Celebrating Dan Graham's work

Dan Graham may be the most influential American artist you've never heard of.

Despite a monumental standing in contemporary art -- he's a pioneer of conceptualism and was in the vanguard of video and film installation, performance art and site-specific installation -- the 67-year-old artist has a relatively low profile with American audiences.

During a short-lived and financially ruinous stint as a New York art dealer, Graham gave Sol LeWitt his first show. He displayed early work by minimalist greats Dan Flavin and Donald Judd, and was pivotal in the founding of the band Sonic Youth (among other favors, he helped Kim Gordon land her first New York apartment).

But try to find a sizable portion of his work outside of Europe, and you'd be hard-pressed.

And so it is momentous that Walker Art Center welcomes "Dan Graham: Beyond," the first U.S. exhibition to encompass the artist's many-faceted, genre-eluding 44-year career. Opening Saturday, the show arrives in Minneapolis after marquee runs in Los Angeles and New York. (It is co-curated by Bennett Simpson of Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art and the Whitney Museum's Chrissie Iles.)

There's a lot of voyeurism going on in "Beyond," and playful complications of public vs. private space. Mirrors, glass windows, fishbowl-style observation chambers, video recordings of the audience viewing Graham's work -- one of the few constants in his career is the question of who is looking and who is being looked at. His famous "pavilions," roomlike glass-and-mirror sculptures that he has said exist somewhere "between architecture and television," play a big part in the show.

So does pop culture. Graham, a rabid enthusiast of mass entertainment in the United States, worked rigorously with rock culture and magazine publishing. His monumental video work "Rock My Religion," a hypnotic sound-collage of a thesis linking the origins of hard-core punk to the Shaker religious movement, is required viewing, as is "Homes for America," a photo essay capturing the deadening repetition of suburban New Jersey architecture.

Without seeing the work in person, Graham's gale-force intelligence can come off the wrong way. The way he bullrushes pop culture with academic analysis, the way he packs his written proposals with dense language, the way his exhaustingly meta scenarios force you to watch yourself watching someone else who is simultaneously watching themselves watch you -- his work might sound like some grinding, overwrought academic exercise.

But that isn't quite right. And curator Peter Eleey, who has organized the Walker's presentation of Graham's retrospective, is quick to say so.

"If you've read more about it than you've seen, that might make it seem academic in some ways," says Eleey. "But it's not. There's a lot to see, feel and mull over when one experiences Dan's work.

"His work brings together the analytical aspects of conceptual art, the phenomenological interests of minimalism and the mass cultural subject of pop. But all with a heavy dose of play."

Much like fiction writers David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo, Graham's feverish intellectualism is self-conscious and often deeply funny. It's the sign of someone who's obsessed with getting to the bottom of things -- and who recognizes that doing so can make you sound like a doctoral dissertation.

"I love magazines because they are like pop songs, easily disposable, dealing with momentary pleasures," Graham has commented. "They are full of clichés. We all love the cliché. We all like tautologies, things that seem to be dumb and banal but are actually quite intelligent."

"Homes for America" may be a spot-on indictment of soul-bludgeoning suburbs. But it's also a bit of a spoof that Graham describes as "pure deadpan humor." And while "Rock My Religion" may be an enthralling conceptual probe into youth culture, it's also a sendup of scholarly authority, mimicking the scrolling script and bland narration of a high school educational film.

It's a high/low mash-up that former Walker curator Philippe Vergne describes as "elitism for everyone."

At any rate, Graham's "fake think pieces" always seem to lead to some pretty serious ruminations. But for an intellect as rapacious as Graham's, rumination is play. In a story about the exhibit's Los Angeles appearance, Art in America magazine noted the gleeful reaction of some visitors to a video piece, racing from one closed-circuit camera to the next. Appropriately, the Graham fans weren't grad students. They were children.