The Red Brick Art Museum announces Dan Graham’s first solo exhibition in China at the Museum. As one of contemporary art's most innovative and influential figures, Graham has been at the forefront of many of the most significant developments in art, including conceptual art, video and film installation, performance and site-specific sculpture. Often blurring the lines between private and public, inclusion and exclusion, Graham’s works have appeared in various arenas around the world, from museums and institutions to public gardens, shopping malls, coffee shops and magazines. Spanning five decades of the artist’s work, this comprehensive exhibition offers a complete overview of the artist’s practice and features over twenty new, recent and historical pieces.
Graham first began exploring issues of the performative, exhibitionism, voyeurism, mirroring and the mundane in the early 1960s and 1970s. As a means of reaching the widest possible audience, the placement of artwork as adverts in newspapers and magazines became Graham’s preferred method of dissemination during this period. On display in China for the first time as part of this exhibition, these magazine projects challenged the idea of value by reducing art to a mere advert and marked Graham’s entry point into conceptual art.
His visionary embrace of performance art is also captured in the exhibition through videos of early performances. Single-channel time-based works, like Lax/Relax (1969) and Performer / Audience / Mirror (1969/1995), focus on the ability of art to be both interactive and reflective, incorporating wall - size mirrors, video cameras and audience participation. These historical pieces represent the artist’s pioneering use of video to document perception and illustrate his interest in the semiotics of film. Works like Rock My Religion (1981) and the rock and roll puppet show Don't Trust Anybody over 30 (2004) highlight the cultural importance of rock music and showcase Graham’s engagement with youth culture, as well as his innovative approach to cross-disciplinary collaboration. These works, which will be screened in their entirety in the museum, sample the artist’s favourite music from different periods of history while taking into account the broader social contexts of the time through a focus on religion and politics. Graham's greatest hits, a music playlist he has been compiling for the past several years, will be available for visitors in a specially created room complete with soundproof booths and headphones.
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