Dan Graham's artworks and critical writings have had an enormous influence on the course of contemporary art over the past quarter century. Rock My Religion collects eighteen of Graham's essays from all periods of his work, beginning with his essays on minimalist artists such as Dan Flavin and Donald Judd, continuing with his writings on punk rock and popular culture, and concluding with his more recent considerations of architecture, urban space, and power.  Alternating with these theoretical essays are descriptions and documentations of Graham's own works and installations - projects that trace his explorations in conceptual art, video, photography, architecture, and public sculpture, showing the integral connections between Graham's criticism and his own artwork. Although as an artist Graham has been associated with minimalism, conceptual art, and postmodernism, his writing does not conform to the stylistic and theoretical constraints of any specific movement. With sources and topics ranging from Ronald Reagan to the Sex Pistols, from Michel Foucault to Dean Martin, Graham's eclectic investigations into the complex cultural relationships between art production and social reality are always strikingly original. What makes these writings particularly astonishing, though, is Graham's willingness to examine specific manifestations of popular culture (television, magazines, rock and roll, drugs) without regard to traditional qualitative judgments and without separating "high" or "low" culture from the processes of everyday life.  Dan Graham's artwork has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. His writings have appeared in Artforum, Arts, and numerous other magazines, books, and monographs. Brian Wallis is a senior editor of Art in America.

Rock My Religion: Writings and Art Projects, 1965-1990

Arts & Photography

Graham, Dan

Individual Artists

Mit Pr

The internationally renowned artist Dan Graham is widely acknowledged as one of the leading members of the 1960s conceptual art movement. However, his subsequent work in photography, performance, film, video and the fusion of art and architecture, though well known in Europe and Japan, is less well known in English-speaking countries. In "Rock My Religion" (1993) Graham explored mainly the work of other artists. In this collection, he articulates the rationale behind his own art. The broadly accessible essays, which include his most canonical text, are organized both thematically and chronologically. They chart his career from conceptual art for magazine pages of the 1960s, to work integrating video, television, architecture, film and performance of the 1970s, to his pavilion sculptures of the 1980s and 1990s. The book also features an essay by Jeff Wall and interviews with Graham that address the art historical references and theoretical principles underlying his work.

Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham on His Art

History & Criticism

Essays charting the diverse works of renowned conceptual artist Dan Graham.
The internationally renowned artist Dan Graham is widely acknowledged as one of the leading members of the 1960s conceptual art movement. However, his subsequent work in photography, performance, film, video, and the fusion of art and architecture, though well known in Europe and Japan, is less well known in English-speaking countries.
In Rock My Religion (MIT Press, 1993), Graham explored mainly the work of other artists. In this collection, he articulates the rationale behind his own art. The broadly accessible essays, which include his most canonical texts, are organized both thematically and chronologically. They chart his career from conceptual art for magazine pages of the 1960s, to work integrating video, television, architecture, film, and performance of the 1970s, to his pavilion sculptures of the 1980s and 1990s. The book also features an essay by Jeff Wall and interviews with Graham that address the art historical references and theoretical principles underlying his work.
Published in association with the Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

Alberro, Alexander

Marian Goodman Gallery

A fascinating history of the explosive convergence of avant-garde art and rock music The dynamic relationship between rock music and visual art crosses continents, generations, and cultures. Beginning with Andy Warhol’s involvement with The Velvet Underground in 1967, artists have maintained a strong connection to rock. Artists such as Slater Bradley, Mike Kelley, and Raymond Pettibon have created album covers and music videos for rock bands, while rock musicians such as Bryan Ferry, John Lennon, and Peter Townsend have emerged from art schools, and punk and new wave bands such as Talking Heads and Sonic Youth have shared the same social and artistic milieu as artists including Robert Longo and Richard Prince.
Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967 looks at the intimate and inspired relationship between the visual arts and rock-and-roll culture, charting their intersection through works of art, album covers, music videos, and other materials. Organized regionally by cultural centers including London, New York, Los Angeles, and Cologne, the essays examine rock and roll’s style, celebrity, and identity politics in art; the experience, energy, and sense of devotion rock music inspires; and the dual role that many individuals play in both the sonic and visual realms. Presenting work that defies a more literal interpretation of the theme and instead suggests the style, energy, and attitude that has come to be associated with rock and roll, this fascinating volume is essential for admirers of contemporary art and culture.

Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967

Diederichsen, Diedrich

Nickas, Bob

KELLEY, MIKE

Higgs, Matthew

Hell, Richard

Molon, Dominic

Tumlir, Jan

Koether, Jutta

Elms, Anthony

History

Yale University Press

Assembled from the wisdom of 36 legendary art teachers – all of them artists or critics at the top of their field – Akademie X: Lessons in Art + Life is an ideal curriculum for the aspiring artist.
Each of the book’s "tutors" has provided a unique lesson that aims to provoke, inspire and stimulate the aspiring artist. These lessons cover some combination of the following: technical advice (e.g. don’t make a sculpture bigger than your studio door), assignments (some of which will take five minutes to complete, others five years), tips for avoiding creative ruts (including suggestions for mind&amp;hyphen;expanding materials to read, watch or listen to), principles of careful looking (demonstrated with images of artworks, photographs, films or even billboard advertisements), advice on the daily practice of art (how to balance time alone in the studio with building an artistic community), career pointers (how to prepare for a studio visit from a curator or gallerist) and personal anecdotes (e.g. stories from the instructor’s own humble beginnings). Taken together, these lessons offer the reader a set of tools for thinking, seeing and living as an artist.
Not only is Akademie X: Lessons in Art + Life the first illustrated text book of its kind for artists, but it will also appeal to anyone interested in contemporary art, providing first hand revelations into the philosophies and techniques of some of the world’s best artists and writers.

Akademie X: Lessons in Art + Life

Abramović, Marina

Eliasson, Olafur

Studio Raqs Media Collective

Phaidon Press

Dan Graham's Kammerspiel

Wall, Jeff

Art Metropole

Photography has become an increasingly pervasive medium of choice in contemporary art practice and is even employed at times by artists who do not necessarily consider themselves to be photographers. How did this come to be? The Last Picture Show will address the emergence of this phenomenon of artists using photography by tracing the development of conceptual trends in postwar photographic practice from its first glimmerings in the 60s in the work of artists such as Bernd &amp; Hilla Becher, Ed Ruscha and Bruce Nauman, to its rise to art-world prominence in the work of the artists of the late 70s and early 80s including Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman. Intended as a major genealogy of the rise of a still-powerful and evolving photographic practice by artists, the checklist will include a wide array of works examining a range of issues: performativity and photographic practice; portraiture and cultural identity; the formal and social architectonics of the built environment; societal and individual interventions in the landscape; photography's relationship to sculpture and painting; the visual mediation of meaning in popular culture; and the poetic and conceptual investigation of visual non-sequiturs, disjunctions and humorous absurdities. Bringing together a newly commissioned body of scholarship with reprints of important historical texts, The Last Picture Show seeks to define the legacy that has produced a rich body of photographic practice in the art world today.

The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography 1960-1982

WEISS, David

Beuys, Joseph

Baldessari, John

Dibbets, Jan

Nauman, Bruce

Flood, Richard

Anselmo, Giovanni

Gronnert, Stefan

Lee, Pamela

Batchen, Geoffrey

Fischli, Peter

Bochner, Mel

Charlesworth, Sarah

Export, Valie

Acconci, Vito

Ader, Bas Jan

Boltanski, Christian

Broodthaers, Marcel

Kruger, Barbara

Oppenheim, Dennis

Lewitt, Sol

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Walker Art Center

Buildings and signs

Museum of Modern Art

Dan Graham is one of the most influential of the American Conceptual artists who first emerged in the mid 1960s as part of a generation that included the Minimalists Carl Andre, Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt, with whom he was closely associated during that period. While their work offered a critique of the gallery's white club and of the value of material, Graham began to question the art system itself and decided to operate outside it. From 1965-69 he produced a series of texts such as "Schema" (1966) which he inserted into mass-market magazines. The periodical nature of magazine production and consumption was clearly related to the experience of time and change - a theme central to Graham's work ever since. In 1966-67 he also made a series of photographs showing details of suburban housing projects, new shopping precincts, truck depots and roadside diners, titled "Homes for America". Alongside the photos Graham's texts "deconstruct" social architectural spaces in ways which were far ahead of their time.  From 1969-78 Graham worked primarily with performance, film and video, focusing, for example, on the synchronization of speech and breathing patterns between the artist and his audience. From 1974, with the installation/performance "Present Continuous Past(s)", Graham began to use two-way mirror walls in relation to real reflections and time-delayed video projections. These works evolved into the socially-based architectural projects such as open air pavilions, for which Graham is most famous internationally. These have included a "Skateboard Pavilion" in Stuttgart in 1989 and in the same year "The Children's Pavilion" (with Jeff Wall) and the "Star of David Pavilion" (Vienna, 1991-96). All of Graham's projects are democratically rooted in everyday urban life and activity, particularly children's play. His work is thus as valuable to architects and town planners as to the art community

Dan Graham - Models to Projects

This video and publication are based on Dan Graham's (born 1942) Rooftop Urban Park Project, which opened as an extended exhibition at Dia Center for the Arts in 1991. Re-released as a DVD and packaged with the original 1992 publication, this title includes an essay by the artist and a 20-minute video.

Dan Graham: Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and a Video Salon

Dia Art Foundation

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