The Skateboard Pavilion is
Designed to be Graffitied:
Dan Graham in Conversation
with Anthony Kiendl
Dan Graham: I first got into the skateboard pavilion when I went
to the Hayward Gallery in London. There were skateboarders all
over the curved and concrete structure. So I thought, why not put
together art and skateboarding?
Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth turned me onto a magazine
called Thrasher that featured Minor Threat and Black Flag, and I
saw some designs; one was a bowl shape. If I made the skateboard
pavilion, I would allow the skateboarders to design the ramps
themselves. I would make the top into a cut-away pyramid, two-way
mirror glass, a little like a nineteenth century music gazebo.
In the late 1980s, all major cities had buildings with pyramidshaped roofs. So I thought I would make this scintillating diamond
pattern, so that when you are up in the air it’s a little like making
1980s neo-Fascist architecture; something that is psychedelic. When
you’re up in the air, you can see everybody looking from the side;
the sky will change, back and forth. I was also coming from the same
influence that Gordon Matta-Clark did: Louis Kahn. It was almost made in Leeds in 2000, however city officials,
decided to construct a big water drum instead. Vito Acconci did a
skateboard pavilion, of course based on mine, and in Rem Koolhaas’
Prada shop in New York there is also a ramp.
Anthony Kiendl: I wanted to ask you about Gordon-Matta Clark
and your take on his work, especially the cutting pieces.
DG: Gordon Matta-Clark studied at the school of architecture in
Ithaca, and I’m sure he read Oppositions (which I read) by Peter
Eisenman’s. I also think he was deeply influenced by Louis Kahn,
which nobody mentions. Instead of making monuments, Kahn made
anti-monuments; in other words, he cut away at and memorialised
something that was about to be destroyed anyway. And of course
this cutting originated from Michael Grey’s first house, the Benserof
house, where he cut away at an existing structure. I think Frank
Gehry also comes from this direction. American president, Jimmy
Carter, was also an influence on my work. His mantra was that we
shouldn’t consume any more, due to limited energy supplies. So the
ideas was to cut away, to eliminate. In other words to take Mies van
der Rohe’s “less is more” more literally.
Matta-Clark was very fascinated by the city plan, certainly in
his conical intersect, for Les Halles area in Paris. It was an historical,
working class area that was being torn down for the Centre
Pompidou. Matta-Clark, however, wanted to cut away; to reveal,
rather than to build in this instance.
AK: You describe his work as anti-monumental. Do you see your
own work as anti-monumental?
DG: The people I used to be compared to—Benjamin Buchloch,
Michael Asher, John Knight—perceive my work as monumental.
They are very against the DIA Foundation (piece); they think I
should deconstruct, not construct. I think my work is humanistic. It
is never that large.
My work derives from Russian Constructivism. It was half
functional and quasi-utopian symbolic. Things that are functional,
interest me because they are somewhere between art and
architecture, or minor architecture. I was very influenced by Flavin
and Sol Lewitt. Unlike Flavin—but more like Lewitt—my work is
concerned with the city plan and city grids. I think Matta-Clark was
very aware of such things.
AK: What I find really interesting about your work is its connection
to your early performance video work. Even in the pavilions you can
see the reflection of the spectators in relationship to one another.
DG: When I was 14, I read parts of Being and Nothingness by Sartre,
which led me to Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage. This influenced
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Dan Graham
Death by Chocolate:
West Edmonton
Shopping Mall, 2005
Production stills
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the first pavilion I made, which was a philosophical model with two
two-way mirror cubes that faced one another. The way I used the
glass is very different from corporate use which is always a one-way
mirror. Inside its dark, and you can see outside without being seen.
From the outside you just see a mirror reflection. I wanted to make
that into a heterotopia, being both transparent and reflective.
The relationship of spectators to one another became very
important to me. This is something you find in normal architecture
in the city. Even though I had not read Walter Benjamin, this notion
has a lot to do with his Arcades Project.
consume any more. In response, architects and artists eliminated
rather than built structures. The idea was to make a cut, and that
would be the artwork; to construct by taking away. In this sense
such an action contradicts Mies.
Venturi reacted against Mies, equating the architect with
corporate power (he reduced everything to corporate power). MattaClark was definitely a Marxist; he wanted to subvert the system.
AK: Did he live in your neighbourhood?
DG: He lived on Forsyth Street very close to me. I went to a party
AK: When you talk about the shopping mall, I am reminded of the
that he gave once where everyone was rolling around on beds and
West Edmonton Mall. You’ve talked about how it is read in relation
sofas. He and his friends were heavily into drugs, and I thought this
to youth culture. What do you think of it architecturally?
is not for me. This was in the 1960s/1970s. I don’t think I really saw
much of his work at the time, we just came to the same conclusions
DG: West Edmonton Mall has to do with the onslaught of
reading Oppositions, and from having a similar interest in Kahn.
entertainment; everything is amusement park oriented now. I think I’m sure he began with Kahn as an antidote. All his work is about
the biggest problem for modern architecture, and modern cities,
sunlight or moonlight coming through cuts.
even art, is the omnipresence of Disneyland; in other words, theme
I have a theory about Kahn that no one else has mentioned.
parks. West Edmonton Mall is a consumer paradise that’s themed.
Kahn was very involved in Egyptian and Sumerian architecture and
It goes one step further than the arcades of the nineteenth century
I think he was worshipping the sun. People say he is a Medievalist,
and corporate atriums and shopping centres. It is more international but I think he was responding to these kinds of primitive forms.
in scope than Disneyland.
Although his primary influence was Grey’s Benseroff house,
Shooting at the West Edmonton Mall fed into my later interest in Matta-Clark anarchically reacted against Kahn’s monumentalism by
corporate atriums. When we shot it was a very business orientated
cutting away. With work by architects such as Frank Gehry, we now
period. The 1990s became more narcissistic, which the mirrors in the perceive the action of cutting away as simply a stylistic trick. Gehry,
Mall communicated to some extent.
however, began work as a social critic. He was political in a kind of
cynical way. I think this is the same with a lot of artists’ work, it
AK: To go back a bit, you quoted Mies’ “less is more”…
starts as political and then changes.
DG: In the late 1970s, because of the oil crisis in America, Jimmy
Carter wanted to get rid of nuclear power. He had been a nuclear
engineer, but turned around and said we should not produce or
AK: Do you think it loses its meaning?
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Dan Graham
Death by Chocolate: West Edmonton
Shopping Mall, 2005
Production stills
DG: I think you have different sponsors. With Matta-Clark, we
don’t know what his work might have become. Essentially he was
competing with his father, who was also an architect, but he also
shared his interest in Surrealism.
AK: When you talk about Jimmy Carter, is this how you felt at the
time, or something that you reflected on later?
DG: No, I was definitely influenced by him at the time. The whole
country was influenced. I don’t think he was a great president but,
in the late 1970s, one of the most radical issues was ecology and
this was something he addressed. America was the first country
to be involved in ecology, and now it is the biggest abuser of
the environment. I am still inspired by this period. There is an
architect who I love from that era, Emilio Ambaz, who makes things
underground; he was a huge influence on my Children’s Pavilion
project.
AK: How does the destruction of the World Trade Center impact
American society?
DG: In Mexico City they asked me what I thought about 9/11. I said
I had always hated it. The World Trade Center was for me a symbol
of what was wrong with the Reagan period in the 1980s. It is a badly
designed building. It was erected too quickly, so doesn’t have many
safety features, and was basically under-rented for a long time. It
is symbolic of what happened in every major city—the last being
Berlin—of people speculating on the downtown area and making
huge high rises where people work during the day, and desert at
night. Trevor Boddy’s notion that it was destroyed for symbolising
capitalist architecture made sense to me. I think he over-stated what
he was meant, but the intuition was correct.
AK: But there is something iconic about the World Trade Center.
DG: I think it is a phenomenon of the 1980s. This was a period
where everything was geometrical. We used pyramids on rooftops
(which IM Pei did at the Louvre). Corporations dominated; it was
a move of corporate power. In the 1990s, however, all corporate
building became elliptical—very Baroque—making them more
pleasurable and without the rigidity that such buildings used to have.
This is particularly prevalent in the city in London and was the
impetus for making the elliptical pavilion for Waterloo Sunset. In a
sense I was competing with and criticising Herzog and de Meuron’s
Tate Modern.
AK: You seem very optimistic about new buildings, that they are
pleasurable to be in.
DG: Well they are Baroque. When I made the DIA Foundation piece,
I used anamorphic distortions, the idea was to really break away
from minimal art. (I have learned a lot from minimal art, but of
course I’m also resisting it.)
AK: Do you say that now, on reflected, or have you always felt as such?
DG: Minimal art is less concerned with subjectivity and also
denys many things. For instance, Donald Judd’s work has a lot to
do with female imagery but he’s a very macho guy, so I think he
was looking to make a void. In some ways his work is also more
expressionistic than some people realise, because minimal writers
only talk about formalism. Flavin was also overtly expressionistic,
coming from such influences as Caspar David Friedrich and German
Expressionism, even American Abstract Expressionism. Barnett
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Dan Graham
Death by Chocolate:
West Edmonton Shopping
Mall, 2005
Production stills
AK: The one that’s there now?
DG: In architecture, late modernism was mostly comprised by people
who copied Mies van der Rohe, or awful work such as the Walker or
the Carnegie by Andrew Laraby Barnes. I don’t go so far as Jeff Wall
who denies all of modernism, by harking back to the nineteenth
century and early representationalism. I think my work is mimetic
of contemporary city architecture, its all about the city, and also
about Benjamin who was a student of the city and early media
culture. I discovered him indirectly first, through Marshall McLuhan
and then via Illuminations by Hannah Arendt. I feel a great affinity
to Benjamin. (Of course, his hero Baudelaire has almost the same
birthday as me, although I never read Baudelaire.)
I am not into Adorno, because he hated American culture. He
was a bit old-fashioned European. Buchloch, John Knight, Michael
Asher, however, all those people worshipped him. I had a problem
reading him because I love popular culture.
DG: No, the Two Audiences public space from 1976.
AK: And he said, “how can we have poetry after the Holocaust…”
AK: You said before Flavin was destroying other art. Can you
expand further?
DG: The worst architecture I have seen recently is the Holocaust
Museum by Liebeskind. It hits you over the head and makes you
feel guilty. The great thing about the Holocaust is that both Jews
and Germans feel guilty together; they can relate. Jewish guilt is
very important to Jewish culture, it has a lot to do with humour.
Newman too. So I think the subjectivity of minimal art was denied
and, as a consequence, I focused on the relationship between subject
and object (for, in philosophy, phenomenology and Sartre, there
is always a relationship between subject and object). When I use
materials in my work, they are real materials appropriated from the
city, thus reflecting and relating to real spaces within it.
Benjamin Buchloch, who hates minimal art, thought my interest was in reducing minimal art to a kind of sociological critique.
However, it’s a state of ambiguity that I create in materials. For
example, with the Venice Biennale piece, if you were there alone,
you would interacting with a big minimal work of art. When a crowd
culminates, however, it transforms into something psychological and social.
DG: Well, with garish lights it made the art irrelevant. I think
artists first start making work, particularly men, the results are
both destructive but also homages to other art. Flavin’s work is an
homage to Barnett Newman in many ways, who actually befriended
him. There is also an aspect of Pop in Flavin. One of his first pieces
was a flower pot. Inside he installed a light bulb with a rose inside,
which was illuminated. He called it Barbara Roses; the same name as
the leading critic at the time. He really had a nasty sense of humour!
AK: We talked about anti-monumentalism. Would you say you’re
anti-modernist?
AK: Liebeskind has also been involved with the reconstruction of
the World Trade Center site.
DG: Yes, but it is becoming diluted. I don’t like deconstructivism in
architecture. It was a false period.
AK: Have you seen the drawings for the new World Trade Center site?
DG: No, not in person, only bits and pieces on television.
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AK: What did you think of them?
sociology, it’s more about anthropology. I’m very interested in the
family structure.
DG: I think it looks good on paper.
AK: The last thing I want to ask you about is architectural models,
particularly your Scotch tape models. What are your thoughts about
models as opposed to actual architecture or pavilions?
DG: They are very useful pragmatically. I used to make them
early in the morning, and would take them to a site so the client
can see what they might actually look like. Also, I cannot work
with computer renderings because they don’t show the optics or
materiality. The Scotch tape models are perfect for this. The first
models I did were actually vernacular models and they were much
more interesting than the Scotch tape models.
AK: What kind of vernacular models?
DG: Alterations of a suburban house, the TV projector outside the
house. There was a model for Clinic. They were very small and
vernacular… and became normal for artists to do.
AK: Overall, your interest in children…
DG: Kids like my work. I think most artists’ work relates to their
earliest childhood memories. I am slightly schizophrenic, and
Matta-Clark’s piece Splitting (the idea of splitting the ego) has some
interest for me. It is also the influence of Jean Paul Sartre. The
other influence when I was young was Margaret Mead. I read her
books as a child because I was interested in sexuality and she was
very strongly for the matriarchy. I also read Shiumeth Firestone,
a Canadian from Ottawa, who wrote about feminism. Benjamin
Buchloch says my work is sociological. It’s not really, its ‘fake’
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Consumption/
Ruin
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