Dan Graham

Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and a Video Salon

Michael H. Shamberg

Dan Graham, Stanton Miranda

This 1992 video highlights Dan Graham's installation Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and a Video Salon, originally created as part of the Rooftop Urban Park Project at the Dia Center for the Arts in 1991. The video documents and further explores Graham's investigations of the urban environment, from Abbe Laugier's theory of the Rustic Hut to Parisian shopping arcades, wintergardens, museums, Disneyland and corporate office buildings. For the Dia Center in New York City, Graham developed an environment, analogous to a small-scale urban park, which integrates aesthetic and utilitarian functions, and spatial and visual experiences, bringing the landscape into the roof and extending the roof into the landscape. Graham writes: "The pavilion structures are psychologically and socially self-reflective. There is a dialectic between the perception of oneself and other bodies perceiving themselves, making the spectator conscious of him or herself as a body.

Past Future Split Attention

Dan Graham

This performance, at London's Lisson Gallery, documents Graham's project of psychologically restructuring space and time. Graham writes, "Two people who know each other are in the same space. While one predicts continuously the other person's behavior, the other person recounts (by memory) the other's past behavior. Both performers are in the present, so knowledge of the past is needed to continuously deduce future behavior (in terms of causal relation). For one to see the other in terms of the present (attention), there is a mirror reflection or closed figure-eight feedback/feedahead loop of past/future. One person's behavior reciprocally reflects/depends upon the other's, so that each one's information is seen as a reflection of the effect that their own just-past behavior has had in reversed tense, as perceived from the other's view of himself."

Local TV News Analysis

Dara Birnbaum, Dan Graham

Local TV News Analysis is the document of a collaborative project of Graham and Birnbaum, in which they investigate local television news, both in form and content. Three simultaneous realities of the news are revealed within one composite frame: the receivership of the family at home; the inside control room of the broadcast studio; and the local news itself.

Performer/Audience/Mirror

Dan Graham

Using the mirror at the back of the stage as a monitor, Graham voices his unrehearsed observations, activating the various feedback cycles taking place within himself as performer, between the performer and audience, and among audience members. Issues of duration and attention are critical for both performer and audience.