Dan Graham: Is There Life After Breakfast?
Dan Graham
Is There Life After Breakfast?
Curated by Peter Fischli
Marian Goodman New York | 15 March – 29 April 2023
Press Release | Checklist | Statement by Peter Fischli, curator
Exhibition Playlist (Spotify)
''With Dan’s texts of bright thinking, profound knowledge and sharp analyses of lyrics in popular music in mind, I always speculated why he selected a song—the so-called meaning of the song and what that meaning meant to Dan. The contradiction of the vernacular and the distinctive, or the ridiculous and the sublime, was well balanced in the playlist of each CD.''
In the North Gallery Viewing Room, an immersive sound component with a playlist, curated by Graham, reveals the artist’s eclectic music tastes, creating a mise-en-scene that is part suburban arcade, part manga video lounge.
In the South Gallery, prints, objects, and collectibles—assembled as a private cosmology invoking the work of Fischli/Weiss— range from informal bricolages to a few rare novelties from the artist’s personal collection.
View Map of South Gallery
“I designed a skateboard pavilion because in the 1980s, skaters were basically banned from city parks. It was a two-way mirror pyramid with the top cut away positioned over a bowl covered in graffiti. The skaters would be able to go up in the air and experience a kaleidoscopic distortion of the surrounding corporate architecture.
“It was about inserting psychedelic feelings inside the fascist monolith. At the moment, I’m trying not to be against corporate culture, at least not in the way that many socially critical artists are. I now want to coexist with it.”
— Dan Graham (1942–2022), Bomb Magazine, August 2019