Dan Graham: Beyond at the Walker Art Center

Contemporary art just wouldn’t be the same without Dan Graham. Really. His influence is both deep and wide, a fact that will become apparent to anyone who sees Dan Graham: Beyond at the Walker Art Center. It’s an ambitious retrospective of Graham’s career—most recently seen at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York—that captures the full scope of his work starting in the 1960s, including film and video projects, architectural models, indoor and outdoor sculptures, drawings, prints, and writings.

In all, more than 100 pieces will be on display, ranging from conceptual head-scratchers and innovative media installations to pieces that embrace what Graham calls “anarchic humor”—conceptual jokes that are about as much fun as one is allowed to have in an art museum and still be taken seriously. In a piece called “Roll,” for example, two projectors are placed back to back: On one wall is video of the artist rolling down a hill, on the other wall is blurry, jerky footage shot from Graham’s point of view while rolling down the same hill. One is objective, the other subjective, and together they’re, well—funny.

“Dan may be the most quintessentially ‘American’ artist of the post-war period,” says Walker Art Center curator Peter Eleey. “Over a career spanning half a century, he has had more profound things to say about the things that comprise American culture—the architecture we inhabit, the music we listen to, the magazines we read, and the economies that structure this culture—than most anyone else.”

Visitors to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden may be familiar with Graham’s Two-Way Mirror Punched Steel Hedge Labyrinth, a series of glass panels that reflect people and the surrounding nature in continuously changing, unexpected ways. In fact, when asked recently to choose a single sculpture in the garden that stood out as a “masterpiece,” Walker chief curator Darsie Alexander chose Graham’s Two-Way Mirror—because, she says, Graham saw how geometrically the sculpture garden is laid out, as well as its reliance on nature. “Amidst this bucolic setting, Graham inserts his transparent walls—not to block access, but to see more intensely,” Alexander explains.

According to Eleey, Graham’s influence on other artists has less to do with his subject matter or medium than it does with how he makes art. “He brings together the analytic concerns of conceptual art, the phenomenological interests of minimalism, and the mass cultural sublime of pop—the mind, the body, and the body politic,” says Eleey, “while making it as fun for us as it is for him.” Oct. 31–Jan. 24. Walker Art Center, 1750 Hennepin Ave., Mpls., 612-375-7600