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).