Investigation
Investigate: Dan Graham
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Robert Venturi was not the only one to observe the diffusion of the outer space in 1966. The very same year artist Ed Ruscha made a complete ‘inventory’ of ‘Every Building on Sunset Strip’, which Venturi later was to paraphrase in his ‘Las Vegas Strip’.(1) The year after, in 1967, Ruscha documented ‘Thirty-Four Parking Lots’ in Los Angeles with black and white photographs from the air. The year after Robert Smithson, another artist of the outer space, wrote in his article “Spectral Suburbs”:
Los Angeles is all suburb, a pointless phenomenon which seems uninhabitable, and a place swarming with dematerialized distances. A pale copy of a bad movie … Exterior space gives way to the total vacuity of time … What the artist seeks is coherence and order – not ‘truth,’ correct statements, or proofs. He seeks the fiction that reality will sooner or later imitate.(2)
Both Ruscha and Smithson were well aware of the constructed quality of space, and as the outer space was constructed by narrations, scripts, signs and maps, so were the design spaces. Ruscha’s artistic statements in douche pastels from the 1970s were sour sweet comments on suburban life in Southern California – in a ‘gentle’ commercial wrapping but with a harsh content. Smithson’s maps and movie treatments from the late 1960s and the early 1970s were diagrammatic design spaces on their way to be constructed in sand, mirrors, asphalt or glue.
The philosopher Yve-Alain Bois writes about Ruscha:
Ruscha is the great census taker … He takes urban dust as the greasy version of a ‘cleaner’ evil that is characteristic of advanced capitalism and its mass media, namely, entropy as defined by information theory … This theory … designates everything that hinders or is useless to the transmission of the message as ‘noise’; and, by extension, everything that has no informational content, everything that is repeated, predictable, redundant – all of that is nothing but dust. In this sense, the city itself, as a megalopolis, has become pure noise, pure zone.(3)
Compared to the radical views of Ruscha and Smithson, Venturi’s feeble hope of a ‘contained intricacy’ seemed naïve – at least. The entropy of the postmodern suburb and mass media was just too powerful to be contained. Even the most well-founded design methods of modernism – containment and purification – had to capitulate, faced with the postmodern intricacy and the formless entropy.
The artist Dan Graham emerged in this place of mass media, tract homes, cybernetic combination and reflection in the late 1960s, when he reported on variations of ‘Homes for America – Early 20th-Century Possessable House to the Quasi-Discrete Cell of ‘66’ that was published in an issue of Arts Magazine. (4) He maneuvered with a remarkably finesse in a landscape created by signs and slogans, always with a bittersweet comment.
We may see his production as two interconnected parts. First, printed strategies, which were constructions framed by mass media, newspaper adds or articles. They contained ‘recipes’ on how to develop suburban housing, color combinations, schematic breakdowns of the language used in magazines, offerings of medical writings or even ‘A Computer – Astrological Dating – Placement Service’. They were spatial ‘packages’ with a well-defined set of operands, and a suggestive rule for dealing with those operands, though not always accessible. Second, dematerialized installations, which were installations or pavilions constructed by glass and mirrors, either as a scale model or as a full size construction. Graham called these ‘optical/architectural containers’ as they contained the perceptual and social reversal that his printed strategies constructed in mass media. In an interview with Brian Hatton, Dan Graham explains:
My works can be read as ‘scenographic’ urban or suburban modern cliché-forms, or as ‘high’ architecture on the verge of becoming ‘low’ or ‘corporate’ architecture. They refer to urban corporate buildings or suburban house clichés as well as to the park pavilion/amusement park leisure Utopia vernacular … The first pavilions are also philosophical or socio-psychological models referencing the spectator’s ego and visual perception process relative to the ‘other’ spectators or audience. They are both primitive shelter and landscape. They hover between optical service and media form … I only agree in part that my pieces cancel out a sense of place. They do create ambiguities of the place of subject related to the Self’s and the Other’s gaze and consciousness, and superimpose distant/near space onto the internal psychological ‘space’ of perception.(5)
Graham’s constructions were clearly architectural: They both contained the strategy and the executed construction. However, what set Graham apart from many of the ‘real’ architects of the outer space in the late 1960s and 1970s, was that he so consciously constructed design spaces that sometimes were executed as installations, but for the most part remained diagrammatic.
A few years later, in 1978, he made an insertion into the iconic American culture in ‘Alterations of a Suburban House’. In a scale model, he replaced the entire front of a tract house by one large storefront window. He left all the living room furniture untouched, so the house was on the display for whoever passed by. Through the length of the house, he placed a mirror that reflected the living room and the neighborhood. As the neighbors passed by the house they would first see across the front lawn, then into the living room through the glass wall, then see the doubling of the living room in the mirror, and at last see themselves and the whole neighborhood reflected. Behind the mirror, half of the house was still kept away from preying eyes. Later Graham has explained:
The glass facade reveals the interior living quarters and displays them like a show window. The use of a mirror in the interior arbitrarily separates private space, made more mysterious, from the fully visible front areas … In LA I could see an individual eccentric home-owner creating an ‘Alteration of a Suburban House’ as part of the ‘theme-park’ Hollywood movie-set environment. It could be either ‘negative-nasty’ or ‘playful-aggressive’ … I wanted to make an unlikely merger of Mies’ Farnsworth House (aristocratic villa), Venturi’s suburban vernacular inflections, and roadway signage … Just as Koolhaas writes about the delirious pleasures of the congested modern New York, my suburban models speak of the delirium of the suburbs.(6)
By undressing the suburban house, which he in the design space of ‘Homes for America’ had called quasi-discrete cells, Graham made a real manifest of space: what was an interior place of architecture had in the hands of Graham become an exterior place in the suburb. By his operations in this place, he effectively reversed our focus on the profane tract home and by that, what constituted these places in the real and in our minds. The design space of Grahams spatial printed strategies had transformed into a dematerialized installation of the outer space.
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(1) In 1972 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour were to paraphrase this ‘strip inventory’ in their documentation of the Las Vegas Strip.
(2) Smithson, Robert (1968), “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (1996), Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, p. 91.
(3) Bois, Yve-Alain & Rosalind Krauss (1997), Formless, New York, NY: Zone Books, p. 228.
(4) Graham, Dan (1997), Architecture, London: Architectural Association.
(5) Ibid., p. 7 & 18.
(6) Ibid., p. 24 & 13-14.
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