Homes for America

Dan Graham, Homes for America, Arts Magazine, 1966-67.

Dan Graham, Homes for America, 1965, Photography.

'Large scale 'tract' housing 'developments' constitute the new city.'

- Dan Graham.1

 During the 1960s Dan Graham positioned art within the media. Thus, by integrating the art object with its social production, he negated the formalist ideology that isolated art as autonomous from social life. The piece Homes for America was published as a photo-essay in Arts Magazine in 1966. In this work, the textual explanation is not an address to an external artwork; instead, the work and the explanation appear as a singular piece of information.

The bland uniformity of the American suburban setting is composed such that it registers with the visual seriality of Minimalist sculpture. The critic Gregory Battcock in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology claims that Homes for America demonstrates "minimal-type surfaces and structures as they are found by the artist (photographer, sculptor) in nature..."2 As such, Graham achieves a remarkable, deadpan humored commentary on both art and everyday life.

Lance Pearce

1 Dan Graham, 'Homes for America,' Arts Magazine, Dec 1966 - Jan 1967, 20-21.

2 Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968, 175.

Additional sources

Mary Bergstein, 'Lonely Aphrodites: On the Documentary Photography of Sculpture,' The Art Bulletin, 74:3 (Sep., 1992), 475-498.

Kirsten Swenson, 'Be My Mirror,' Art in America, May 2009.

Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, Walker Evans and Dan Graham (exhibition text).