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Essay by Lynne Cooke
Perched on a platform, Dan Graham's latest pavilion is at once
elevated above the ground line and cantilevered against the vista
of sky and urban horizon. Composed of two-way mirror glass, and
hence both translucent and transparent, reflective and opaque,
it mediates between the specifics of the site and the broader
reaches which it frames in ever-shifting perspectives.
For Graham, the pavilion is at once a sculptural object and a
quasi-architectural entity. Its origins lie as much in Minimal
art of the sixties, which was often aligned with the purely formal
characteristics of the physical contexts in which it was devised
and displayed, as in Modernist architectural styles and (earlier)
architectural typologies-typologies that range from the gazebo
to the pergola, from the conservatory to the contemporary atrium.
Tellingly, such architecture is public rather than private, involved
with leisure and display, and with meditation as well as social
interaction.
The outer rectilinear structure of this site-specific sculpture
makes reference to the city below: to the grid pattern which determines
its topography; to the predominance of modernist and modernist-derived
architectural styles in its high-rise architecture; and to its
framing of the dual character of urban social experience, of seeing
and being seen, of spectatorship and spectacle.1 Lifted some three
feet above the roof these sheltered environs offer unexpected
opportunities for panoramic surveillance, yet opportunities in
which the viewer never escapes the possibility of being him- or
herself the object of perception. Moreover, in Graham's work,
perception always becomes a bodily grounded activity, one in which
the viewer cannot escape consciousness of his or her self-image
as mirrored in the glass, and hence of his or her agency in the
act of vision. Nor can he or she remain unaware of the participatory
social character of perception, given the ways in which reflection
and refraction project and superimpose, however faintly, the viewer's
own image onto that of others in the pavilion as well as onto
the vistas beyond. In these ways Graham's work speaks as much
to a phenomenological as to a psychological reading of the self
and its constructions.
The atrium or lobby in the contemporary hotel, corporate headquarters,
or even, at times, the modern museum typically posits an arcadian
vista which shields the inhabitant from the urban anomie or decay
outside. But whereas these utopian arcadia are technological arbors,
places for retreat and relaxation as much as social exchange,
Graham's, by contrast, is utterly responsive to the natural world,
its powers of reflectivity determined by the motion of clouds
and sun rather than by artifice.
The inner cylinder takes its form metaphorically from the bodies
of the viewers, as well as, more literally, from the adjacent
watertower, a ubiquitous feature of the Manhattan skyline. Graham
is keenly aware, too, of the proximity to Battery Park City, also
on the Hudson River, whose public art projects were devised for
functional as much as decorative ends. But the location has, for
him, an additional linkage, namely to certain "cutting edge"
alternative venues like The Kitchen, for like them, his structure
is intended to be used also for dance, music, and other types
of performance events. Consequently, he argues, "My two-way
mirror pavilions can be seen as microcosms of the city environment
as a whole."2 Yet, significantly, he brings these ideas together
in an abstract and generalized way, one which permits him to incorporate
the process of viewing as an integral aspect of the thematic content.
With works of this type, which he has now been making for over
a decade, Graham eschews gallery situations in favor of ancillary
or hybrid locations that enable him to inflect the activity of
viewing in general, and of viewing art in particular, and so render
its self-questioning and contextually shaped character more evident.
"I think my works are partly educational and philosophical
and partly aesthetic,"he said recently: they disclose "the
necessary social and visual engagement connected with the apprehension
of the work of art."3
In this regard they develop certain of his earlier concerns from
the 1970s when he was principally preoccupied with performance,
video, and film activity. Recalling "the three years it took
me to realize this piece, "Graham revealed that" the
solution came out of wanting to go back to that period when I
was doing films and video. The first film that I made, From Sunrise
to Sunset, actually was concerned with the horizon line making
a gradual spiral to map the entire length, and so you were at
the very top of the sky at sunset and at sunrise.... And for the
last film that I did, Body Press, I built a mirrorized cylinder,
and I had a man and a woman, each naked, holding a camera against
their bodies and making a spiral mapping their bodies.... Also,
because it was clearly handled, held in people's hands, it had
that subjective sense of being identified with the performer,
so the spectator identified with the performer.... It also picked
up all sorts of issues from Godard to Jacques Lacan about the
other and the mirror stage."4 At once the basis for and correlative
of his current activity, video is given a place in this rooftop
project in the lounge in which Graham's own tapes may be viewed
in conjunction with those of others. In his videos Graham causes
the viewer once again to negotiate the medium through which he
or she is experiencing the work, and with that the conditions
of spectatorship itself. If participation in the pavilion arises
inevitably out of the spectator's actual behavior, in the case
of the videotapes it involves a degree of complicity. In both,
however, looking becomes self-evidently a participatory activity,
so that whatever the viewer experiences involves recognizing his
or her own contribution to that activity.
Notes
1. Two-way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube was created specifically
for this site, where it will remain for a period of three years.
Thereafter it may be relocated elsewhere, albeit in venues with
similar characteristics.
2. notes for Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and a Video Salon,
unpublished manuscript, 1991. Graham's decision to produce a video
rather than a printed catalogue to accompany this project, both
documenting it and indicating some of its origins, was prompted
partly by the links it made to his own videos which will be shown
in the video salon.
3. quoted in "Brian Hatton and Dan Graham: A Conversation" ,in Dan Graham, Galerie Roger Pailhas, Marseilles, 1991, unpaginated.
4. interview with the author, August 28, 1991.
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