Automotive Prosthetic: Technological Mediation and the Car in Conceptual Art

4. Communication Space: Automotive Urbanism in Dan Graham’s Work

\\ 151 the haptic unconscious of dan graham’s urbanism the spread of suburbia after world war ii correlated with [the] automobile ’s alteration of American life. the new, middle-class, suburban family was more transient than ever before, more willing to pack up and move quickly to another location. corporations spread and decentralized, shifting their staffs from branch to branch throughout the country. the suburban automotive period also saw the rise in drive-in cinemas and shopping malls. it was the use of the automobile for leisure and decline of the urban cinema that led to the many highway theme parks, of which disneyland is the best known example. dan grahaM, “garden as theater as MuseuM,” DAN GRAHAM: BEYOND Chapter 4 Auto m o tive urBAn ism in dAn grAhAm ’s w o rk communicAtion sPAce 152 // Automotive Prosthetic The automobile has an elusive presence in the work of Dan Graham. As what is arguably the primary force behind the formation of American suburbia , it is an implicit component of the foundation upon which Graham’s suburban-themed art projects have been fabricated. The suburbs do not exist without highways and cars, and thus Graham’s suburban-based work is couched in an automotive network of architectural development. Graham interrogates the relations between perception, technology, and the formative role of the generalized suburban context in works such as Homes for America (1966–1967), Picture Window Piece (1974), Alteration to a Suburban House (1978),Video Projection outside Home (1978),Clinic fora Suburban Site (1978), and Video View of Suburbia in an Urban Atrium (1979– 1980).While transportation by the car is a central motivatorof the suburban templateof life set in relief spatially by these projects, the car remains simply inferred, an unconscious consideration. Its presence is often marginal, materializing for example in the words “Car Hop, Jersey City, NJ,” handwritten beneath a color photograph of the interior of a roadside fast-food restaurant in the framed and collaged version of Graham’s magazine piece, Homes for America (1966–1967) (Figure 4.1).1 A form of marginalia, the words propound Michel Foucault’s destabilizing exegesis of the “work” as a matter of both periphery and center: the “work” is aphorisms, rough drafts, and “the notes and deleted passages at the bottom of the page” that exist outside of and in counterpoise to the “masterpiece” and finished work of art.2 As the title of a single photograph within the piece, the words set off a fury of suggestion about Dan Graham’s “work” of art called Homes for America. We understand the project to be fundamentally about double, triple, and quadruple intentions: a loquaciously self-reflexive interrogation of the “subject ” conceived multidimensionally—as artist, viewer, work of art, art world frame, magazine structure, suburban landscape, and automobile infrastructure . The prodigious chattering that is internal to Homes for America strikes a mobility of form akin to electronic noise. The self-reflexivity of the piece is a frenetic force, one of the varied trajectories of communication space: a zone within Graham’s work delimited by human and technological relations —the prosthetic connection that links urbanism, house, dweller, car, and electronic gadget. In another photograph taken at the same roadside restaurant, the automobile is just beyond the frame, thereon the road but unseen (Figure 4.2).Used as part of an exhibition of projected slides that is a component of Homes for America, the photograph sets in play the car as an unnoticed motivator of Communication Space \\ 153 urban form. Though there are no cars in the split second of Graham’s snapshot , one imagines cars before and after the picture driving swiftly along on the highway strip just outside the window in front of a family of three sitting on swivel-top stools.The viewer sees their backs in front of a large glass pane as they look out onto a momentarily car-less roadway running at an oblique angle. Perhaps making a stop while out for a Sunday drive, they are dressed in their best.The son wears a checkered suit coat, the mother a red coat and yellow ribbon in her hair, and the father a dark tweed suit. In another shot from the same slide-projection series, the viewer sees a woman sitting inside a tour bus (Figure 4.3). She is ensconced in the pill-shaped window of the backdoor of the tour bus. Here the automobile...