Dan Graham - Schema (March 1966)

1966

Artists: Dan Graham · Year: 1966 · Medium: Conceptual-art piece, self-describing printed list of its own formal attributes · Substrate: Printed page in a magazine (multiple versions); each version's content self-describes that version's specific formal parameters · Place: New York, USA · Institution: John Daniels Gallery (Graham's own gallery) Dan Graham's Schema (March 1966) is a single page of typed text that describes, in strict enumeration, the physical properties of the page on which it is printed. It lists its own paragraph count, word count, column-width, typeface, and column-inch dimensions, and it was deliberately composed so that each printing in a magazine would change the specific numerical values. To print Schema is to generate a new version of Schema. The page is the object; the values describe the page; the description is therefore self-modifying each time the page is typeset. Schema ran first in Aspen 5+6 (the Aspen magazine issue edited by Brian O'Doherty, which also contained Sol LeWitt's Paragraphs on Conceptual Art and Mel Bochner's Serial Attitudes), and subsequently in Art-Language, Studio International, and a dozen other places, each time with slightly different numbers, each printing constituting, under the instructions, a new "version." Graham had built, on paper, a program whose output was the representation of its own execution. This is the premise of conceptual art, that the idea is the work, and the physical artifact only one of many possible executions, stated in the purest operational form the movement ever achieved. Schema anticipates, conceptually, every piece of self-descriptive code, every program that reports its own state, every "quine" in computer-science folklore. It also anticipates the practical form of much later web-era conceptual work, sites that display their own page source, Twitter bots that tweet their own code, N+7 generators, because it isolates the move: a text whose referent is its own material container. Graham was 24 when Schema appeared. He would go on to make video work, architecture-sculpture pavilions, and his landmark 1974 piece Present Continuous Past(s), but the 1966 text-object remains his most purely algorithmic composition and one of the cleanest conceptual-art parallels to first-generation computer art being made in Europe at the same moment. Lore Graham arrived at Schema while running the short-lived John Daniels Gallery in New York (1964–65), where he had shown LeWitt, Judd, Flavin, and the first one-person exhibition of Sol LeWitt. The gallery failed financially within a year. Graham, broke and unable to place his own work in galleries, began writing texts for magazines instead, and discovered that the magazine was a cheaper, stranger exhibition surface than the wall. He was fond of saying that he became a conceptual artist because he could not afford to be any other kind. Schema is the piece that proves the constraint was generative: he could not have made it without being forced to treat print itself as his medium. Sources • Graham, Dan, Rock My Religion: Writings and Projects 1965–1990 (MIT Press, 1993). • Aspen 5+6 (The Minimalism Issue), ed. Brian O'Doherty, 1967. • Museum of Modern Art, Dan Graham: Works, 1965–2000 (exh. cat. 2001).