DAN GRAHAM

Interview by Sarah Rosenbaum-Kranson

...

DAN GRAHAM, BISECTED TRIANGLE INTERIOR CURVE, 2002

Dan Graham has been a vital presence in the contemporary art world since the 1960s. Over almost half
a century, he has seamlessly shifted among the roles of artist, writer, and curator. Though best known
for the magazine piece “Homes for America” and his indoor and outdoor glass pavilions, Graham’s
output has spanned video, film, performance art, photography, architecture, and musical theater, as
well as drawings and prints. Throughout his career, he has investigated questions of public and private
space, urban planning, and the individual. The first North American retrospective of the artist’s work,
“Dan Graham: Beyond,” opened in February at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and
will travel this summer to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and then in the fall to
the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Known for his intelligence, generosity, and humor, Graham
makes for an ideal interview. I met the artist at his apartment on Spring Street in New York to discuss
his work, and whatever else came to mind.
Sarah Rosenbaum-Kranson: When did you originally move to New York?

DAN GRAHAM: I was born in Illinois. I grew up in Winfield and then Westfield, New Jersey.

Rosenbaum-Kranson: I actually grew up in Summit, about six miles from Westfield.

GRAHAM: But Summit and Westfield are horrible cities. Winfield was like a housing project for
shipbuilders, near Linden, but it’s along the river. I really didn’t like the kind of people you’d find in
Summit or Westfield, and they usually commute. We moved there so I could get into college, but I
never went to college. I never really liked Westfield, although Summit has one thing that’s
interesting—it’s near Mountainside, where all the scientists live because of Bell Laboratories. And I
remember, as a teenager, I was interested in science fiction, so a friend and I went to visit John
Campbell, Jr., who’s the editor of a big science fiction magazine, Astounding Science Fiction, and he
lived in Mountainside, I think, because of Bell Labs. I was in and out of New York around 1962. In
other words, I used to stay with friends who had apartments in New York. I didn’t move until around
’63, and I had my gallery, the John Daniels Gallery, from ’64 to ’65. I lived in the Lower East Side
around East 10th and First Avenue. The people there at the time reminded me very much of the
characters in Thomas Pynchon’s book, V, really down and out people.
 EERO SAARINEN, BELL LABORATORIES, 1962, HOLMDEL, NEW JERSEY

Rosenbaum-Kranson: When did you move to Nolita?

GRAHAM: Until twelve years ago, I lived on Eldridge Street, between Hester and Grand, in a
$450/month apartment. My downstairs neighbors were Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon of Sonic
Youth. I got Kim the place. It’s interesting because then it was a real slum, but now I found a huge new
gallery on Eldridge Street, between Broome and Grand, called Woodward Gallery; it had an amazing
show of Ad Reinhardt’s sexual collages. Everyone knows the cartoons, but you don’t realize that he
was very involved in pornography. He was a supporter of Olympia Press, which published Lolita
before Grove Press was in existence. The artists then had very literary backgrounds, and you don’t get
this when you read the critics. When I got into art, I wanted to be a writer. Flavin wanted to be like
James Joyce, pretty much all the artists wanted to be writers.

Rosenbaum-Kranson: Do you think that often happens—artists wanting to be writers? I’ve heard you
speak a lot about artists wanting to be architects—that there is a certain hybridity or fluidity.

GRAHAM: No, I think that in the 60s—and you can see this with Andy Warhol—you could do
anything and call it art. In the 60s, it was a very broad situation. And, of course, what happened in the
80s and 90s is that people went to art school and became career artists. Jeff Wall started writing
because I was writing about artists, but then recently, about eight years ago, he said, “Dan, artists
should never write about themselves or about other artists because the most important thing for an artist
is to become famous, so that he can have curators and critics write about him.” So, in the 80s and 90s,
that strategic idea took over, and everybody became specialists. Judd’s early writings were reviews,
and they were very open-minded. And he also had three articles: one was on Yayoi Kusama, his
girlfriend; the second on Lee Bontecou, who, I think, influenced him enormously; and the other about
the nineteenth-century Kansas City plan.

Rosenbaum-Kranson: Do you think that artists should go back to writing more about their work?

GRAHAM: We have one artist who is, I think, a great artist and a great writer, John Miller. And Mike
Kelley is a very good writer, but he puts down Marcel Broodthaers and supports people who influenced
him, like Öyvind Fahlström and Paul Thek. It hasn’t hurt his career, but I think it has hurt John Miller’s
career. People don’t realize that John’s work is very good. I never became well-known because I wrote
about myself and other artists. And actually Carl Andre, in a recent interview with Benjamin Buchloh,
said, “Dan Graham is not an artist,” because I wrote about him. Museums don’t buy my work; MoMA
doesn’t own a piece.

Rosenbaum-Kranson: From a critical perspective, I can’t imagine the discussion not including your
work. So, there seems to be a gap between criticism and collection.

GRAHAM: People know about a few works. Like Buchloh says, Homes for America (1966-67) is the
key work, so that’s the only thing that they write about. I did magazine pages three years before
Conceptual Art, and there are works that are much more important than those in Homes for America,
but people don’t even look at them.
DAN GRAHAM, HOMES FOR AMERICA, 1966-7, ARTS MAGAZINE
Rosenbaum-Kranson: Coming from an academic background, “Homes for America” does get cited
most frequently.

GRAHAM: What people misunderstood was that the work was not an attack on Minimalist art at all—
that’s what Buchloh thinks: it was basically flat-footed humor, the parody of the think-piece that
Esquire used to have critiquing the suburbs. If anything, it comes more from “Nowhere Man” by the
Beatles and “Mr. Pleasant” by the Kinks. I was reading French novels, and Michel Butor was very
important because he showed the labyrinth of the city and of the city plan. So Buchloh misrepresents
“Homes for America” or misunderstands it, and Tom Crow, I think, realizes that it’s arcadian, but he
doesn’t understand that it’s a kind of suburban arcadia. I was on the edge of the suburbs.

Rosenbaum-Kranson: I’m really interested in the way your work relates to play and to humor.

GRAHAM: Let’s bring in the humor thing. My parents were secular Jews, but in doing a lot of
lecturing and teaching, I find that Jewish stand-up comedy becomes very important. And also, when I
was asked to do the Star of David for this castle, at first, I didn’t want to do it because Kurt Waldheim
was president of Austria, that old Nazi. And then I saw the Arnulf Rainer Museum, where Rainer used
blood on the cross, so I thought, in the moat area of the castle, why not do a water pavilion which is
also a Star of David?—and also you can walk on the water as Jesus Christ did. I learned a lot from
Oldenberg and his monuments because there’s a lot of parody there. And the Yin/Yang (1997-98) is
kind of a parody of New Age Bill Viola. So I think you can be politically subversive through humor,
but that might be an old Jewish trick. Certainly Oldenburg’s work is incredibly funny. I also think that
Lichtenstein’s work is really misunderstood; it had a very big influence on me. When Buchloh
interviewed me, I said that Lichtenstein was important because his work had some humor; he said, no,
Lichtenstein’s a conservative. So he’s taking Lichtenstein literally, and I see Lichtenstein like the
Ramones; in other words, he always said that he was showing the fascism in the media to call attention
to it. And Gerhard Richter told me that Lichtenstein was his big hero. Lichtenstein’s humor’s a bit
academic because he was an academic, but there is humor there. Most of the great art that I admire has
humor. Even Flavin had a kind of nasty humor. And I wrote an article about Sol LeWitt called “Sol’s
Humor.” Sol said his grids were jungle gyms for his cats.

Rosenbaum-Kranson: I think that there’s a way to incorporate humor while still having something
important to say—the two don’t negate each other.

GRAHAM: Well, some kinds of humor I don’t like. For example, I’m not a fan of Maurizio Cattelan—
I think it’s too 90s cynical. I tend to be an idealist. I’m not interested in cynical humor. It’s just my
nature to be fairly idealistic about things.

Rosenbaum-Kranson: When you were starting to develop your work, who were some of the important
influences on you, or that continue to be important for you?

GRAHAM: Flavin, the writings of Judd, LeWitt, whom I showed with my gallery, and actually, the
person who first discovered my work, Robert Mangold. He was actually Joseph Kosuth’s teacher.
Kosuth used to stalk me for three years, and I couldn’t get rid of him. But then, his best friend was
Lawrence Weiner, and he got very involved in the Conceptual Art movement. A lot of my pavilions
still come from Mangold’s paintings. And, in terms of the past, I would say Frederick Church and
Albert Bierstadt, who was actually also Flavin’s hero.

Rosenbaum-Kranson: One of the things that seems like a common denominator among a number of
those artists is the importance of light to the work, which is something that one can feel quite strongly
in your glass pavilions—the play between natural light, or if they’re indoors, artificial light, interior
and exterior.

GRAHAM: Actually, Flavin’s best works were in spaces where there was a window, so you could see
an afterimage afterwards. Although it also could be, if you wanted to do this astrologically, that I’m an
Aries; Flavin’s birthday is the day after mine, and I think that somehow the instantaneousness of light
was very important, although I deal with the light changing gradually in time. That probably comes out
of the fact that I wanted to get away from Minimalist art and the idea of the immediate present.
Through drug culture, and also through music—my interests in La Mont Young, Terry Riley, and Steve
Reich—the idea of the duration became more important.

DAN GRAHAM, THREE LINKED CUBES/INTERIOR DESIGN FOR SHAPE SHOWING VIDEOS, 1986, MIRRORED
GLASS, MAHOGANY, TELEVISIONS, CUSHIONS

Rosenbaum-Kranson: Can you elaborate a bit on duration and time delay in your work

GRAHAM: For my retrospective catalogue for the LA MoCA show, there’s an interview with Rodney
Graham, who says that when he first saw the Venice Biennale piece, Public Space/Two Audiences
(1976), he realized that it took place in time because as you move around, people redistribute what
they’re looking at, and then duration became very important. Around the same time, the early 70s,
many artists wanted to break with the idea of an instantaneous present time, which was very much what
Minimalist art was dealing with. I became interested in historical memory through Walter Benjamin,
but I also think that marijuana was very important.

Rosenbaum-Kranson: When you do a retrospective, like the one at LA MoCA and then the Whitney
and the Walker, how do you deal with your own personal history and the question of looking back to
the past?
GRAHAM: When I do a show, I want it to be enjoyed by everybody. So one of the key works is the
Girl’s Makeup Room (1998-2000), which is very engaging for children. There are very few things that
work indoors. In [New] Design for Showing Videos (1995), you can lie down on the floor, so that’s
very engaging for teenagers, and there are benches for old people. I try to have a variety of work in
different areas, but they should all be engaging for the general public when I do the show. For the
Whitney, I was going to have six pavilions at the Bronx Botanical Gardens—Tom Eccles set that up—
but then they turned me down, even though we were designing them with architects. It often takes
many years before things get done.

Rosenbaum-Kranson: You did the piece Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and Video Salon at the
Dia Art Foundation in 1991, and then, in 2002, you created Bisected Triangle, Interior Curve through
the Public Art Fund. New York has obviously been your home for the past forty-plus years. Is it
different working here versus anywhere else? Are there any particular issues that interest you in this
specific urban environment?

GRAHAM: I did an article with an ex-girlfriend, “Corporate Arcadias,” about corporate atria, so when
I did the Dia piece, I was thinking about the idea of doing a 70s alternative space and an 80s corporate
atrium, so the corporate atrium was rather important. I want to acquaint people with the just past, and
also, I knew that Battery Park City would be coming up the Hudson because I was following Venturi
Scott Brown’s Westway Urban Design Project (1978-85). I used boardwalk surfacing because I had
read Delirious New York by Rem Koolhaas, and I thought that the Hudson would be a kind of an
amusement situation [like Coney Island]. There was nothing there then, so it was really about the city.
And of course, the city is a grid, so that’s where the cube comes from. And the water tower I got from
Aldo Rossi—the cylinder comes from the water tower.

Rosenbaum-Kranson: The water tower is one of my favorite urban figures.

GRAHAM: Rossi made that the symbol of New York. I had a real idea of the recent history of New
York. I had written “Corporate Arcadias,” and also LeWitt, who had his first show at my gallery, used
to work for I. M. Pei. So what Sol was doing was like a Pei grid; he was also influenced by de Chirico.
And also, with “Homes for America,” my work was about the city plan. I think that the Dia piece was
about New York City but also about New Jersey because you can see across the Hudson [from its
rooftop site]. I found a tool shed there and decided not to tear it down. I wanted it to be a penthouse
roof and a slum roof at the same time. I knew the slum roof from living on the Lower East Side, and
the penthouse roof is like uptown.

Rosenbaum-Kranson: Can you elaborate a bit on duration and time delay in your work

GRAHAM: For my retrospective catalogue for the LA MoCA show, there’s an interview with Rodney
Graham, who says that when he first saw the Venice Biennale piece, Public Space/Two Audiences
(1976), he realized that it took place in time because as you move around, people redistribute what
they’re looking at, and then duration became very important. Around the same time, the early 70s,
many artists wanted to break with the idea of an instantaneous present time, which was very much what
Minimalist art was dealing with. I became interested in historical memory through Walter Benjamin,
but I also think that marijuana was very important.

Rosenbaum-Kranson: When you do a retrospective, like the one at LA MoCA and then the Whitney
and the Walker, how do you deal with your own personal history and the question of looking back to
the past?

GRAHAM: When I do a show, I want it to be enjoyed by everybody. So one of the key works is the
Girl’s Makeup Room (1998-2000), which is very engaging for children. There are very few things that
work indoors. In [New] Design for Showing Videos (1995), you can lie down on the floor, so that’s
very engaging for teenagers, and there are benches for old people. I try to have a variety of work in
different areas, but they should all be engaging for the general public when I do the show. For the
Whitney, I was going to have six pavilions at the Bronx Botanical Gardens—Tom Eccles set that up—
but then they turned me down, even though we were designing them with architects. It often takes
many years before things get done.
 DAN GRAHAM, TWO-WAY MIRROR CYLINDERI INSIDE CUBE, 1991, MIRRORED GLASS, WOOD, STAINLESS
STEEL

Rosenbaum-Kranson: You mentioned Walter Benjamin earlier, and I’m curious about connections to
his work, especially with your use of glass and his writings on the Parisian arcades. You’ve also
mentioned the just past, which is significant to Benjamin as well. Could you discuss your use of glass
and the idea of recuperating things that are old or seen as obsolete?

GRAHAM: The use of glass didn’t come from Benjamin’s Arcades Project. It basically just came from
observing the city’s architecture, and also, at first, from Robert Venturi. I was anti-Mies van der Rohe
because Venturi accused him of being a corporate architect. So, I was going against Mies, but in many
ways, [I was also influenced by] the ideas of the Bauhaus, in the glass façade being changed by the
two-way mirror glass. As for my interest in shopping malls and shopping situations, I had a gallery in
Brussels, and at one point, all of the galleries there moved to shopping arcades. I did a piece with time
delay and mirrors [in which] there were two showcase windows, which you walked between, so you
were walking between the two storefront windows. I did an early video piece with glass office
buildings. So, the pavilions came out of the fact that I couldn’t do time delays anymore because they
were done with analog video. So, it didn’t come from Benjamin, although his interest in the city, the
reality of the city, and the consumerism of the city were all great, in my mind.Illuminations came out
around ’65 or ’66, and I discovered the just past a bit later. Robert Smithson, who was very involved
with fashion, I remember, in the late 60s, got interested in the 30s, and so, he wrote an article, I think,
for an art magazine, about Art Deco. Everybody was always interested in another fashionable period—
the neo-30s, the neo-50s—and of course, subconsciously, I knew that the Dia loved Jorge Pardo’s kind
of neo-60s work better than they liked my work, so I know there’s a fashion for that kind of work. Paul
McCarthy [on the other hand] did an amazing piece in which he redid Jeff Koons’s Michael Jackson
and Bubbles because Paul is interested in the just past, historically speaking. I realized that it’s more
powerful in a way because we always reject the just past in favor of the neo-past that’s more
fashionable. It’s a way of not dealing with reality.

Rosenbaum-Kranson: What is the just past that you’re interested in right now?

GRAHAM: I did a project in Basel for this big drug company, Novartis, in a park, and it’s adjacent to
the Kazuyo Sejima building. They have three Japanese architects [who designed the buildings in the
Novartis Campus]: one is great, Fumihiko Maki; the other, Tadao Ando, is a lightweight; and Sejima is
really superficial. They also have a Frank Gehry building; they have these kind of brand-name
corporate architects. Sejima’s is a rectilinear building, very simple in the neo-minimalism of its
architecture. My piece is one pane of two-way mirrored glass, which is flat; crossing over it is a slight
curved element, and that distorts the Sejima building. It makes fun of the Gehry a bit, and it’s also a bit
like Bruce Nauman because where it intersects, you can go in, and you get a very perverse space.
Basically it’s moving in time because most of the architecture is [comprised of] very static corporate
trademark monuments, or monuments to the trademark architect. Today we have these trademark
façades.

Rosenbaum-Kranson: One of the things that’s interesting about your pavilion spaces is the way in
which they’re so much about interior space. You don’t live in a façade—you live inside a building,
which is a very different approach from a lot of the skin architecture you see today.

GRAHAM: I also like the way that people walk around the piece because of where I put it—in a park
by a very good landscape architect, Günther Vogt—and it’s a place where people who are doing
research and development and are going to college take their lunch. It’s a space where people lie
down—inside and outside the pavilion. So, for me, the real historical thing that I’m dealing with is
Impressionism. And I now have a big hero from the nineteenth century: I love Georges Seurat, who
shows the spectators in circuses as spectators. I’m not an architect, but in some ways, whatever comes
in, I deal with. So, this is a corporate piece that I think actually works. Instead of just being Hans
Haacke-style anti-corporation, in a certain way, it’s subverting through creating a kind of heterotopic
situation. My work is not aristocratic. It’s more to do with the working class, middle, and upper-middle
class people at leisure. And in this way it becomes a bit like Impressionism.

Rosenbaum-Kranson: Who are some of your favorite architects right now?

GRAHAM: Easy. I like Itsuko Hasegawa, who did the Museum of Fruit in Yamanashi, Japan. I am
now close friends with and love Atelier Bow-Wow. In Europe, although he’s almost retired, I love
Sverre Fehn, the Norwegian architect—you probably know the Nordic Pavilion in the Venice Biennale
(1962), but his other work is even better. In Spain, I like Carmen Pinós. Also, among the older
Japanese architects, Maki is very good; he did the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco,
and he’s doing one of the World Trade Center buildings. And the landscape architect whom I
absolutely love, whom I’m working with, Günther Vogt.
 ITSUKO HASEGAWA, MUSEUM OF FRUIT, 1996, YAMANASHI, JAPAN

Rosenbaum-Kranson: Given all of our talk about city plans and urban living, which cities do you
particularly like?

GRAHAM: I’ve always loved Tokyo, though I haven’t been there in a long time. In Europe, I
particularly like Brussels. Everything about Belgium reminds me of New Jersey—it’s a highway
culture, it’s kind of suburban, it’s like a suburban Versailles. And another city I love is Porto—it’s
beautiful; it also has one of the best museums, the Serralves Museum; it has the architecture of Álvaro
Siza. And I can never live there, but I love Los Angeles. I don’t drive, but it has the best artists, the best
architecture. I finally got inside a John Lautner house—Lautner and R.M. Schindler are incomparable.
And of course New York is great for people from Europe, vacationing here or just coming over to see
the city, and I really enjoy being a host.
Rosenbaum-Kranson: And just to round out the discussion of your interest in urban space and social
space, since New York has been your home for so long, where are some of your favorite spots in the
city?

GRAHAM: I like the IBM atrium. And actually, right here, [Nolita], where I live, this neighborhood,
because it’s such a wonderful mixture of old Italian women who are in rent-controlled buildings, the
Ceci-Cela café—one of the owners is an old hippie from Brittany who used to go to the Isle of Wight
Festival as a teenager. And the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, particularly when the garden is open. That
place is a real treat. Places I don’t like—Battery Park City. It’s walled in, right?

Rosenbaum-Kranson: It’s just based on a totally different model of the city from every other
neighborhood in New York. And that has to do with when it was developed.

GRAHAM: Also, the interesting thing is that it’s an imitation. All of the buildings there [were
designed] during a historical restoration period. So the buildings, which were undersold, are imitations
of other classic apartment buildings in New York City.

...

2009