R. H. Quaytman on Dan Graham
Considering again on my thirty-year friendship with Dan Graham, I notice, solely now, that getting into his orbit was lots like moving into certainly one of his glass pavilions. There was an out of doors and an inside, with a threshold between them that was optically however not bodily permeable. As anybody who knew Dan will attest, he may 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 frequent life story. He had a method of getting at your deepest fears, laying them out like an affordable country-and-western music and thereby miraculously defusing them.
However then there was the opposite aspect of the glass—Dan’s ideas about this panorama, the artwork world that we have been entangled in. To be Dan’s good friend, and to really recognize the pavilion, one wanted a want to learn the way he himself interpreted these environment and their histories, ideas, temporalities. Once 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 all the time pointless. He couldn’t hear, in spite of everything; he was on the opposite aspect of the glass.
To enter dialog with Dan was to take part in a vibrant, all-encompassing cosmology that occurred from time to time to line up with my goals. By means of him, I realized that it was essential to invent an imaginary route. I trusted his steering due to what guided it: a sturdy feminism and a World Warfare II–period socialist populism that all the time charmed me. His proclamatory politics have been based mostly in a love and belief of the floor of issues. His associates will snicker at reminiscences of the messages he would sometimes depart on our answering machines, screaming New York Put up–model headlines into the receiver. Dan’s temper may flip from concave to convex relying on whether or not his pondering communicated delight, humor, affection, and hypothesis or the inverse: impatience, anger, disdain, and gossip. To like and be taught from Dan was to belief that his optics, distorting as they generally have been, oriented us in a single course, one which led away from elites and alienation and towards connection, towards play, towards, because the music goes, the sunny aspect of the road.
R. H. Quaytman is an artist based mostly in Guilford, Connecticut.