The Whitney Museum currently has on view an excellent retrospective of the work of Dan Graham. My own appreciation of Graham’s work is grounded in one of his most well known works, his 1966 Homes for America. The Whitney exhibition provides a fantastic opportunity to review this work in full, including the original slide show of suburban homes and the layout for the work to be published in Esquire magazine. In Homes for America, Graham reveals the celebrated geometry that characterized much modernist work to be as significant as the suburban homes that by this time had come to define the American landscape for all of its mundanity. Graham brilliantly appropriates the language of modernism to reveal its own limitations. The fact that he hoped to publish this work in a magazine further reveals his efforts to deconstruct the modernist celebration of so-called high art.
The Whitney show, however, does much more than exhibit Graham’s best known works. Instead, it takes us throughout his entire career and into the present moment, including Graham’s latest installations that serve as challenges to the way that we experience space. There are also many must see videos of some of Graham’s most interesting performances. In one work (sorry I don’t have the title), Graham holds a camera close to his body as he rolls around on the ground in Central Park, thus recording his actions as intimate bodily experiences. At the same time, he positions another camera to record his actions from a distance. What results is a reflection on the differences between how we perceive and experience the world. This is one of the central themes of many of Graham’s works, and the Whitney provides us with fascinating examples of this throughout the exhibition.
Dan Graham: Beyond is on view until October 9, 2009.
Cynthia Fowler
