US artist Dan Graham brings ‘Greatest Hits’ to China
A total of more than 20 artworks, from videos to installation works, on display at Beijing’s Red Brick Art Museum will give Chinese visitors a chance to look back at US artist Dan Graham’s fivedecade-long art career. Titled Greatest Hits, the exhibition will run until February 25, 2018.
According to the museum’s curator, Yan Shijie, Graham started exploring exhibitionism and voyeurism in the early 1960s and 1970s. During this period, placing adverts featuring his art in newspapers and magazines to reach the widest audience possible became his preferred method of dissemination.
On display in China for the first time as part of this exhibition, these magazine projects challenged the ideas about the value of art by reducing art to mere advertisements and also marked Graham’s entry point into conceptual art.
Yan also noted that since one of Graham’s focuses is on the relationship between humans and architecture, visitors will notice a lot of buildings and life scenes in his works.
His visionary embrace of performance art is also captured in the exhibition through videos of his early performances. Single-channel time-based works such as Lax/Relax (1969) and Performer/Audience/Mirror (1969/1995), focus on the ability of art to be both interactive and reflective, and through the use of wall-size mirrors and video cameras encourage audience participation.
These historical pieces represent the artist’s pioneering use of video to document perception and illustrate his interest in the semiotics of film.
Other works, like Rock My Religion (1981) and the rock’n’roll puppet show Don’t Trust Anybody over 30 (2004) highlight the cultural importance of rock music and showcase Graham’s engagement with youth culture, as well as his innovative approach to crossdisciplinary collaboration.