ART REVIEW : ‘Public/Private’: Chronicles of a Restless Researcher

Dan Graham is a Conceptual artist whose work is profoundly academic. The problem is his work isn’t smart enough.

“Public/Private,” a 30-year survey of Graham’s photographs, video installations, public art proposals and critical writings at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in Hollywood, reveals the New York-based artist to be a generalist, a restless researcher who knows a little bit about a lot of topics. As a result, the works look better the farther you get from them. The closer you look, the more they tend to resemble illustrations of ideas more fully elaborated elsewhere.

One of Graham’s earliest and most influential pieces is “Homes for America,” a lithographic enlargement of a two-page spread he placed in an art magazine in December, 1966. This fake advertisement presents a compressed history of tract housing in the terse language of Minimalist art. Formal repetition in art is linked to the serial development of cost-cutting suburbs.

If Graham’s scathing layout mocks high art’s neutrality with humor largely absent from his other pieces, it does not stake out new territory. His critical ad simply applies to the art world ideas outlined in Robert Venturi’s influential book “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture” (1966), which begins with a reproduction of Philip Johnson’s glass house in New Canaan, Conn.

Graham, too, made a version of a glass house, in the form of a model. “Alteration to a Suburban House” (1978) proposed that the entire facade of an ordinary house be replaced with a giant window, and that a similarly scaled mirror, parallel to the window but set in the middle of the home, also be installed.

Graham’s model intended to dissect the expectations suburbanites bring to public and private patterns of behavior. But, it also enforces a rather cruel exhibitionism that transforms viewers into voyeurs of their own lives. Participants are stripped of the illusion that they are free to choose, even in the ostensible privacy of their own homes.

Much of Graham’s body of work can be described as an inverted version of Venturi’s thinking. Enhanced with mirrors and smoked glass, the artist’s most recent models, including “Skateboard Pavilion,” “Untitled (Triangle)” and “Swimming Pool Proposal,” duplicate rather than subvert the same flat-footed phenomenology of Minimalist art and architecture that Venturi attacked.

Venturi’s impatience with Modernist reductivism led to a celebration of modern life as a limitless collage of competing impulses. Graham, by contrast, is rigidly rational. His art emphasizes surveillance and regimentation, turning viewers into controlled subjects, like laboratory rats.

Too often Graham’s interdisciplinary projects seem like pedagogic demonstrations--elaborately engineered experiments designed to prove predetermined conclusions. Although Graham borrows procedures from such fields as sociology, architectural theory, psychoanalysis, structural linguistics and television programming, he rarely transforms these strategies into self-sufficient works that merit attention on their own terms.

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Even Graham’s best piece, “Present Continuous Past(s)” (1974), appeals primarily to the mind, at the expense of the body. In the wall of a claustrophobic, mirrored room, Graham has embedded a video camera with a wide-angle lens and a monitor that plays, at an 8-second delay, whatever transpires in the room. The work exaggerates mismatches between your actual body, your self-image, your mirror reflection and your videotaped depiction.

The most engaging component is the monitor, which makes you feel that your shadow has a life of its own. As time passes, however, this alienating sensation diminishes. Leaving your body behind, your eyes and then your mind try to follow the infinite regression set up between the monitor and the mirror. As abstract speculation takes over, psychological resonance is purged from Graham’s lablike setup.

Favoring formal rigor over ambiguity, Graham’s art doesn’t elicit the creepy, body-before-brains experiences of Bruce Nauman’s video installations. Where Graham is caught up in narcissism’s endlessly reflected images, Nauman is driven by a paranoid sense of flesh-crawling dread.

Ironically, Graham’s clinical dissection of modern subjectivity also signals an identity-crisis at LACE. As new commercial galleries showing emerging artists proliferate in Los Angeles, this established alternative space is losing its original reason for being. Exhibiting a New York artist of Graham’s stature may become essential for LACE’s survival, but that, too, will require that its identity change from an alternative space to a mainstream one.

* Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., (213) 957-1777, through March 12. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.