Dan Graham

Like water in a pot on the stovetop below deck on a trawler buffeted by a roiling storm, Dan Graham sloshed and sluiced. He wouldn’t (or couldn’t) obey the edicts of the pot’s boundaries. He answered instead to the forces of nature. To wind and gravity and barometric pressure. It’s for this reason that those mirrored pavilions never seemed to me the real Dan Graham. Sure there’s all the tricks and trippiness that implore us to pair mirrors with smoke. But the sturdy permanence of those pavilions are nearly the antithesis of my image of Graham.

I prefer to think of his slinking, sly self in his writings on rock music or postwar domestic architecture. I prefer to think of his now-you-see-me/now-you-see-yourself coquettishness in performance. I prefer to think of the inconstance of his astute rationality offset by his insistence on astrology.

This unbalancing act of his is on stark display in one of his masterworks, the early-80s video Rock My Religion. As soon as you start to describe it, you come up against its constitutive contradictions. It’s a documentary. And it’s not. It’s a thesis on rock and roll in American culture. But not really. It’s a portrait of Patti Smith. Except it’s not. It’s a montage of rock and roll in the wake of punk that reconnects the form’s originary impulses to its current manifestation. That seems pretty close, but it still badly misrepresents the logic and phenomenology of the video.

Rock My Religion presents – again, maybe the wrong word, it performs – the fractious ennui of middle-American, middle-class stultification. It’s as if the houses in Graham’s mid-60s Homes for America came to life as angsty, antsy teenagers, flinging themselves about revival tents, into rock clubs, off causeless rebel cliffs. Graham portrays a developmental view of American agitation. Chafing against religious disenfranchisement, the Puritans and the Shakers willed themselves into ecstasy. They tipped and turvied, like exotic dervishes, like listing schooners. Their tongues turned somersaults, transforming the rational dictates of spoken English into feral caterwauls of yaw and yearning. Graham connects this, on the one hand, to the ghost dance of the Paiute and the Lakota, and, on the other, to James Dean’s embodiment of generational abhorrence. Out of this primordial fret emerges rock and roll: spurn as style, dissidence as commodity.

Rock My Religion followed on from Graham’s early work as a rock critic. He wrote with knowledge and giddy devotion about the British invasion, reserving special affection for the Kinks. Graham’s treatise careens from Buddy Holly to Sonic Youth alighting here on Henry Rollins, there on Mark E. Smith. Graham would also make a straighter concert film of D.C.’s straightedge lords, Minor Threat. Inexplicably, there is practically no acknowledgment of the fundamental African and African American contributions to rock and roll. Granted this is not a scholarly work, but the art leaks out of its articulateness through this breach. The video eventually sets down on the figure of Patti Smith, rock and roll’s Ann Lee (the founding leader of the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, or the Shakers). The Shakers had a severe exit strategy: procreation was forbidden. La-la-la live for today! Patti Smith is in it for what can’t be gotten blithely. One must grit one’s teeth and plunge headlong into the corroded depths of the psycho-commodified banality of  cultural consensus. Battered by indifference the pilgrim, the seeker, suffers slings, arrows, and gobs of spit to touch down revivified on the earth: mother, brother, other.

Graham talked the walk. Witness Performer/Audience/Mirror. He’s being us, asks us to be him. I is another. I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together. Mother, brother, other. Goo goo g’joob.

Dan Graham has been called a conceptual artist. Conceptual art has been called cool, heady, unemotional, bathetic, calculated. It’s tough to square this circle because Graham was capricious, wayward, inconstant, flighty, whimsical, wooly in more ways than one. Lester Bangs once wrote of the Stooges that they work with ideas that “may not be highly sophisticated (God forbid) but are certainly advanced.” Like the Stooges, Dan Graham wallowed in the folly of bothering to do something, to make something, knowing that time will swallow the lot. Can’t go on, must… etc. The ornate is a liar; the tidy a false god. The seamless is unseemly. Graham preferred laughter and flailing and pogoing into the abyss. That’s why – all other gods impervious and those pavilions notwithstanding – rock was his religion.