"an elaborately narrated philosophical inquiry into the nature of art and its context"
Friday, July 3, 2009 at 09:42AM "Elaborate narated" is perhaps one of the best descriptions of artist Dan Graham's body of work that I've yet heard and comes from Roberta Smith's New York Times write-up on the exhibition, Dan Graham: Beyond.
Currently at the Whitney, the show was previously at MOCA LA (where I caught it) and on its way to the Walker Art Center this fall. It's a good show, and Smith largely thought so as well. What I thought was particularly interesting in her review though, and what I totally missed in my visit to the show, was that Graham wrote "half of the show’s text labels". Of course, out of a combination of laziness and self-preservation I almost never read labels, so it's no real surprise that I missed out, but I'm sorry for that policy now. I was also sorry to find that Smith didn't quote from them in her review, and the museum sites (neither the Whitney nor MOCA) haven't put any of them online. Too bad.

Though it doesn't seem to include the label texts either, you can get the exhibition catalog which contains a couple of essays by, among others, Graham. But whether or not you can get to the show, I can also recommend Graham's 1999 book of essays Two-Way Mirror Power which, like the catalogue, was published by MIT Press. This is is my brief write-up on it from Hol's fall catalog (pdf/scribd):
Following stops in New York and Los Angeles, this comprehensive survey of the work of conceptual artist/writer/sculptor Dan Graham, finished its run in Minneapolis this fall.
Since starting work in the sixties with a group of artists interested in exploring the boundary line between word and art, Graham’s writing has always been integral to his artistic practice. Like those artists, Graham started out using writing as art, but he soon turned to writing on art as his primary form. This practice culminated in the publication of his book, Rock My Religion, in 1993. The book was Graham’s collected cultural criticism on art, film and performance of all kinds. In his 1999 book however, Two-Way Mirror Power, the focus is on Graham’s writing that is either about or for his own work. Though even then, when it came to distinguishing his commentary from his art, Graham and many others would be hard pressed to precisely define a difference.
As artist Jeff Wall bandies in the closing lines of the book’s introduction, “Graham’s writing is not writing about art, or even ‘art-writing’; rather, Graham’s art is an art with writing in it, or, maybe more precisely, an art with the writing it contains glinting in the form of texts.”


























