Humour, anthropology and psychoanalytic theory may not be natural bedfellows, but the artist Dan Graham spent more than 50 years utilising all three in a prodigious career that encompassed photography, video, performance and sculpture and strayed into architecture, astrology and music criticism.
In 1966, Graham, who has died aged 79, was travelling on a train from Manhattan to New Jersey when he saw a subtle pattern emerge in the otherwise identikit new housing springing up along the line. The artist’s subsequent photographs of these “tract housing” developments appeared in an issue of Art News magazine under the headline Homes for America, alongside an essay describing an apparent mathematical formula the artist could discern in the architecture.
