Installation shot of Dan Graham: Beyond at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Image via the New York Times
This week’s column at the L Magazine discusses the timeliness and exhibition arrangement of Beyond, Dan Graham’s retrospective at the Whitney. The teaser below.
Do people expect conceptual art to create the same transcendental feeling we ask of more traditional forms of art? I don't, but from the video documentation at Dan Graham's retrospective at The Whitney, it seems viewers haven't always agreed with me. Even when very little action appears in his taped performances from the mid-70s, museum crowds wait patiently as though the art will eventually deliver a higher experience. I can only assume that for some, such transcendence was actually experienced.
You won't see too much of that sort of behavior at his current exhibition at The Whitney, but not because art audiences have so transformed over the years that they don't know what to do with the work. Many of us may not enjoy durational performances quite as much as we used to, but we still know how to look at them. And, regardless of era, we still require the same things we always have to fully engage with art: namely, exhibition organization.
Unfortunately for Graham, curators Chrissie Ilses and Bennett Simpson don't lay out a lot of that in the show, titled “Dan Graham: Beyond.” Arranged largely by medium rather than chronologically, the exhibition space is a disorienting array of architectural glass rooms with semi transparent and transparent glass, wall-mounted textual documentation of various projects, and a number of double projection wheels. The curators present a pleasing exhibition design, but there's almost no way for a viewer to gain a better understanding of the artist's work and career without pre-existing knowledge.
To read the full piece, click here.
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