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Dan Graham

Public Space/Two Audience (1976)

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? Snow White, or SUPERSWEET? Do excuse Poonperm Paitayawat’s lame joke. He only wants to make a point that since the first mirror was created, it never stops intriguing us. We, perhaps not “we” but just “he”, spend not just hours but decades looking into the mirror admiring our luscious beauty, fixing our hair, or even squeezing our spots. There is something about mirror that sucks us in. Vanity? Narcissism? Not always. According to American artist Dan Graham, it’s the illusion, or even the hallucination, one experiences whilst looking into a mirror.

The Pavillion in Berlin Mitte

Born in 1942, Urbana, Illinois, Graham moved to New York in 1964 and founded the John Daniels Gallery. During his years at the Gallery, Graham showcased works by Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, and Robert Smithson, whose minimalist approaches to art became the inspiration for his own. Not long after, Graham relinquished his childhood dream of being a writer, and with no formal art training, started experimenting with several art forms: i.e. film, video, performance, photography, and architectural installations. His early, less well-known work explored the relationship between print, magazines and art. Yet, within two decades, Graham fortified his aesthetics and fused his approaches with a wide range of literary, anthropological and scientific influences. He was set to take over the art world with … some mirrors!

But, for somebody who describes himself as “short, fat and not masculine enough” and whose greatest regret is “not being handsome,” it is obvious that Graham does not use his mirrors to satisfy some narcissistic urges like we do. So, what does Graham do to deserve the “mirror magician” title? Let’s say: he combines different types of mirrors and glasses - reflective, semi-reflective, transparent - some of which are flat, others curved. They are assembled to create wondrous glass pavilions that blur the conventional boundaries between architecture and sculpture. Since the 80s, these geometrical, architectural glass structures have been placed over hill, over dale, on the top of the buildings, in a student’s accommodation and as far as Norway’s Arctic Circle to mirror what comes near them.

Using the term “to mirror”  is, in fact, an understatement. Graham’s glass pavilions are distinctive in both their physical presence and absence. “Triangular Pavilion with Circular Cut-Out Variation H” (2008), for instance, marvelously blended itself with the greenery of London’s Holland Park and tricked the optical ability of the park’s regulars. How? The pavilion creates a hexagonal illusion as one was encircling it, whilst the one-way and two-way disc mirrors worked to conceal the cut-out entrance to the inside of this semi-sculptural, semi-architectural constructions. Whilst building the pavilion, Graham took into consideration, not just the aesthetics of the creation, the environment in which it will be located. Light, therefore, becomes the most important ingredient to achieve the illusion, the so-called hallucinatory effect. Inside, the space reduplicated itself and the person inside was not only reflected within the glass walls but became part of the art-meet-architecture spectacle to passers-by. In other words, Graham’s pavilions indulging us with their kaleidoscopic refraction of bodily experience, thus demonstrating the artist’s interest in revealing the private self as part of a social, public context. Spectators are forced into a new self-awareness about themselves as individuals and in relation to others.

Triangular Pavillion w/Circular Cut-Out Variation C

Graham’s body of works is conceptual in its nature ditching the Modernist convention that was prevalent in the 50s and favouring minimalist technologies to beget wonders. His glass pavilions mark the tantalizing negotiation between nature and man-made objects. They exploit their surrounding as well as contribute to it. They play on our perceptual experience. Through their participation, human beings become the mediators between Graham’s creations and their surrounding. In a simplest term, Graham’s work is the ultimate non-replicable funhouse that exploits our relentless interest in anamorphic visions reshaping physical objects and giving them confounding, immaterial visual presence. This is fun; this is beautiful and one does not need a bunch of magic mushrooms to fall in love with Graham’s illusion.

Throughout his career, Graham explores the relationship between his audience and the artwork. His artistic contribution does not end with the glass pavilions. His performance works, such as Performer/Audience/Mirror (1977) and installations, such as Public Space/Two Audience (1976) and Yesterday/Today (1975), are among his most highly acclaimed. But, it is those glass house sculptures that we just simply cannot take our eyes off.

Words: Poonperm Paitayawat