DAN GRAHAM
Born in 1942, Urbana, Illinois (USA). Lives and works in New York.
Project for slide projector, 1966
80 slides
Courtesy of the Micheline Szwajcer gallery, Antwerp
“I wanted to do the same things I was seeing in Pop and minimalist art, but in a flat situation, a photograph. I wanted to remake the works by Larry Bell or Donald Judd in the form of a slide show. (Dan Graham). The first cinematic slide show by Dan Graham consists of twenty shots, “images of reflections and transparencies on glass, obtained in the following way; one constructs a structure starting with four rectangular glass panels joined in a way that forms a box with four faces. The upper part is open and the base is a mirror … the shots are realised revolving about the box in a similar manner to the hands of a clock, with a depth of field that retreats to a point each time until the eighth view, at which it has returned to the start. It continues like this, little by little adding boxes on to boxes (five in total), always photographed in the same order. In total twenty shots will have been done. The images in the form of the slides are duplicated four times and inserted into the projector in the following way; the first batch of twenty follows the order in which the shots have been done; the second batch of twenty is reversed with respect to the first and placed in the projector in the inverse order. The third batch is like the first, and the last is like the second…” (Dan Graham, End Movements, 1969, pp.34-36). The light that enters the translucent cube is progressively modified by the new panels and the cube turns increasingly opaque, producing more and more complex reverberation effects until the glass walls turn into mirrors. The experience contains elements of certain fundamental notions of Dan Graham’s work; the mirror and the screen, the glass cube and the modifications of perception due to the movement and natural variables of the light, the perversion of transparency and empirical experimentation.
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