Art@Site www.artatsite.com Dan Graham Curved Two-Way Mirror Triangle, One Side Perforated Steel
Artist:

Dan Graham

Title:

Curved Two-Way Mirror Triangle, One Side Perforated Steel

Year:
2000
Adress:
Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
Website:
A good starting point
This artwork consists of a screen, which is partly transparent. A central focal point arises because of the mirror, by the reflection of the sunlight.
Performed Mirror by Dan Graham invites you to walk around it. I wonder if the temperature is rising while coming close to the focal point.
To me, this is a technical artwork with a special material, a specific curve, an interesting physical effect. The artwork doesn’t evoke me a emotion.To me, the work is a good starting point for an artwork.
Perhaps it would be possible to project images on the screen. Another possibility is making use of the heat for melting something or put something in motion. It might be possible to make tangible what climate change means for mankind. Or maybe this is too comprehensive and perhaps a platitude.
Performed Mirror by Dan Graham is lacking the essential aspect of an artwork: evoking an image or emotion, expressing a meaning.

Vertaling
Een goed startpunt
Dit kunstwerk bestaat uit een scherm, dat deels doorzichtig is. Door de spiegeling, door de weerkaatsing van het zonlicht blijkt een centraal brandpunt te ontstaan.
Performed Mirror van Dan Graham nodigt uit om erom heen te lopen. Ik ben benieuwd of een verhoogde temperatuur voelbaar is dichtbij het brandpunt.
Voor mij is dit een technisch kunstwerk met een bijzonder materiaal, een specifieke ronding, een interessant natuurkundig effect. Ik heb geen emoties bij het kunstwerk. Voor mij is dit werk een goed startpunt voor een kunstwerk.
Wellicht zou het mogelijk zijn om een voorstelling te projecteren op het scherm. Een andere mogelijkheid is om de warmte te gebruiken om iets te laten smelten of in beweging te brengen. Wellicht is het mogelijk om voelbaar te maken wat de klimaatverandering betekent voor de mensheid. Of misschien is dit een teveel omvattend en ook afgezaagd onderwerp.
Bij Performed Mirror van Dan Graham ontbreekt het essentiële van een kunstwerk: een beeld of emotie oproepen, een betekenis geven.

www.wikipedia.org:
Dan Graham’s artworks are said to blur the line between sculpture and architecture. Since the 1980s, Graham has been working on an ongoing series of freestanding, sculptural objects called pavilions. Graham's popularity has grown since he started his walk-in pavilions and he has received commissions all over the world. His pavilions are steel and glass sculptures which create a different space which disorients the viewer from his or her usual surroundings or knowledge of space. They are made of a few huge panes of glass or mirror, or of half-mirrored glass that is both reflective and transparent. Wooden lattice and steel are other materials most commonly used in his work.
The MIT Art Center calls his pavilions rigorously conceptual, uniquely beautiful, and insistently public. The pavilions create a unique experience for the viewer. His pavilions are created for the public experience. His pavilions combine architecture and art. Dan Graham’s pavilion works have been compared to Ryue Nishizawa and Kazuyo Sjima’s work on the Kanazawa Museum. The glass wall of the structure reflects and distorts light much like Grahams sculptures. The layered, but simplistic quality is said to be very much like Graham's. The structures are similar in their study of space and light.
In 1981, Graham started work on a decade long project in New York City. The work Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and Video Salon was part of the Rooftop Urban Park Project. Graham worked on the piece in collaboration with architects Mojdeh Baratloo and Clifton Balch. This transparent and reflective pavilion transformed the roof of 548 West 22nd Street into a rooftop park. The pavilion captures the surrounding landscape and changes of light creating an intense visual effect with the sky. The Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and Video Salon has become one of his most well-known works throughout his art career.
After numerous commissions in Europe, the Children’s Pavilion (1988–93) was actually the first piece Graham was commissioned to do in the United States. A collaboration with Jeff Wall, the pavilion is a very conceptual piece relating to the children of the nation. It is a circular shaped room with an oculus that is both transparent and reflective at the top, so the viewers on the outside of the building could look inside as well. Wall's nine circular framed photographs of children belonging to many nationalities and ethnic backgrounds surround the room. Each child is shown half-length and viewed from below against the background of a sky. In each image Wall chooses a different sky. In 1991, the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art attempted to realise the pavilion on Rotterdam's Ommoord district; the plan was eventually abandoned in 1994. Related works include Children's Pavilion (Chambre d'Amis) (1986), Skateboard Pavilion (1989), and Funhouse for the Children of Saint-Janslein (1997–99).
For a temporary installation in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s roof garden is, Hedge Two-Way Mirror Walkabout (2014) is a collaboration with the Swiss landscape architect Günther Vogt. The pavilion consists of an S-shaped curve of slightly reflective glass, bookended by two parallel ivy hedgerows. Later, Graham worked with designer Phoebe Philo to create an S-shaped steel-and-glass pavilion in which to show her spring/summer 2017 collection.

www.hauserwirth.com:
One of the most important American artists of his generation, Dan Graham first emerged in the 1960s, alongside artists such as Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt, as an influential pioneer of Conceptual Art and performance-related Video Art. His multi-disciplinary practice – which incorporates installation, pavilions, sculpture, photography, conceptual projects, architectural models, video and performance – has proven groundbreaking for the development of conceptual art over the last 40 years. During this period, Graham has developed a diverse practice that refuses to be defined as contemporary art and instead aligns itself with popular culture. His work is informed by a social awareness, often working with hybrids that oscillate between quasi-functional spaces and installations.
Graham has designed glass, steel and mirror pavilions since the late 1970s, which bridge the divide between Minimalist sculpture and social environment. These works investigate the complex relationship between the art object and its viewer, providing a cross section of the diversity of his practice and highlighting the artist’s unique interaction with his audience through his projects. Graham’s pavilions are created on a human scale; the two-way mirrored glass allowed viewers watching the film to see themselves as they are invited to lounge on the floor, whilst visitors standing outside of the structure can observe the people lounging inside, implicating the spectator as part of the structure and reversing the roles of subject and object.

www.jirisvestkagallery.com:
Dan Graham is a highly influential figure in the field of contemporary art, both as a practitioner of conceptual art and as a well-versed art critic and theorist. His oeuvre spans over 40 years and he is considered the 'guru' of artists' pavilions having interrogated the concept since the 1970s. Graham's work questions the relationship between people and architecture and the psychological effects it has on us.