Dan Graham

Rock My Religion is a provocative thesis on the relation between religion and rock music in contemporary culture. Graham formulates a history that begins with the Shakers, an early religious community who practiced self-denial and ecstatic trance dances. With the "reeling and rocking" of religious revivals as his point of departure, Graham analyzes the emergence of rock music as religion with the teenage consumer in the isolated suburban milieu of the 1950s, locating rock's sexual and ideological context in post-World War II America. The music and philosophies of Patti Smith, who made explicit the trope that rock is religion, are his focus. This complex collage of text, film footage and performance forms a compelling theoretical essay on the ideological codes and historical contexts that inform the cultural phenomenon of rock 'n' roll music.

The function of both popular and underground music in contemporary culture has long been a point of inquiry for Graham in his analyses of the social implications of cultural phenomena. Here he documents Minor Threat, a "hardcore" band from Washington D.C., in a performance at CBGB in New York. Distinguished from punk music in that it developed in suburban areas, hardcore, as typified here by Minor Threat, is seen by Graham as a tribal rite, a catalyst for the violence and frustration of its predominantly male, teenage audience. The raw quality of Graham's documentary style mirrors the crude energy of his young subjects and the hardcore subculture of the 1980s.

Local TV News Analysis is the document of a collaborative project of Graham and Birnbaum, in which they investigate local television news, both in form and content. Three simultaneous realities of the news are revealed within one composite frame: the receivership of the family at home; the inside control room of the broadcast studio; and the local news itself.

Two filmmakers stand within a surrounding and completely mirrorized cylinder, body trunk stationary, hands holding and pressing a camera's back end flush to, while slowly rotating it about, the surface cylinder of their individual bodies. One rotation circumscribes the body's contour, spiraling slightly upward with the next turn. With successive rotations, the body surface areas are completely covered as a template by teh back of the camera(s) until eye-level (view through cameraman's eyes) is reached; then reverse mapping downard begins until the orginal starting point is reached.

Using the mirror at the back of the stage as a monitor, Graham voices his unrehearsed observations, activating the various feedback cycles taking place within himself as performer, between the performer and audience, and among audience members. Issues of duration and attention are critical for both performer and audience.

This 1992 video highlights Dan Graham's installation Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and a Video Salon, originally created as part of the Rooftop Urban Park Project at the Dia Center for the Arts in 1991. The video documents and further explores Graham's investigations of the urban environment, from Abbe Laugier's theory of the Rustic Hut to Parisian shopping arcades, wintergardens, museums, Disneyland and corporate office buildings. For the Dia Center in New York City, Graham developed an environment, analogous to a small-scale urban park, which integrates aesthetic and utilitarian functions, and spatial and visual experiences, bringing the landscape into the roof and extending the roof into the landscape. Graham writes: "The pavilion structures are psychologically and socially self-reflective. There is a dialectic between the perception of oneself and other bodies perceiving themselves, making the spectator conscious of him or herself as a body.

Produced by Graham at the Banff Centre in Canada, DEATH BY CHOCOLATE draws on nearly twenty years’ worth of footage shot in the bizarre yet familiar arena of the shopping mall. The resulting work provides a coldly beautiful view of mall culture: its architecture, its consumer public, and its unique aesthetic world. This work also provides a corollary to Graham’s own prodigious writings and projects on the public spaces of corporate capitalism.

This performance, at London's Lisson Gallery, documents Graham's project of psychologically restructuring space and time. Graham writes, "Two people who know each other are in the same space. While one predicts continuously the other person's behavior, the other person recounts (by memory) the other's past behavior. Both performers are in the present, so knowledge of the past is needed to continuously deduce future behavior (in terms of causal relation). For one to see the other in terms of the present (attention), there is a mirror reflection or closed figure-eight feedback/feedahead loop of past/future. One person's behavior reciprocally reflects/depends upon the other's, so that each one's information is seen as a reflection of the effect that their own just-past behavior has had in reversed tense, as perceived from the other's view of himself."

Partially inspired by James J. Gibson's The Perception of the Visual World (Boston, 1950). Made by aiming a 16mm camera in a slow spiral across the sky. Unlike the aesthetic overfitting we find in much putatively hallucinatory art, Graham here reduces things to a usefully predictive basement reality: the alteration of one’s sense of time. A quote from Diedrich Diederichsen on Tony Conrad’s Yellow Movies might also be apt here: “In the early psychedelic avant-garde, if one wishes to save this word for once from its present reduction to a few formal motifs in pop music and poster design, there existed thus a very specific alliance between the critique of capitalism and mysticism that had to do, among other things, with an evocation of a different temporality.” Here, in one simple gesture.