PERFORMER / AUDIENCE / MIRROR – DAN GRAHAM – 1975 (1977) 

(VIDEO OF LIVE PERFORMANCE, 22 min 52 secs)

 

Located in a dance studio the audience is seated on the floor facing a mirrored wall (looking back at themselves). Dan Graham enters the room and faces the audience with his back to the mirror. He starts to describe his appearance and his movements as they occur and then the movements and appearance of the audience he sees before him. Graham then turns to face the mirror and starts to describe his appearance/behaviour and the audience's reactions influenced by what he sees in its reflection.

 

Performer/Audience/Mirror is the most complex of Graham's performances and his last experiment with live work that wasn't theatrical. His use of the mirror provides an architectural dimension to the field of self-reflection and group dynamics, allowing for the audience to cross-reference how Graham describes them as a social group with how they view themselves in the mirror. This is what Graham called the continuous present time and the static present time.

 

Performer/Audience/Mirror managed to enter and make visible the internalised reflection process, highlighting Graham's adeptness at making processes tangible. It opened up the dialogue of art as a two-way street traversed simultaneously by the artists and the viewer. All of Graham's early performance work is still so current today due to this feedback loop it is built upon and the alternatives it can still offer to the communication structures we adhere to. (Watch video extract)