Events > Artist Talk/Lecture

05 Oct. 2009

Public lecture by Dan Graham

Speaker
Dan Graham
Time
6:30 pm - 8:
Offsite Location
Room 103, 230 College Street, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
In this Series

10 Jun. 2009
European book launch and signing for Josh Thorpe's Dan Graham Pavilion

04 Oct. 2009
Canadian book launch for Josh Thorpe's Dan Graham Pavilions



Since the ’60s, Dan Graham has been making radical work in print, video, performance, and architectural installation. In the late ’70s he began designing his pavilions, structures in steel and semi-reflective glass that comment on local architecture and offer rich social moments for people to reflect on the world around them.

Dan Graham Pavilions: A Guide is the first publication to provide comprehensive and direct information on the remote international sites where his public works may be discovered and enjoyed.

Graham’s pavilions are parodies of corporate architecture, moments of psychedelic experience in the urban landscape, shelters for the weather-beaten pedestrian, romantic rendezvous for lovers, photo-ops for tourists, and funhouses for kids. This guide provides photos, locations, and access information for public works across North and South America, Europe, and Asia. It is the product of a research collaboration between Toronto artist and author Josh Thorpe, Toronto artist-run centre Art Metropole, and Dan Graham himself.

The lecture will be held at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto.

A webcast of the lecture will be available at http://mediacast.ic.utoronto.ca/20091005-ALD/index.htm


Installation, Performance, and Conceptual artist Dan Graham (American, b.1942) is best known for his pioneering advances in Video Art as well as his highly-conceptual installations, which facilitate specific interactions between viewers. Born in Urbana, Illinois, he moved to New Jersey as a young man and in 1962 opened the John Daniels Gallery in New York, his first official foray into the art world. There he showed the work of Conceptual and Minimalist artists, such as Sol LeWitt (American, 1928–2007) and Donald Judd (American, 1928–1994), and began creating works himself during this time, influenced by similar reductive aesthetics. Beginning in the late 1960s, he worked with photography, documenting houses in both urban and suburban areas, which he later published in a magazine format, accompanied by texts in his Homes for America series. In the 1970s, he was a leading proponent of Performance and Video Art, before turning to an installation format to create architectural sites provoking interactions between viewers and public spaces. He often also used video, mirrors, and other materials in innovative ways to explore the relationship formed between the audience and the artwork. Retrospectives of his work have been held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles,the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in Germany, the Museu Serralves in Portugal, and the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. He has also exhibited his work in several Documenta exhibitions in Kassel. In addition to his work as an artist, Graham is also an acclaimed cultural critic and theorist, and has published several significant books over the past three decades. He currently lives and works in New York City.