Rock My Religion is a provocative thesis on the relation between religion and rock music in contemporary culture. Graham formulates a history that begins with the Shakers, an early religious community who practiced self-denial and ecstatic trance dances. With the "reeling and rocking" of religious...
Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and a Video Salon
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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,...
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...
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...
Death by Chocolate: West Edmonton Shopping Mall (1986-05)
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Produced by Graham at the Banff Centre in Canada, DEATH BY CHOCOLATE draws on nearly twenty years’ worth of footage shot in the bizarre yet familiar arena of the shopping mall. The resulting work provides a coldly beautiful view of mall culture: its architecture, its consumer public, and its...
Partially inspired by James J. Gibson's The Perception of the Visual World (Boston, 1950). Made by aiming a 16mm camera in a slow spiral across the sky. Unlike the aesthetic overfitting we find in much putatively hallucinatory art, Graham here reduces things to a usefully predictive basement...
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...
Two filmmakers stand within a surrounding and completely mirrorized cylinder, body trunk stationary, hands holding and pressing a camera's back end flush to, while slowly rotating it about, the surface cylinder of their individual bodies. One rotation circumscribes the body's contour, spiraling...