Art is Process! Not Function!

author Dan Graham
interviewed by Matej Mljač

 

ORIS: Your art projects were from the beginning very connected to the experience of space and time. Let’s start talking about your big interest in ’just-past time’ during the sixties and the connections between music on the one hand and space, architecture and art on the other.

 

Graham: Well, Terry Reilly, and after that Steve Reich1, fused the ’just-past’ time delay to make music. It is very much like feedback-time. In other words it’s ’inside your brain’ time, which gets feedback to you at the same time, so it becomes a feeling of extended present time, probably analogous to the feeling after smoking marihuana. I was interested in breaking the sixties idea of the immediate past, which made everything disposable. Literal Art in the sixties was about object art. I became more interested in the objectivity of the spectator than the object itself and I got that from music. But I was also interested in Walter Benjamin’s idea of the ’just-past’.