Artist Dan Graham (79) made pavilions like little mirror palaces

His glass pavilions can be found in the most beautiful sculpture gardens in the world, from the Middelheim Museum in Antwerp to the Brazilian art park Inhotim† But the first outdoor pavilion designed by the American artist Dan Graham is in the Netherlands, at the entrance of Museum Kröller-Müller† Two adjacent pavilions, made for the Documenta of 1982, consists of two cubes of dark glass and steel. You can enter through a door and see yourself reflected by the mirrored walls, while you are being watched by other museum visitors.

Dan Graham, who passed away on Saturday at the age of 79 in his hometown of New York, loved that game of watching and being watched. With their geometric shapes of steel and glass, his pavilions had the strict appearance of modernist architecture – Mies van der Rohe was a major influence – but with human dimensions. At the same time, the artist was also concerned with the fun of playing. Only when his buildings were populated by people did they come to life as small palaces of mirrors. Graham was one of the first artists to give human behavior a role in his art.

gallery owner

Graham, born in 1942 in Urbana, Illinois, had no art education. He began his career in the 1960s as a gallery owner in New York, showing artists such as Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Robert Smithson at the John Daniels Gallery. Their minimalist, geometric design language would later prove to be of great influence on his own works of art. Just as working in a commercial gallery would prove formative: in many of his later works of art Graham would rebel against the economic system of the art market.

Shortly after leaving the John Daniels Gallery in 1965, Graham embarked on a series of conceptual texts – a kind of schematic poems – which he published as autonomous works of art in magazines, such as Scheme (1966). “Here I used the magazine page as my medium,” the artist said about it later in art forum† “Because you can throw away magazines, the pages undermined the monetary system of gallery art and also placed the art in a popular and publicly accessible domain.” Because of his early text works, Graham is often seen as one of the pioneers of conceptual art, preferring to call his work ‘anarchic humour’.

In 1966 he began a series of color photographs of prefabricated American homes in the suburbs of New Jersey, Homes for America, which he again printed as a work of art in a magazine, this time accompanied by texts about the economics of land prices and the lack of craftsmanship in modern architecture. Graham described the uniformity of the new neighborhoods with a great sense of irony. The series was the beginning of his research into the relationship between man and his architectural environment.

punk band

Graham’s versatile oeuvre also includes performances, sculptures and films. In 1985 he made the music documentary Rock My Religion, in which he drew a direct line from the ecstatic religious rituals of the Shakers to the rock concerts of the 1960s and 1970s. He himself played a role in the punk movement as one of the founders of the band Sonic Youth and as the maker of a film about punk band Minor Threat. “Everything I do is hybrid,” Graham said of his eclectic body of work. “I get bored with what I do pretty quickly and I don’t want my work to become a trademark.”

Yet Graham’s pavilions, the works for which he will be especially remembered, are recognizable among thousands. He himself described them as “geometric shapes that can be inhabited and activated by the viewer.” They are works of art that, half building, half sculpture, according to Graham “cause a feeling of discomfort and alienation”, because they both enclose and exclude you as a spectator. In these small theaters it is all about looking and being watched, the spectator is a voyeur and vain at the same time. Sometimes Graham made them opaque and heart-shaped so that they can be used for romantic encounters, like the follies of our time. But most of the time they were made of clear, transparent glass: Graham’s nod to the semi-detached house.