With Art After New Media in mind, it was interesting to hear Anthony Kiendl, Director of the Walter Phillips Gallery and symposium organizer, introduce Graham's work as "immersive, participatory, and situational" - terms very familiar in the new media world, although Graham's work has almost nothing to do with technology per se. Graham himself described one of the central issues of his work as the "intersubjective gaze" (shades of Eduardo Kac's "dialogic art"), and said that it is "about the specator not the object" and that it "always mimics the surroounding urban architecture but tries to make it utopian and pleasurable."
Pictured (poorly) is Graham's skateboard bowl. He described the truncated pyramidal form above the bowl with its transparent two-way glass as "psychedelicizing the 80s." The superstructure is, in part, a reference to 80s architectural predilections for pyramidal pediments. By opening it up at the top, he allows light to refract on the differently mirrored surfaces.
Whether you agree with them or not, it was refreshing to hear an artist let it rip with comments about being "ripped off by my ex-friend Vito Acconci" and describing Bill Viola's workk as "Sony-sponsored New Age Buddhism," as well as lamenting his tribulations with Dia to create the magnificent Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube on their roof, by which, he says, he intended to shift Dia from an elitist institution to a more populist institute for contemporary art, complete with cafe.
