Dan Graham: Somewhere between architecture and television

Rooftop Urban Park Project 1981-1991, at the Dia Center for the Arts

Public Space/Two Audiences 1976, at the Herbert Collection in Ghent, Belgium

Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and artist Dan Graham in conversation
Time Out New York, May 7, 2009

WHAT: Graham’s retrospective
WHEN: June 25–October 11
WHERE: Whitney Museum, 945 Madison Ave at 75th St (212-570-3600, whitney.org)

WHAT: Sonic Youth’s new album, The Eternal, and an NYC performance
WHEN: June 9 (album); July 3 (concert)
WHERE: United Palace, 4140 Broadway at 175th St (212-685-1414)

Dan Graham: Congratulations on the BAM concert.

Thurston Moore: Oh, thank you so much. Congratulations to you too on your retrospective.

Graham: You saw my show when it was at MoCA in L.A., right? With your daughter? I hope she liked one of my favorite pieces, Girl’s Makeup Room.

Moore: She loved that piece! That was a great way to experience it, too, by going there with her. I told her, “This is the artist I met when I moved to New York.” I lived in the same building as you on 84 Eldridge Street. Those years were a crash course in discovering the New York art world, which I had sort of had some handle on when I was playing with people from the Rhode Island School of Design. Our shows were always at Jenny Holzer’s loft. That age group—artists like Robert Longo and Holzer and other ’70s art graduates— they were always talking about you and Vito Acconci. I first met Kim [Gordon] when I was playing in a band that [later] became Sonic Youth, but it didn’t have a name yet. I remember I was rehearsing at Acconci’s studio in Brooklyn and the first time I met you was when you were there one afternoon, sitting at the table with Vito, and you were both discussing punk rock and No Wave records. I was kind of fascinated that these two artists were having a really heavy discussion on Gang of Four. [Laughs]

Graham: Well, as a would-be rock writer, I was always fascinated by music. My closest friend for a long time was Steve Reich. I presented his work, actually, in the Paula Cooper Gallery. That’s why I moved to New York, not to be an artist, but to be a writer. I was a slacker, I didn’t know what to do with my life. I knew a little bit about art through reading Esquire magazine, which published a lot of writing about art. But at the time, everyone had this idea of being the artist-writer: Robert Smithson wanted to be like Borges. Dan Flavin wanted to be like James Joyce.

Radical Nature at the Barbican

Social Mirror, 1983. A mirror-covered sanitation truck by US artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Photograph: Mierle Laderman Ukeles/Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York

Agnes Deans: Wheatfield – A Confrontation, 1982. She planted and harvested two acres of wheat in Battery Park landfill, Manhattan. Photograph: Agnes Denes/Public Art Fund, New York

Island for Weeds, 2003, by British conceptual artist Simon Starling
Photograph: Jeremy Hardman Jones/Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow

Land artist Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, 1970 (in the Great Salt Lake, Utah)
Photograph: Gianfranco Gorgoni/James Cohan Gallery, New York

Radical Nature is the first exhibition to bring together key figures across different generations who have created utopian works and inspiring solutions for our ever-changing planet. Radical Nature draws on ideas that have emerged out of Land Art, environmental activism, experimental architecture and utopianism. The exhibition is designed as one fantastical landscape, with each piece introducing into the gallery space a dramatic portion of nature. Work by pioneering figures such as the architectural collective Ant Farm and visionary architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, artists Joseph Beuys, Agnes Denes, Hans Haacke and Robert Smithson are shown alongside pieces by a younger generation of practitioners including Heather and Ivan Morison, R&Sie(n), Philippe Rahm architects and Simon Starling.

Clemens von Wedemeyer at the Curve Gallery

Von Wedemeyer’s work is entitled The Fourth Wall, after the ‘imaginary screen’ conceived by actors as a means to imagine themselves alone and which, at the same time, enables the audience to believe the drama on stage is real.

United Visual Artists: Deus at the Smithfield Gallery

UVA’s first photographic show explores the potential of light to redefine an environment, both physically and emotionally. The exhibition aims to distill the experience of UVA’s installation work into a series of striking, large-scale images. These photographs document a number of experimental light installations in secluded areas of Britain - huge artificial lights which are in sharp contrast to the natural landscape around them, creating an ephemeral new space.

UVA | United Visual Artists

Michel Auder

Full Metal Jacket. Series of 2 Digital C-Print, 20 x 24. 1971.

In French-American film-maker Michel Auder's work, the camera both witnesses and directs social exchange. It describes a highly subjective position, moving about his environment, recording its soundtrack, admitting incidental drama, autobiographical detail and the real-time incursions of broadcast media. In the early 1970’s Michel Auder adopted a continuous approach to film-making, recording the people and scenarios he encountered and amassing an extensive archive of video footage. His films collide with narratives in art history and popular memory, involving artists, writers, and musicians that he has come to know. Michel Auder's films have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Centre Pompidou in Paris. He lives and works in New York. 

Embassy Art

Sol Lewitt's Wall Drawing #1256: Five Pointed Stars was installed in Berlin in 2008

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