Dan Graham

American, b. 1942, Urbana, Illinois; lives and works in New York

Working in a variety of media, Dan Graham began in the 1960s to reflect on the artistic system, focusing particularly on the mechanism of perception offered by works in different contexts. Since the early 1970s, the ideology that underpins social phenomena such as rock music and architecture has been at the center of his work. Inquisitorial ads in newspapers, revealing contributions to magazines, antirational architectural works, and exterior and interior pavilions that combine formal simplicity with visual complexity are some of the many means through which Graham has explored his ideas. In 1965, while living in New Jersey, Graham recorded the homes around him in a series of photographs. Making use of a cheap Kodak camera, he intended to make images that anyone could produce. He originally presented the photographs as a slide show and eventually published the images in Arts magazine, accompanied by a text that compared the serial qualities of suburban architecture with those of Minimalism. In Alteration to a Suburban House (1978/1992), clear glass replaces the facade of a suburban home while the interior space is bisected by a mirror. By exposing the home’s inhabitants and reflecting the environment it faces, the artist investigates the boundaries of public and private, providing an ironic commentary on the utopian ideal of suburban life, its atmosphere of voyeurism and surveillance, and social conformity. Graham’s work has been widely exhibited and published; selected publications include Rock My Religion: Writings and Projects 1965–1990 (1994), Dan Graham Interviews (1995), Dan Graham: Catalogue Raisonné (2001), and Dan Graham: Half Square and Half Crazy (2005).