Inside/Outside/In, Dorit Cypis, 2010

Inside/Outside/In
(performer/audience/mirror/dan graham/1975)

Dorit Cypis, 2010



Inside/Outside/In, Dorit Cypis, 2010
Dorit Cypis borrows formal elements from Performer/Audience/Mirror, and in a surrealist manner adds personal elements of text drawings, a clock, a concave mirror and a reproduction of Egon Schiele's drawing "The Artist and His Model", 1910. Inside/Outside/In engages Graham's earlier reflections on "seeing" with more liminal psychic elements of how we as subjects "see" from within as well as from without, including myth, memory, history, fantasy, dream... Cypis further engages us with how subjectivity displaces meanings of subject and object and constantly redefines identity and social relations and with how social engagement is a mutable dance of power and reciprocity. The inner Dan Graham space itself is extended out into the street with an arrangement of chairs suggesting the audience can choose to sit here, formally, or enter inside the space and participate more informally.

Dan Graham the artist is a muse here, a participant in memory and as generous teacher. Dan Graham the space provides the context of an architectural container and provocative memory of Dan Graham the artist thus generating a displacement between artist, history, space and viewer. The audience brings in their spent worlds, perceptions and projections. Together we engage. We make art, again.




Performer/Audience/Mirror, Dan Graham, 1975
Dan's work of 1975 structurally and formally reveals nuances of phenomenological identity through a performer, a mirror and an audience. He used these elements to make visible shifts in personal and cultural perception, and of time and space as mediated by how representation (the mirror) objectifies and displaces the subject. In 1975, when Dan created performer/audience/mirror, I was 24 years old and becoming aware of fluid relationships between phenomenology, psychology, political context and social relations. I have continued to work in this sandbox for the 35 years since.


Dan Graham, the space, Chinatown, LA, Aaron Wrinkle
Because I know Dan, Dan Graham the space is full of the memory and resonance of Dan Graham the artist. I cannot separate one from the other as my personal relationship with Dan is mediated by his name as title of the space. Even the fact that Dan Graham the space is located in Chinatown is meaningful to me as in the 1980's I often met Dan Graham the artist in Chinatown, NYC. Dan lived close to Chinatown and used it/knew it well. Aaron Wrinkle, the artist who created Dan Graham the space, provokes us to think of Dan Graham the artist, of name recognition and reputation as contextualizing ART and ARTIST, of generational learning via the MFA, of how ideas are represented and re-represented. Dorit Cypis

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Entertainment

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• art
• performance
• artist
• studio
• audience
• conceptual art