Dan Graham

EO

What does education mean to you?

DG

I dropped out of high school. My only real success was getting a photo in the yearbook. The word then was “slacker,” and though my parents wanted me in college, I refused. Whatever education I got was by accident. Two friends in New York had money and wanted a gallery for their social life. I knew nothing about art, neither did they. But with their money and my parents taking a tax loss, I ended up directing the John Daniels Gallery. I met Sol LeWitt there, gave him his first solo show. That’s how I learned—just by being around artists.

Like almost everyone I knew then, I wanted to be a writer. Russian Constructivism mattered to me—Rodchenko, design, photography, architecture. The great thing about the ’60s was you could call yourself an artist and pretty much do anything.

EO

So writing came first?

DG

Yes. Everyone wanted to be a writer except Sol, who was simply a great reader. I even had a column, From the Spanish Diary, named after Baudelaire. We wanted to be like Joyce or Carl Andre. A lot of kids my age dropped out to sit in cafés in San Francisco, to be beatnik poets. My own interest began with science fiction—very common for my generation. What’s funny now is how young writers circle back to Ursula Le Guin. I think she should be everyone’s starting point.

EO

And yet you turned to objects.

DG

By accident. I was writing a catalog essay for John Gibson, who had probably the best gallery in the world then. He convinced me to be an artist. Suddenly I had free admission to every museum in New York, just for being in group shows. One of my works—a magazine page about poetry, Pop art, and drugs—was sitting in Gibson’s back room. Herman Daled bought it, probably through Marcel Broodthaers, which meant it ended up in Brussels at MTL, the best gallery in Europe. They were showing Baldessari, Brouwn, Kosuth, Buren. I picked things up very quickly just by being in that company.

EO

What did running the gallery teach you?

DG

Minimal art. After it closed, I’d take the train back to New Jersey and see Judd everywhere—in warehouses, railroad tracks. I started photographing it. Later I got invited to teach at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. They had equipment I couldn’t afford—video, film. I thought, why not? I could make art like Bruce Nauman.

EO

How did you make work if you were cash poor?

DG

I should bring up Andy Warhol. Andy was a great writer, a good illustrator, but I don’t think he intended to be an artist—he absorbed ideas from the smart people around him. I was just living cheap, in an Eldridge Street apartment, no studio, eating Chinese food to survive. I was lucky. Kasper König kept putting me in the right situations.

EO

And what do you think your “trademark” is?

DG

I don’t have one. I keep changing because I critique what I did last time. The idea of an artist as a businessman—settling into a brand—that’s recent, and I think it produces very bad art.

EO

What did teaching mean to you?

DG

It was a way to turn my writing impulses into lectures. In Nova Scotia, I staged pieces through local media—TV, newspapers, even astrology. My “Computer-Astrological Dating Service” was basically a proto-Tinder. I liked clichés. Astrology was a way to get to know students, or strangers, instantly. Being an Aries gave me an identity—obnoxious, playful, opinionated.

EO

What about the pavilions?

DG

I never wanted to be known just for them. When I began, I was thinking about Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion, which I didn’t like at first. But I liked temporary structures, phone booths, bus shelters. The hedges came from the suburbs, the glass from corporate downtowns. Two-way mirror is both transparent and reflective, depending on the light. That’s what fascinated me.

EO

Why glass?

DG

It was ecological at first—cutting down on air conditioning in Los Angeles. Then it became corporate, projecting the sky as an alibi. I liked turning that into art: surveillance, transparency, reflection, all at once.

EO

And works like the Skateboard Pavilion?

DG

That was 1989, for “International Garden Year.” Skateboarding wasn’t allowed in parks—skaters were outsiders. I wanted to combine that outlaw energy with corporate pyramid power. It was never realized. Most of my proposals weren’t. It’s a miracle when anything gets built.

EO

Do you think of your work as ornament or structure?

DG

Yes, in the sense that Venturi influenced me. I love Venturi, though Europeans hate him. Mostly, though, my work is about context—whether socialist Norway, or anarchic America.

EO

And magazines?

DG

I loved them. Rock papers like Sounds and NME. I placed pieces in Harper’s Bazaar through Smithson. My early essays were in music magazines. It was the perfect medium—immediate, disposable, mass.

EO

What does success mean to you?

DG

Getting projects done, in the right context.

EO

Which projects still matter most?

DG

The ones done quickly, with collaborators I think of as geniuses—Günther Vogt on the Met Roof Garden, Glenn Branca, Jeff Wall. I like working with people who share my background: Catholic, working class, suspicious of success.

EO

And criticism?

DG

I turned to architecture theory because art criticism was stupid. I devoured Oppositions. I wanted to learn by seeing buildings—Aldo Rossi’s cemetery in Modena was unforgettable. I’ve always thought of my work as staging reality, not critiquing it.

EO

What would Dan in 1964 think of Dan now?

DG

That I survived, somehow. Back then I thought of myself as a semi-loser. I’m still self-critical. I wish some institution, like the Getty, would take my catalogs. The ideas are there.

EO

Is there something you still want that you haven’t had?

DG

Opportunities to work in between different areas. What I miss most are the socialist contexts I once had in France and Norway—situations I really believed in.