Dan Graham: photography: both objective and subjective
interest and relations:
I believe that if I can take Graham's explanation for his work and apply it to my body of work, it would fit with ease. I find his work to be the kind that can only be experienced and graspable after allowing all five senses to explore the landscape. It is not the kind of work that is understood through language or reading of visual text. One must roam and satisfy the senses' curiosity. The thing I enjoy most about Graham's work is the ability of giving up some 'control' and allow the viewers, the audience, the participants, the subjects, the individuals who are in front of the camera take the 'experiment' and run with it, leading you along to the unknown destination in the vague out there; rather than herd them along to the destination you predisposingly have for them.
Another factor that makes the unraveling process wonderfully suspenseful and anticipating is; increase in numbers of 'participants' and 'data'. Within each increment of increase, with each addition, with any amount of 'collected data', there reveals a partial truth. In any selection of data, a form of coherent basis surfaces. It is a wonderful feeling to see that 'collection of data', which ultimately and potential holds the truth, expand and grow larger and wider in size, categories, demographic, etc. It becomes addicting, an obsession to grow and see growth.
Like a balloon in need of an increasing amount of helium to float high, high, high up in the sky.
It is how we continue to persevere; it is that kind of desire and curiosity for answers to the human kind; about me, about you, about us.
biography:
"Dan Graham's work questions the relationship between architecture and its psychological effects on us and remains as poignant today as it did in the late 1960's when Graham first began to investigate the relationship between architectural environments and those who inhabit them. His work continues to investigate the voyeuristic act of seeing oneself reflected, while at the same time watching others. This overlay of experience creates a focused dual perception amid a changing environment and / or audience. Dan Graham has described the broad practice of his work as "geometric forms inhabited and activated by the presence of the viewer, [producing] a sense of uneasiness and psychological alienation through a constant play between feelings of inclusion and exclusion."
quotes:
As Dan Graham explains, "The philosophical base for the films with the camera attached to the eye…is that the camera was objective, being a mechanical box attached to the subjectivity of the gaze of the performer, which is also the gaze of the spectator. The spectator identifies with the performer, identifies with what the performer is looking at, which is another performer. The camera is objective, but the gaze can be both objective and subjective."
The use of the two-way mirror and the reflexivity and transparency of surfaces in the later pavilion projects has an antecedent in the interplay of mutual reflections first experimented with in the films and other early works."
"Dan Graham has an extreme interest with interior and exterior space in the relation behavior of the viewer when the anticipated boundaries are changed. Dan Graham has not only been a participant in, but has also been a developer in the conceptual art movement. Conceptual art is more about the idea behind the work and the process of creating the work than the actual finished product itself. The concepts behind Dan Graham’s artworks engage the viewer in the artwork. His artworks explore architecture and space and the effect it has on the viewer."
review, artist & gallery link:http://www.jca-online.com/graham.html
http://www.lissongallery.com/#/artists/dan-graham/
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