Lot 24 | Dan Graham | First Day Opening of Highway Restaurant, Jersey City, NJ

GRAHAM, DAN
1942 Urbana/Illinois - 1922 New York

Title: First Day Opening of Highway Restaurant, Jersey City, NJ.
Date: 1967.
Technique: C-print.
Mounting: Mounted on card.
Depiction Size: 26,5 x 34cm.
Notation: . Signed, dated, titled and dedicated to Kasper König.
Frame: Framed. Not examined out of the frame.


Provenance:
- Kasper König Collection, Berlin (directly from artist)

"Homes for America"
From 1965 onwards, Dan Graham concentrated on exploring art and conceptual photography in particular. After the closure of the John Daniels Gallery in New Jersey, New York City and Staten Island, he began to photograph various suburban motifs. The documentation of single-family homes in the American suburbs was the first project that Graham systematically began from 1965 to 1966. The architectural conformity of the houses and the suburban uniformity resulted in serial forms. Graham planned to publish the results in a renowned magazine with numerous illustrations. "Homes for America" will be shown as a dia-projection at the Finch College Museum of Art in the exhibition "Projected Arts". Parallel to the exhibition, there is the possibility of publishing his project, but the article will be published in "Arts Magazine" without the conceived illustrations.

Conceptual approaches
Graham explains his concept as follows: "This was the first time that art had been published (minimal in this case) that had been conceived as a place but created solely in terms of the information that the reader was to take from the context of a document intended for the masses and to be thrown away, rather than encountering reality itself [...]." (translated) Graham continues the project in the suburbs of New Jersey, as with artist Robert Smithson at Flower Hill Cemetery in North Bergen, NJ (Lot 118).

New Jersey
The opening of a highway restaurant in Jersey City is included in the "Homes for America" series with several photographs. The composition is divided into two halves by a restaurant employee standing in the middle, while adults are grouped around a table on the right. On the left, children are waiting at the counter, from whom the girl in the red dress is moving away. The clothing of the employee and the guests, as well as the restaurant interior, identify the scene as a typical American everyday situation. Since the article does not publish the illustrations, Graham launched his layout boards designed for the report in 1970 and inserted this photograph, which was printed in the numerous catalogs and essays that followed.