R. H. Quaytman on Dan Graham
Considering again on my thirty-year friendship with Dan Graham, I understand, solely now, that getting into his orbit was rather a lot like entering into certainly one of his glass pavilions. There was an outdoor and an inside, with a threshold between them that was optically however not bodily permeable. As anybody who knew Dan will attest, he might deploy an intense focus towards his interlocutor that made it really feel like he actually noticed you. He was a soothsayer, a reader of the indicators and markers of our widespread life story. He had a method of getting at your deepest fears, laying them out like an affordable country-and-western track and thereby miraculously defusing them.
However then there was the opposite facet of the glass—Dan’s ideas about this panorama, the artwork world that we had been entangled in. To be Dan’s buddy, and to really respect the pavilion, one wanted a need to find out how he himself interpreted these environment and their histories, ideas, temporalities. After I began working for Dan, in my early thirties, I had absorbed too many conflicting concepts about artwork and was having hassle trusting or believing any of them. Dan gave me a backbeat to march to as I pushed my work ahead amid the overwhelming cacophony. I wanted to seek out an artist with whom there was simply no arguing, and I received that in spades. Arguing with Dan was at all times pointless. He couldn’t hear, in any case; he was on the opposite facet of the glass.
To enter dialog with Dan was to take part in a vibrant, all-encompassing cosmology that occurred now and again to line up with my desires. By way of him, I discovered that it was essential to invent an imaginary route. I trusted his guidance due to what guided it: a sturdy feminism and a World Struggle II–period socialist populism that at all times charmed me. His proclamatory politics had been based mostly in a love and belief of the floor of issues. His mates will chuckle at reminiscences of the messages he would sometimes go away on our answering machines, screaming New York Submit–fashion headlines into the receiver. Dan’s temper might flip from concave to convex relying on whether or not his considering communicated delight, humor, affection, and hypothesis or the inverse: impatience, anger, disdain, and gossip. To like and study from Dan was to belief that his optics, distorting as they generally had been, oriented us in a single path, one which led away from elites and alienation and towards connection, towards play, towards, because the track goes, the sunny facet of the road.
R. H. Quaytman is an artist based mostly in Guilford, Connecticut.
