Harper’s Bazaar March 1968 - Figurative by Dan Graham
I had a few old magazines. I was Ebay’ing some of them and someone from Sweden asked a scan from one of the magazines. It’s Harper’s Bazaar magazine and the page has an artwork on it by Dan Graham. It’s an interesting piece, I found a few sources on the web about it:
Following the “Homes for America” project, Dan Graham created a diverse oeuvre of artwork and theory. He began by using commonly available resources such as advertising, music, and television, to communicate a critical art perspective. One of his most notable examples of this type, is a work titled, “Figurative.” Here Graham documented a strip of paper from a calculator or cash register. The paper has a series of unrelated numbers in a consecutive series. Graham printed the strip of paper next to text that read “Figurative by Dan Graham,” and the work was displayed in an issue of Bazaar magazine in the advertisement section. Here Graham played on the viewers’ expectations for commercial imagery. The intention of the artist seems incomprehensible save for that of provoking the viewer of the magazine into a re-consideration of the validity of mass-produced imagery.
Dan refers to these “magazine pieces” as “clichés”, in the twofold ironic and professional meaning of the term; as sort of “small rock songs”, tied to the clichés of the moment, contextual and (I continue to quote him) ephemeral as the paper dresses conceived by the fashion designers of those times. In the apparently transparent reign of the media, the possible pages of Scheme(1965)/Schema(1966) appear as enigmatic typographical iterations, as puritanical versions of concrete poetry, as Buddhist tautologies, or as inexplicable accidents of pagination causally side by side with a fantastic advert for “bras”, as seen in the “variant” of Scheme called Figurative, published in Harper’s Bazaar in March 1968, in which one can read:
“If nature didn’t, Warner’s will. / Our Comfort Curve™ bra with low-cut sides will do it for $5. Warners®.”
Dan Graham, in For Publication, 1975
This points to a shortcoming of classical Conceptualism. Benjamin Buchloh pointsout that “while it emphasized its universal availability and its potential collectiveaccessibility and underlined its freedom from the determinations of the discursiveand economic framing conventions governing traditional art production and recep-tion, it was, nevertheless, perceived as the most esoteric and elitist artistic mode.”Kosuth’s quotation from Roget’s Thesaurus placed in an Artforum box ad, or DanGraham’s list of numbers laid out in an issue of Harper’s Bazaar, were uses ofmass media to deliver coded propositions to a specialist audience, and the impactof these works, significant and lasting as they were, reverted directly to the rela-tively arcane realm of the art system, which noted these efforts and inscribed themin its histories. Conceptualism’s critique of representation emanated the same man-darin air as did a canvas by Ad Reinhart, and its attempts to create an Art DegreeZero can be seen as a kind of negative virtuosity, perhaps partly attributable to aNew Left skepticism towards pop culture and its generic expressions