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I DIDN'T KNOW Dan Graham well. I met him a handful of times in the mid-2000s when I was a graduate student at Princeton University. I wanted to write my dissertation on Dan, but I was too young and too terrified to do it. Once, when I met him in his loft on New York’s Spring Street, he threw a fit because I didn’t know the work of the Japanese architect Itsuko Hasegawa. I was wet behind the ears and couldn’t find my angle—I was too sympathetic to his position, which was at once ardent, skeptical, and laced with wry humor. With Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, we took an architectural tour of New Jersey, the artist’s home state, and Dan snapped pictures of the octangular buildings of Paterson, Alexander Hamilton’s industrial utopia, where Graham’s compatriot Robert Smithson had also rummaged, and of the floppy inflatable figures flailing around exurbia-on-Hudson. When I invited Graham to Princeton, he screened a documentary on his work, narrated by the artist. Graham spoke over the soundtrack for an entire hour, offering a real-time voice-over that uncannily mirrored the historical record. Like David Antin (a contemporary), Dan was one of the art world’s great talkers, and yet what he said was neither stream of consciousness nor off the cuff—rather, it was the result of a life dedicated to thinking, and thinking again, about “real life” and the systems that animated it. One might call these forces culture, but for Dan culture was far from the Arnoldian concept of the best which has been thought and said. The most generative site was that middle space of pop music, dating services, developers’ architecture, and corporate arcadias, a lesson Graham learned, in part, from his study of Pop figures including Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Venturi. But if culture served as the artist’s object of inquiry, art provided the space from which to look at it, offering an outside angle that allowed for thought. For Graham, art and life existed in strange tension with each other. He resided somewhere between those two poles.
Graham came to be known as...