Ushma thakrar

HOMES FOR AMERICA PROCESS AS CRITIQUE

The conceptual artist, Dan Graham's "Homes for America" is neither a construction manual nor a piece of photographic documentation, but presents its reader with the images of the homes that were being built in the suburban sprawl outside of New York City - largely in New Jersey. The piece, published in various formats in a variety 1 of magazines, culminating with the canonized version that was published as a spread in Arts Magazine in December of 1966, took nearly ten years to be accepted as belonging to the practice of Conceptual, Minimalist Art of which Graham and his peers were to become or were already leading figures. Graham while already deeply involved in this 2 scene particular scene in New York City, his involvement had been as a gallerist, rather than as an artist per se.

While his gallery was one of the first to display American Minimalist Art, Graham unable to afford its rent was forced to close his gallery in 1965 and returned to his parents' home, where he had spent his formative years, in Westfield, New 3 Jersey. It was upon this return that Graham began to document the postwar suburban sprawl with a cheap, massproduced Kodak 35mm Instamatic camera. The suburbs he took as subject matter were much like the one he was returning to - all along the commuter railroads that lead back to New York City, all master-planned communities, built following the Second World War, the housing of which was mass-produced, largely tracts of row-housing.

Both the subject matter and Dan Graham's means of production, places his photographic series decidedly outside of the prevalent art industry at the time, Graham did eventually take his photographs to New York. Upon showing his slides to friends at an informal presentation, Graham was solicited to write a piece for Arts Magazine on the topic of suburban New Jersey. While this interest in his work may seem unprecedented for the project's exteriority to the discipline's boundaries, but Graham's previously established status as gallerist, close associations with prominent artists like Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Heiner Friedrich and Michael Asher, made him fundamentally interior to the art world - an institution he and his peers were attempting to undermine in their work. Dan Graham's project must be read

1

Before the publication of Graham's findings in the magazine format, Graham held a viewing of his slides at a salon in New York City in 1966. Wigley, 2012.

2 Dan Graham was the founding gallerist and part-owner of the short-lived John Daniels Gallery in Manhattan. Wigley, 2012.

3 Wigley, 2012.

against this climate of New York City art scene with which he was involved with at the time, which had as its primary objective the dismantling of the institutionalization of art and the specific undermining of the power that had been vested in museums and galleries in defining the boundaries of the field and their ability to limit public access to the works they first deemed worthy of experience. It was within this particular stance that what Jeff Wall calls the 4 aesthetics of "non-art" come into play. While many were working through this idea of non-art at the time of Graham's 5 publishing "Homes for America," based on his series of photographs in Arts Magazine is of note for the project of artistic avant-garde at the time. Graham utilized, perhaps not entirely of his own volition, the magazine as a site for artistic production, rather than as it is conventionally understood - a site for artistic reproduction. While Graham has 6 later recognized the interiority of magazines in the fields to which they are aimed, his understanding of his production 7 is as a "fake think piece," which places it in an ironic relationship with the magazine's institutional nature. The fake think piece model imitates those found in magazines like Esquire and Playboy and was specifically chosen by Graham for its being held as cheap and mid-brow by most standards of art and because of its status as a throw-away medium, which required it to be quickly consumed and subsequently recreated, much like the suburbs he was attempting to describe through the medium. The medium and the content said medium carries were entirely incidental in "Homes for America," as they serve only to display an aesthetic quality.

The piece's aesthetics are those of the suburban homes: cheaply-manufactured, mass-reproduced, repetitive geometric forms, which are all replicated in the cut-paste quality of the piece's formatting and the site of the magazine which is likewise a quickly consumed and as quickly thrown-away. The photographs that Graham took on his trips and those that he published in "Homes for America" can clearly be seen to be mirroring the repetitive, geometric forms of Conceptual and Minimalist art of the era. Graham's move outside of the gallery space to the suburbs has been 8 commonly understood as a move into what he calls "material reality" in order to continue to the project of the subversion of the art-institution from its exterior. This reading is, however, limited by an understanding of Graham's work as holding its value aesthetically. The very aesthetics of his piece belong to the tradition of "non-art," which while not deny aesthetics, nor the possibility of aesthetic experience of a work, holds its meaning and its value as art work outside of this experience.

Graham has said these spaces were of interest to him not because of their aesthetic quality nor the not the similarity they bore to his own suburban roots, but rather because they were physical manifestations of the population that 9 resided in them, which he described as being "upper-lower class with lower-middle class ambitions." In the artist's highly aestheticized representation of these spaces, there is no mention or sign of population of the suburban spaces presented. Graham's concern with this population is of interest for the project, because it is how the work is positioned as a critique of not only the art institution that bars this group from their world and how the artists working to subvert the gallery institution were simply reifying an pre-existing aesthetic condition such that it could be appropriated by the 10 logic of the art world, rather than dismantling it. The position of his production as critique, depends on the explication of "Homes for America," and cannot be gleaned from aesthetic experience, or even a reading of the piece's visual or linguistic content. In Graham's piece, form and content are simply indices of process. Process, though not represented in Graham's practice holds a complete monopoly on artistic value and demotes both form and content's previously standing as conveyers of message.

4

Wall, 1990.

Though Graham provided Arts Magazine with several of his photographs to accompany "Homes for America" the editors decided to use a Walker Evens photograph and the images Graham collaged into the piece which he took from a real estate brochure.

Wigley, 2012.

6 In 1985, Graham wrote a quasi-material analysis of the role of art magazines in generating value of art, previously validated by the gallery institution in his essay "My Works for Magazine Pages: "A History of Conceptual Art." 7 Wasiuta, 2012.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Krauss, 1990.

5

WORKS CITED Graham, Dan. "My Works for Magazine Pages: "A History of Conceptual Art." pp.10-18. ed. Alexander Alberro, TwoWay Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham on HIs Art. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1990.

Krauss, Rosalind. "The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum." October, Vol.54 (1990): pp.3-17.

Wasiuta, Mark. “Interview with Dan Graham (February 8, 2007)” Dan Graham’s New Jersey, eds. Mark Wasiuta & Craig Buckley. New York: Lars Müller Publishers, 2012.

Wall, Jeff. "Introduction: Partially Reflective Mirror Writing." pp. x - xvii. ed. Alexander Alberro, Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham on HIs Art. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1990.

Wigley, Mark. “The Reluctant Artist.” Dan Graham’s New Jersey, eds. Mark Wasiuta & Craig Buckley. New York: Lars Müller Publishers, 2012.