Dan Graham — Body Press and closed-circuit investigations

1970

Artists: Dan Graham · Year: 1970 · Medium: Closed-circuit video installations and performances — time-delay feedback loops as subject · Substrate: Sony Portapak video, closed-circuit camera-monitor setups, delay electronics, performance directives · Place: New York, USA · Institution: Leo Castelli Gallery; John Weber Gallery Dan Graham's Body Press (1970–72) is a two-channel 16mm film. Two naked performers, a man and a woman, stand inside a short mirrored cylinder, each holding a camera against their body and rotating — the man turning his camera up along his torso, the woman turning hers down along hers. The two cameras film each other's reflection in the mirrored walls and, simultaneously, each other's bodies in motion. The two resulting films are projected side by side: a stereoscopic, full-body video of two humans attempting to film themselves through each other. The piece is, operationally, a system. The rules are simple and specified in Graham's instructions for the work: two performers, two cameras, one mirrored cylinder, constant rotation, no cuts. The output is determined by the system and the bodies operating it. Graham had been thinking, since his 1966 Schema, about works whose form was a specification rather than a composition; Body Press is Schema's argument executed through an entire cinematic-sculptural apparatus. The cylinder matters. Mirrored surfaces turn any film made inside them into a chorus of fragmentary selves; the camera sees its own reflection, the operator's reflection, and the other operator's reflection, layered infinitely. The rotation imposes a tempo. The bodies — specifically, their physical presence, the fact that the cameras are held against skin — prevent the work from becoming abstract. This is a machine-generated film whose generator is a body, a camera, and a circular wall. Graham would make, over the next decade, a series of video and performance works — Performer/Audience/Mirror (1975), Present Continuous Past(s) (1974), Cinema (1981) — in which architectural arrangements of mirrors, cameras, and human bodies produced emergent spatial and temporal feedback. Body Press is the earliest of the major ones. It is now held in four 16mm prints at the Museum of Modern Art, Dia, the Van Abbemuseum, and the Marian Goodman Gallery, all of which occasionally project it in pairs as Graham specified. Lore Graham originally conceived Body Press as a performance for two people, with live video feed to monitors in a gallery; the film version was a compromise made after the logistics of a live two-camera rotating mirror piece proved unmanageable for a 1970 gallery. He hired the performers — dancers he had met through the Judson Dance Theater circle — and rented the mirrored cylinder from a window-display fabricator in the Garment District. The cost of the original production was under $400. He was 28. The film's naked performers meant that several museums declined to exhibit it in the early 1970s; it was acquired by MoMA only in 1992 after Graham's work had been retrospectively vindicated. Sources • Graham, Dan — Rock My Religion: Writings and Projects 1965–1990 (MIT Press, 1993). • Museum of Modern Art — Dan Graham: Works, 1965–2000 (exh. cat. 2001). • Van Abbemuseum — Dan Graham collection files.