Dan Graham - Optics And Humor

About

In the 1960s and 1970s, Dan Graham was one of the central figures of the emerging Minimal and Concept Art and from the 1990s onwards he became the focal point of the aesthetic discourse for a younger generation of artists in which philosophy, sociology and media studies met.

The long-standing friendship and collaboration with Dan Graham provides the impetus for a tribute exhibition that attempts, by means of a few selected impressions, to reflect a part of his activities as an artist, author and source of inspiration, as well as to trace his interaction with his cultural environment.

The exhibition addresses Graham’s ambivalent relationship to the work of his predecessors, like Josef Albers and Agnes Martin, or that of his colleagues and friends, such as Jo Baer, Bruce Nauman, Fred Sandback, Robert Smithson, Lawrence Weiner, as well as Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and Sol LeWitt— whose work he exhibited during his unsuccessful stint running a gallery, but also the echo of his work in a subsequent generation of artists such as Andrea Fraser, Mike Kelley, Franz West and Heimo Zobernig.

Graham's genius lies in the fact that he did not consider his respective subjects or his artistic work in isolation, but understood them in their historical, social, and psychological context. As Benjamin Buchloh aptly remarks, he pursued his studies as cultural studies, a method of artistic intervention—long before this trend in art became widely established.

A New York Times critic once observed in consternation that Dan Graham, an Aries, made no distinction between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Britney Spears—even referencing their zodiac signs. And Sebastian Egenhofer states: “Graham's humor is an assent to the instability of the subject, whose masks are set up around an empty center, a lack, a hole (...).”

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication of significant texts by and about Dan Graham, focussing on his truly unlimited activities and influence in the field of art and culture, with texts by Ute Meta Bauer, Dieter Bogner, Sabine Breitwieser, Helmut Draxler, Sebastian Egenhofer, Zdenek Felix, Andrea Fraser, Kim Gordon, Dan Graham, Franziska Hausmaninger, Robin Hurst, Kasper König, Mieko Meguro, Christian Meyer and Jeff Wall.