The Proliferation of Dan Graham's Pavilions

Abstract

This essay revisits American artist Dan Graham's original motivations for the development of his long‐running series of pavilion sculptures. It explores their relationship to minimalist art of the 1960s and to the postmodern architecture of the 1970s and 1980s, before considering the implications of their large number and global spread for their current critical purchase. It is argued that the proliferation of Graham's pavilions across innumerable sites since the early 1980s augments their mimicry of corporate architecture, lending additional credence to existing claims made for his work as a critical parallel to wider architectural trends. This is especially the case in so far as contemporary corporate architecture itself, as a key expression of today's ruling logic of finance capitalism, is programmed to proliferate as a ‘spatial fix’ for capital's periodic crises of over‐accumulation, as a means to absorb surplus capital.