The political dimension of Dan Graham's work has always been recognizable and has always been one of his essential concerns as shown in transformations like the medialiy orientated work "Schema": this work consists of a list of guidelines how to compose poems, made up of magazine ads by the editor of the respective media. Here the outward appearance varies greatly from edition to edition and consequently the way the spectator sees the identical work vary likewise; and the pavilions by Dan Graham with their glass panes, semi translucent and reflecting panes play with the relation observer and object in the same way. The particular position of the observer does not only determine his present viewpoint but at the same time alters the work of art by his/her presence.
The role of the observer becomes so to speak the role of a performer who has yet to create the object of his contemplation. The fact that it has existed already before is thus being questioned, as the thing that has been here before, is something else.
Here those questions crop up which are raised by endophysics with its deciamation "TheWorld from Within": what sort of image of the world have we created to see it the way we see it - or: where do we find that interface to which we have to move or which we would have to become ourselves to be able to cast so to speak an erogenous glance at a world.
In his way Dan Graham did this already in the seventieswith his projects "Present Continuous Past(s)" (1974), "Two Viewing Rooms" (1975) or "Public Space, Two Audiences" (1976), but above all with his performances "Performer / Audience Sequence" (1974) and "Audience Peformer, Mirror" (1977). There is the reaction of the observer that creates what the performer wants to convey (the sort of world he creates), on the other side it is his words that influence the behaviour and the point of view of the observer. In a way each of them reciprocally reflects the other which results into an endless feedback of the picture / result. Like in Present Continuous Past(s) "the, monitor in the monitor in the monitor does not only take space but also time to its extreme limit and in its vanishing point there is the infinite post" (de Duve). So, this vanishing point - the endless feedback picture / result - is imaginative, too. Here the entropy of time and space is neutralized only by an additional side mirror which enables the spectator to "step out" of his / her "world". At the very spot where and at the very moment when the spectator turns away from the reflected video image, a sort of "interface" comes into existence which cambines / spearates the interior (=the entropical reflected and timeshifted video image) and the exterior (=the reflection into the side mirror). One could think that the question about a scientific-philosophical explanation for the "World from Within" has been answered for a long time. Anyway, Dan Graham's reflecting semi translucent pavilions allow the observer to intuitively anticipate the explanation.
Katharina Gsöllpointner
THE ENDOGENOUS VIEW
Contemporary Video Art in Dan Graham's "Three-Linked-Cubes" Pavillion
"We shouldn't come so far, shouldn't go so far that we presume a certain
peculiarity in everything, and everyone and behind everything and everyone;
something puzzling, significant (...). Everything is what it is and nothing
else"
(Thomas Bernhard "Korrektur", 1975).
In "We", Shelly Silver quotes one Thomas Bernhard, clearly influenced by Wittgenstein's "Tractatus" ("1. The world is everything, that is what counts") as a horizontally running text which mid-axially cross-connects two contrasting pictures. A close-up of the penis of a masturbating man and a hectic street scene as parallel images only serve to show "what counts". Everything else, every meaning, presumption, association is interpretation and is arbitrarily interchangeable as such. "Everything we see, could be different. Everything that we can at all describe could also be different". We contemplate Shelly Silver's video in the plate glass of Graham's pavillion and find that the two pictures have been interchanged - the penis instead of the street scene and vice versa. Of course, the significance moves with the pictures, too. The banal is still banal and the pornographic is still pornographic. Our "inner monitor", a priori-matrix of acquired values and symbols makes us see the pictures as we see them: as representatives of a certain semantic system, reflections of "former ages". We describe the world every day as a real thing and in doing so create just that. We ourselves are our world and consequently all the pictures of the world are ours. "The world and life are one. 5.63 1 am my world. (The Microcosmos)".
Gerald Harringer
