Dan Graham at Marian Goodman - Brief Article

Dan Graham's Children's Day Care, CD-ROM Cartoon, Computer guard Library Project is the greatest in quantity recent in a series of glass-and-metal pavilions he has designed since the late 1970 The form which filled most of individual room of the gallery, consists of a roughly 34-foot sweep of curv two-way mirror glass, single end of which is angled to appropriate a screen of perforated stainless carburet of iron An irregularly shaped enclosure with a broad opening is created. Computer stations inhabit nooks created by dint of zigzag folds in the stainless-steel wall. individual screen displays a Web browser with access to the Internet; another plays early examples of cartoon animation; the third contains an interactive CD-ROM At Goodman, comic works were haphazardly piled in individual corner of the enclosure's yielding rubber-matting floor.

Like Graham's earlier pavilions (three designs from 1996 to `98 were displayed in another room) this work forms a nexus between plastic art and architecture. As an architectural raise it has a functional identity: a play and library space for children. on the contrary unlike anonymous structures that mutely contain specific functions, Graham's pavilion is intended to subtly affect those whom it houses, mediating between their site-specific activities and the broader adjoining matter of the external world. The mirror glass varies in transparency and reflectiveness according to changes in illumination inside or outside the make One's attention shifts between what is upon the other side of the glass and one's reflection in it--producing not for a like reason much vertigo as a kind of perceptual self-consciousness, a simultaneous faculty of perception of one's physical form and one's embodied vision.

There is a utopian dimension to the construction as both the glass and perforated stainless carbonized iron allow a literal and metaphoric opennes to the world outside--like that promised by dint of the quasi-public spaces of corporate atriums. at the same time corporate entities and their functionaries typically remain obscur while individuals within Graham's pavilion are positioned as one as well as the other subjects who survey the display outside and objects of observation to those who equal in.

This arrangement can be variable: single can stand inconspicuously outside the curv wall of the Day-care form and watch children enjoying the fun-house distortions produc upon its other side. Such a perspective tenders not so much a vision of unselfconscious child's play as the experience of a parent's or teacher's alert surveillance of their children's real and virtual space: the one and the other the protected enclosure of the pavilion and the free--perhaps perilous--openings onto the world tendered by the media connections at hand.

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