From the archives of John Gibson Gallery.

Throughout the ’70s, Graham engaged in a series of works that shifted the traditional roles of the audience and performer by creating situations in which each simultaneously functions as both (creating a type of feedback loop). Remarking on the work form this period, Graham once stated, “It begins with Minimal Art, but it’s about spectators observing themselves as they’re observed by other people.”  

Dan Graham (1942-2022) was an American post-conceptual artist whose work consisted of performance art, installations, video, sculpture, and photography. Very much in the moment, Graham’s work was designed to incite and evoke a relationship between the viewer and an object that challenged in a thoughtful yet playful way a desire to reconsider time, space, and surfaces. Beginning in the late 1960s and into the late 1970s, Graham created largely performance-based pieces incorporating film and the new medium of video for his systematic investigations of cybernetics, phenomenology and embodiment. Emblematic of this early filmic work, “Two Correlated Rotations” (1969) was a perceptual, kinetic exercise that explored the interaction of two cameras, utilized as extensions of each performer's body, with the subjectivity of the viewer.