Walking into ‘Dan Graham: Beyond’, at MOCA in Los Angeles, the viewer immediately sees other museum visitors drifting in and out of the three pavilion works grouped together in the first gallery. The people in sight move slowly, and then suddenly jerk one way or another in order to test the loop of reflection, semi-transparency and fragmentation created by the pavilions’ finely wrought angles of two-way mirrors and perforated steel. It is exciting to watch others not only appear like apparitions (through the semi-transparent glass) but move like them, too, within the space of a museum. However, the clustered, spectacularised pavilions represent only one trajectory of the themes Graham has worked with for over four decades.
This show—the artist’s first US retrospective—includes examples of his magazine works, film and videos, drawings and prints, photos, architectural models and pavilions. The opportunity to examine Graham’s practice chronologically reveals how some of his early interest in embodiment was left behind as he focused primarily on the pavilions and on working (pseudo)-architecturally. In that a retrospective is a chance not only to follow how themes are developed throughout an artist’s career, but also to see those that have been phased out over time, I was most struck by several works made in the ‘pre-pavilion’ days that reveal Graham’s interest in how vision and the visible relate to sexuality and embodiment.
Among Graham’s writing work included here are several conceptual pieces for magazine pages. One of these is Detumescence (1966), for which he solicited a medical writer to compose a description of what happens to the male anatomy and psyche after orgasm. This work has aspects of all the magazine pieces, namely that it produces