Rock My Religion collects eighteen of Graham's essays from all
periods of his work, beginning with his essays on minimalist artists
such as Dan Flavin and Donald Judd, continuing with his writings on punk
rock and popular culture, and concluding with his more recent
considerations of architecture, urban space, and power.
Dan Graham's artworks and critical writings have had an enormous
influence on the course of contemporary art over the past quarter
century. Rock My Religion collects eighteen of Graham's essays from
all periods of his work, beginning with his essays on minimalist artists
such as Dan Flavin and Donald Judd, continuing with his writings on punk
rock and popular culture, and concluding with his more recent
considerations of architecture, urban space, and power.
Alternating with these theoretical essays are descriptions and
documentations of Graham's own works and installations--projects that
trace his explorations in conceptual art, video, photography,
architecture, and public sculpture, showing the integral connections
between Graham's criticism and his own artwork. Although as an artist
Graham has been associated with minimalism, conceptual art, and
postmodernism, his writing does not conform to the stylistic and
theoretical constraints of any specific movement. With sources and
topics ranging from Ronald Reagan to the Sex Pistols, from Michel
Foucault to Dean Martin, Graham's eclectic investigations into the
complex cultural relationships between art production and social reality
are always strikingly original. What makes these writings particularly
astonishing, though, is Graham's willingness to examine specific
manifestations of popular culture (television, magazines, rock and roll,
drugs) without regard to traditional qualitative judgments and without
separating high or low culture from the processes of everyday life.
