Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

dan graham’s kammerspiel
jeff wall
Dan Graham’s unrealized (and possibly unrealizable) project Alteration to a Suburban House
(1978) generates a hallucinatory, almost Expressionist image by means of a historical critique
of conceptual art. In this work, conceptualism is the discourse which fuses together three of
the most resonant architectural tropes of this century (the glass skyscraper, the glass house and
the suburban tract house) into a monumental expression of apocalypse and historical tragedy.
In 1978, when the denunciation of conceptual art began to be openly articulated by
advocates of new subjective, narcissistic and frankly commercial attitudes, Graham constructed
a profoundly expressive work on the basis of conceptualism. At a moment when conceptualism’s
suppression of the expressive element in art, once seen as the movement’s radical achievement,
is decried as the source of its failure and collapse, Graham transformed conceptual
methods into their opposites, drawing unexpected conclusions from them. These conclusions,
embodied in the Alteration project, suggest a new historical moment in regard to conceptual
art, the emergence of a new period in its interpretation and its historical significance.
Graham begins from the failure of conceptualism’s critique of art. But his intention is
not to celebrate that failure and throw away the lessons of the radical art of the 1960s in a
theatricalized revival of the myth of authenticity. Rather, he intends with the Alteration project