It is now, in 2014, precisely fifty years ago that Dan Graham more or less by accident, as he says, ended up in the world of visual art. Initially he played a role as co-founder of the John Daniels Gallery in New York and as an art critic, but soon Graham also became active as a conceptual artist. He made use of language, photography and video, produced films, held performances and created installations and pavilions.
Although his body of work has great diversity, its coherence is equally striking. He has little concern for art as an entity unto itself. From the very start, a socially critical involvement could be discerned in his work. While many conceptual artists seemed to be renouncing any connection with the world around them, Graham was in fact striving to give shape to his commitment to social issues through conceptual art.
Among his earliest works are the photographs that he took during the mid 1960s with his Kodak Instamatic: these show postwar prefab homes in all sorts of suburban surroundings.

Due to the way in which the identical, box-shaped dwellings have been portrayed, the rows of houses bear some resemblance to the sculptures of Donald Judd. Also in his photographs of trucks, warehouses, roadside diners and apartment complexes there is a striking similarity to the impersonal, serial language of forms found in minimal art.
‘I wanted to show that minimalism was related to a real social situation that could be documented,’ he later said about this. In his photographs the uniformity of the suburbs takes on an abstract quality. At the same time, they portray a day-to-day reality in which pop culture was rooted, and where youth’s resistance to the established order found an outlet in the punk and rock music that Graham liked so much.
Along with architecture and music, psychology is a field that interests Graham to a great extent. A recurrent theme in his performances and installations from the 1970s is the discovery of the self in a confrontation with one’s own reflection and the gaze of the other.

The audience was often given an active role in this, as with the installation Public Space/Two Audiences carried out for the Venice Biennial of 1976. For this installation Graham divided a space in two with a partition of glass, and then fitted a mirror onto the end wall of one of those spaces. The public could enter both spaces. Visitors, rather than art, were ‘on display’ here. This gave rise to a confusing situation: one of observing oneself and others, of experiencing how one was being observed and how others also felt observed.
The free-standing pavilions of two-way mirror glass seem a logical subsequent step. ‘My pavilions derive their meaning from the people who look at themselves and others, and who are being looked at themselves. Without people in them, they might look a bit like minimal-art sculptures, but that’s not what they’re meant to be,’ Graham emphasized. Their arrangement outdoors provides them with an extra dimension. Because of the changeability of daylight, they constantly assume different appearances. In Two Adjacent Pavilions, one of the first pavilions actually to be carried out and which became part of the collection of the Kröller-Müller Museum after being shown at the 1982 Documenta, Graham exploited this quality. The two neighboring pavilions appear to be the same. Yet one has a transparent roof and the other does not. On a cloudy day there is no difference, and both reflect the surroundings. On a sunny day the pavilion with the transparent roof, however, becomes completely transparent; its interior suddenly becomes visible, along with any visitors who happen to be present.