Critical perspectives between Art and Architecture: Modern ideas seen through Dan Graham's investigations

Abstract

Amidst the criticism of Modern ideology, held since the mid-1960s, Dan Graham’s career emerges as paradigmatic. Acting in the frontier between Art and Architecture, the artist mobilized overriding aesthetic principles in both fields to unveil their own limits and contradictions, questioning the very terms of artistic and architectural practice and thinking engendered by the modernist discourse – hitherto hegemonic. The way he employed the language codes of main production trends in the USA outlined some 'resemantization' strategies of their respective aesthetic prerogatives. Graham thus questions the perception of their formal and conceptual meanings. This article intends to demonstrate how the fundamental aesthetical aspects for the Minimalist 'specific objects', which are very close to the High Modernism formula 'Form follows Function' according to the artist, will be subverted to reveal the institutional context (political and ideological) focused on the object, the audience and the space they are inserted in. Such issues led the artist to think about the hermeticism of those political-aesthetic programs, as well as to develop a work that intended to deal critically with the new social insertion of culture in mass society. The analysis of Graham’s main proposals and texts focusing on this issue will help to clarify the way the artist offers unique views on the aesthetic thought that guided the cultural production of his time. He acted within its own discourses and practices, not disregarding the urgency to experiment new ways of thinking about contemporary artistic and architectural productions from the gaps left by Modernism discourses and practices.