The young artist had only been trying to be a gallery owner for a year when he gave up this job unsuccessfully, but with one insight: An exhibition that is passed over by the relevant media doesn't count.
At that time he understood, wrote Dan Graham in a short, very readable "History of Conceptual Art", that a work that is neither discussed in magazines nor reproduced as a photo "hardly achieves the status of 'art'".
Shortly thereafter, and as a wise consequence, Graham placed his "Homes for America" in "Arts Magazine" in 1966 without exhibiting it - a cool move at the beginning of a career that made him one of the most influential artists of the 1960s.
In the combination of brittle text and documentary photography, the autodidact explained the monotonous suburb,
With Graham, the observer was always also the observed
Graham, who was born in Urbana, Illinois, in 1942, subsequently enlivened a mute contemplation in front of the objects of Minimalism with rooms in which he let the visitors become protagonists of themselves and involved in interactions with others.
In the 1970s he fitted white cells with walls made of glass and sometimes semi-transparent mirrors so that one could be watched by others without noticing.
He increased the interplay of seeing and being seen and the irritations thus promoted through closed-circuit transmissions of real and delayed time and with the videos in these subtle "viewing rooms" created an atmosphere of latent observation that has long since found its way into the urban sphere has held.
His art only emerges in the performance of those involved,
Graham then also projected models of suburban homes in America with glass fronts and mirrored walls in the living room, thereby blurring the boundaries between inside and outside in an emphatic, even odd ideal of transparency.
In the meantime, his glass pavilion sculptures have become noticeably smoother and more elegant and have also been realized as architecture, such as the Café Bravo at the entrance to the Berliner Kunst-Werke.
But even as a classic among contemporary conceptual and object artists, who alone took part in the Documenta five times between 1972 and 1997, Graham leaves behind an oeuvre full of experiments and approaches, such as in his video “Rock My Religion”, a video collage from the early 1980s.
In it he draws a line from the religious shakers and their ritual shaking dances to rock music à la Patti Smith,
sees rock and punk as a modern religion.
It is a complex spirit that contemporary art loses with its death, also an accomplished author, by the way.
Dan Graham died last Saturday in New York at the age of seventy-nine.