Dan Graham unpublished

Dan Graham, pavillion

By ANTÓNIO CERVEIRA PINTO

Twelve years later

I decided to publish an old essay I wrote for Dan Graham's retrospective at Serralves museum. Though I wrote it on commission for the museum, by motives I never quite understood it was rejected by Dan Graham. About it Marianne Brower, co-curator of the show wrote an enthusiastic email to me after she got the English version of my text originally written in Portuguese. I kept the email as a testimony that it is about time to make public my words:

“Schema Likes Children’s Day Care
Art and complexity in Dan Graham’s work.”

Email transcript:

“very good, very different from the others, very radical, funny combination of old-fashion and future, the only true theoretical view on the pavilions, very intelligent”

Marianne Brower
August, 23  2000

I wrote in the end of the essay about Graham:

“Dan Graham’s biggest contribution to contemporary art has, in my opinion, been the reiterative launch of the philosophic and æsthetic grounds of an interactive art in a state of rupture with the elitist notions that tend to view it as a private property of taste, in a state, of rupture, too, with the formalist notions that tend to restrict it to a mere place for anarchistic contemplation of the innominable.”

It was true in August 2000 as it is now.

Carcavelos, 30 April 2012.

Copyright © 2012 by António Cerveira Pinto

Dan Graham by ACP (2000) by António Cerveira Pinto