January 25, 1975: Dan Graham
The first time I met Dan Graham was in a Projects class I was taking up on Coburg Road.
He was at NSCAD to install and perform several pieces at the new downtown Historic Properties campus. He came into the class a little late, disorganized and brilliantly apologietic with two spools of super 8mm film and a splicer. We already had two projectors. He needed to splice some leader onto one of the rolls and repair a break on the other. It was a sunrise film shot with two super 8 cameras.
It was a stereo film projection projected on adjacent walls. I remember being struck by his bumblingly charesmatic personality. We eventually saw the four minute film. I don’t remember much else.
NSCAD AV had these beautiful little fixed focus, wide angle Kodak Super 8 cameras just a little bigger than the film canister. We all wanted to make artist films after seeing Dan’s presentation.
Later that week Dan recorded 2 Pieces in the Audio Visual Studio. The first was a nude male camera operator describing a clothed woman reclining in a chair. The second was a clothed male camera operator describing the same woman nude in the chair.