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Dan Graham
Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors on Time Delay, 1974/1993

Artwork Info

Artwork title
Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors on Time Delay
Artist name
Dan Graham
Date created
1974/1993
Classification
video installation
Medium
two mirrors, two cameras, two monitors, time delay
Dimensions
360 in. × 360 in. (914.4 cm × 914.4 cm)
Date acquired
1993
Credit
Collection SFMOMA
Gift of Dare and Themis Michos and Accessions Committee Fund purchase: gift of Collectors Forum, Doris and Donald Fisher, Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr., Pamela and Richard Kramlich, Leanne B. Roberts, Madeleine H. Russell, and Helen and Charles Schwab
Copyright
© Dan Graham
Permanent URL
https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/93.78.1-0007
Artwork status
Not on view at this time.

Audio Stories

The artist describes this deceptively simple installation work

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transcripts

NARRATOR: 

At first glance, Dan Graham’s “Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors on Time Delay” seems to be a very simple set-up. Two television monitors and two cameras are located in a room, each facing a mirror. The first complication occurs in the way the placement of the mirrors directly across from each other creates a view of infinite regression. But it also has to do with the physical space that it occupies. Here’s Dan Graham. 

 

GRAHAM:  

It also has a lot to do with the space itself. Its a Golden Mean rectangle. Its a six-seconds time delay, and it takes six seconds to walk from one side to the other. So its very much about the space itself. 

 

NARRATOR: 

We invite you to become part of the piece. You can experience yourself in real time; and then see a bit of your own past – from six seconds before – on the television monitor.  
 

GRAHAM: 

I think you’ll find some people reacting to the image of themselves being seen by other people, and I have to say when I was fourteen I read Jean Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” and he said that the ego is formed by a small child seeing somebody else seeing them, as they see another person. So it’s all intersubjective space. 

 

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