower's paintings, and Dean Martin's television show. His early magazine-based art predates, but is often associated with, conceptual art. His later work focused on cultural phenomena by incorporating photography, video, performance art, glass and mirror installation art structures, and closed-circuit television. He lived and worked in New York City.

Movies for Dan Graham...

Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and a Video Salon
Title: Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and a Video Salon
Character: Self - Narrator
Released: January 1, 1992
Type: Movie
This 1992 video highlights Dan Graham's installation Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and a Video Salon, originally created as part of the Rooftop Urban Park Project at the Dia Center for the Arts in 1991. The video documents and further explores Graham's investigations of the urban environment, from Abbe Laugier's theory of the Rustic Hut to Parisian shopping arcades, wintergardens, museums, Disneyland and corporate office buildings. For the Dia Center in New York City, Graham developed an environment, analogous to a small-scale urban park, which integrates aesthetic and utilitarian functions, and spatial and visual experiences, bringing the landscape into the roof and extending the roof into the landscape. Graham writes: "The pavilion structures are psychologically and socially self-reflective. There is a dialectic between the perception of oneself and other bodies perceiving themselves, making the spectator conscious of him or herself as a body.
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Rock My Religion
Title: Rock My Religion
Released: January 1, 1984
Type: Movie
Rock My Religion is a provocative thesis on the relation between religion and rock music in contemporary culture. Graham formulates a history that begins with the Shakers, an early religious community who practiced self-denial and ecstatic trance dances. With the "reeling and rocking" of religious revivals as his point of departure, Graham analyzes the emergence of rock music as religion with the teenage consumer in the isolated suburban milieu of the 1950s, locating rock's sexual and ideological context in post-World War II America. The music and philosophies of Patti Smith, who made explicit the trope that rock is religion, are his focus. This complex collage of text, film footage and performance forms a compelling theoretical essay on the ideological codes and historical contexts that inform the cultural phenomenon of rock 'n' roll music.