Dan Graham. Schema (March 1966).

About

For Dan Graham, Schema (March 1966) (1966–) was a breakthrough. As he would reflect in 2012: “An exemplary and perhaps the most absolute complex, proto-conceptual magazine page that I made is Schema (March 1966).” Part of a series of democratic “magazine works” (others include “Homes for America,” Scheme, and Figurative), Schema is proposal for an open set of variable and site-specific poetry. It is an exhaustively self-referential model designed to produce “a very large, though finite permutation of specific, discrete, possible poems.” In order to create a poem-variant, any editor can use Schema’s instructional inventory that quantifies and determines all possible aspects of that specific poem-variant’s form and content (elements of grammar, parts of speech, typographic style, and design). In Graham’s words, Schema “takes its own measure—of itself as place, that is placed two-dimensionally on (as) a page.”It must be read in the context of publications. 

More than simply an unorthodox poem or work of conceptual art, Schema, deceptively simple, strange, and whimsical, does not conform to any established genre or art form. Inspired by installation instructions that Graham sent to the collector Herman Daled in the 1970s, this exhibition brings together an early description of Schema from Graham’s archives, page proofs of an unpublished variant initially created for Arts Magazine and later gifted to Sol LeWitt, and nearly all the poem-variants printed through 1975 in their original contexts—books and magazines. “The context is very important. I wanted my work to be about place as in-formation,” Graham later said. I pitched this show to Dan when he was alive. He liked the idea.

The opportunity to view Schema as a collection reveals the significant role played by each publication and its readership in the production of its meaning. In 1967, it was printed for the first time in an issue of the experimental multimedia magazine Aspen edited by Brian O’Doherty (also known as Patrick Ireland). In the pages of that same issue, Roland Barthes posited “The Death of the Author” in his landmark essay that articulated a shift in authorial authority from writer to reader and extrapolated its consequence: “every text is eternally written here and now.” As a proposal for a set of user-generated poems, Schema embodied this idea. Despite Graham’s suggestion that “it would be possible to ‘compose’ the entire set of permutationally possible poems and to select the applicable variant(s) with the aid of a computer,” human editors manually produced all the poem-variants on view. Schema is written in pseudocode, a subjective notation resembling a simplified programming language that cannot be read by a computer.

While Graham initially thought of Schema as a permutational poem, it marked the emergence of conceptual art in New York. In December 1966, Graham contributed “Plan for Poem,” an early version of Schema, to the protoconceptual exhibition Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art. In 1969, Schema and a new poem-variant were printed in the first issue of Art-Language, the journal of the British collective Art & Language, alongside Sol LeWitt’s “Sentences on Conceptual Art” and Lawrence Weiner’s “Statements.” Other variants followed in the experimental literary magazine Extensions (inspired by Marshall McLuhan’s writings), Konzeption/Conception (Rolf Wedewer’s early survey of conceptual practices), and art and poetry anthologies (Richard Kostelanetz’s Possibilities of Poetry and Ursula Meyer’s Conceptual Art). 

When Graham began work on Schema, he primarily thought of himself as a writer. And writing provided him with the opportunity to reframe Schema into the following decade. In the 1970s, Schema achieved a new level of self-reflexivity as Graham began collecting and republishing previously published poem-variants—reproductions of reproductions—in artists’ magazines and books. In the critical essays “The Artist as Bookmaker: The Book as Object” and “Information,” he pointed to diverse forebearers: Jorge Luis Borges, Marcel Duchamp, Dan Flavin, Kurt Gödel, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Stéphane Mallarmé, Marshall McLuhan, Roy Lichtenstein, and thirteenth-century poet-mystic Ramon Llull. In 1975, he collected additional “observations,” “implications,” and “afterthoughts” in For Publication (1975), the last publication in this show. 

The exhibition opens with one of Graham’s first interactive works of art, One (c. 1966). Like his “magazine works,” Graham modeled One after a popular, mass-produced good, the 15 puzzle that features sliding numbered square tiles.He also originally exhibited it as a poem. All the tiles are equal. There is no objective to this game. As Lucy Lippard observed in “The Dematerialization of Art” (1968), the essay that anticipated her later book of the same name, “all the possible permutations are equally acceptable within the ratio one-as-one-as-one-as-one.” Holding One in their hands like a book, reader-viewers can shift the tiles around—generating new (but equivalent) poems with each move.

Dan Graham’s “Schema,” 1966–1975, is part of a series of exhibitions in New York intended to honor Graham’s life and work. I spent a lot of time talking with Dan at a mustard-yellow kitchen table designed by Mieko Meguro Graham. The table in this exhibition is painted the same color. 

Jennifer Buonocore-Nedrelow