UNFOLD Audience/Performer/Mirror
Reinterpreting Dan Graham's iconic work
On 15 January 2020, LI-MA presented a new edition of UNFOLD exploring reinterpretation through Dan Graham’s Audience/Performer/Mirror (1977), performed at De Appel, Amsterdam. The first instance of Graham’s performance took place in San Francisco in 1975. The success of the piece allowed it to become a performative manifestation that could travel the world and engage a wider public, even to this day through the qualities of reinterpretation.
About Audience/Performer/Mirror (1977)
In the original performance, Graham describes his own actions and the reaction of the audience. Language plays a crucial role in the performance, allowing the verbal exchanges to become a reflection on time and direct feedback and an exploration of what motivates the individual spectator, the ‘who’, to act and respond.
In the performance Graham's unceasing commentary and dialogue betrays his background in stand-up comedy. The gaze of the camera, in addition to that of Graham and the mirror, plays an important role in this. The work is effective and layered in all its simplicity and has become an iconic work. The analogy that Graham uses in the work, both at the level of technology and that of language and physicality, has invited many artists to make a homage or a new version of the work.
Audience/Performer/Mirror (1977) - Dan Graham. Performed at De Appel.
UNFOLD 2020: Audience/Performer/Mirror (15/01/2020)
With Dan Graham’s performance at the forefront of inspection, LI-MA’s 2021 UNFOLD attempted to answer the following questions:
What does Audience/Performer/Mirror stand for today? How is the work experienced? Which part of the work is still relevant, and what needs to be ‘updated’?
LI-MA invited artists Keren Cytter, Jan Robert Leegte (and Miron Galić), Emile Zile and students of the Rietveld Academie to present their reinterpreted versions of Audience/Performer/Mirror live. While Jan Robert Leegte, Emile Zile translated the work into a contemporary context through digital techniques, Keren Cytter presented her work through a more critical and subtle feminist approach. Together the artists' reinterpretations provided the opportunity to think and re-think through reinterpretation, providing insight into their working methods and the lasting power of Dan Graham's work.
In addition to the performed reinterpretations of Dan Graham’s work, LI-MA also hosted an exhibition showcasing reinterpretations by Adad Hannah, Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard and Judith Hopf along with Dan Graham’s documented work from the De Appel’s archive. Together, the works showed the possibilities of reinterpretation and gave an artistic anthology, and criticism, of the work.
To end the evening of 15 January 2020, Gabriella Giannachi, researcher & professor of Performance and New Media at the University of Exeter; Annet Dekker, curator, researcher and assistant Professor of Media Studies University of Amsterdam; and Willem van Weelden, curator, researcher and tutor at media theory Gerrit Rietveld Academie, reflected upon reinterpretation as both an artistic and preservation strategy in a panel discussion.
