댄 그레이엄의 비디오와 퍼빌리온 프로젝트(1960년대 중반-1970년대 말):‘정보(information)’에서 ‘인-포메이션(in-formation)’으로 변화

Abstract

Dan Graham (b. 1942) has been producing printed conceptual works, moving images and videos, and architectural pavilion projects since the 1960s. His early career encompasses writings such as Rock: My Religion, and the founding of the John Daniels Gallery in New York, where he exhibited Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, Sol Lewitt, Dan Flavin and Jo Baer. While Graham’s early works are rather conceptual and use information as a medium, he focused on video works and pavilion projects in the 1970s and 1980s. My paper hypothesizes the way in which Graham uses the two different concepts, information and in-formation, from his early works in the video and pavilion projects that he began producing in the mid-1960s and late 1970s. The diverse concepts are explained in his early essay, “Subject Matter,” in which he lays out the theoretical foundation for his projects. Based on my interview with the artist and my reading of primary sources of his writing, I would suggest that his Homes for America project is a typical, conceptual work disseminating information through the mass-produced Arts Magazine. The magazine distributes the artist’s ideas, but does not focus on the interactivity of the work and the viewer. In the first chapter,I examine Graham’s early work in connection with the information the artist utilizes. Information can be both form and subject matter. The next chapter looks at the artist’s critical endeavors to explore the roles and functions of “in-formation.” As noted, these were emphasized in his early article “Subject Matter.” Interestingly enough, this interpretation was clarified in my interview with the artist, wherein he stated that in-formation is “a flow of information as a durational process phenomenon relating the perceptual process of the receiver of the information/spectator to the information presented.” Systems aesthetics prevalent in the early 1970s are considered as well. Graham’s involvement with Radical Software testifies to his close association with Gregory Bateson’s “Media Ecology” in the 1970s. Bateson emphasized the interactive link between the medium and society. His concept of the self was quite distinctive because he did not distinguish the subject from the object/viewer and encompassed them within an expanded field of spirit. In the last chapter, I broaden the theoretical inquiries on this kind of situational aesthetics and its very inter-subjectivity and interactivity by analyzing Graham’s move toward video works and pavilion projects. Throughout my paper, I maintain that the artist’s video and two-way mirror projects are not completely separate means inasmuch as they stem from the artist’s early interest in the function of “in-formation,” which comprises not only the environment, artwork, and the viewer, but also “inter-subjectivity.” Although the two mediums of video and glass pavilions are separated chronologically in Graham’s works, they share reflective and immersion visual effects and experiences. In the “quasi- schizophrenia” pavilion projects, one experiences Lacanian mirror stages or “autoscopy.” The three independent chapters are the result of my critical analysis of Graham’s early concepts of “information” and “in-formation” in his magazine pieces, as well as in selected video and architectural pavilion projects. In other words, “Graham’s subject matter is in-formation.”