Dan Graham benefit edition

“Ironically, the new Whitney Museum is an upside down ziggurat and is considered high-style, while the office buildings are not thought to be very classy. In view of this obvious suspension of judgment it might be time to take a new look at the ziggurats.”

Sol Lewitt, “Ziggurats,” Arts Magazine, November 1966

Expanding on his concept of “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art” Sol Lewitt’s Arts Magazine article “Ziggurats” offered a playful analysis of New York City building codes which contributed to the evolution of the skyscraper. The tapering effect design found in Dan Graham’s New York City Ziggurat Skyscraper, 1966, was the formal result of pragmatic “setbacks” referred to in LeWitt’s article, allowing for light and air within an increasingly dense urban grid. Viewed from the vantage point of the street, the forced perspective of this lower Manhattan skyscraper against the blank, white sky flattens both into interlocking positive and negative shapes which resonate between image and form.

Taken during the same period as the Homes for America photographs as well as text pieces such as Schema, both intended for magazine distribution, Graham’s initial interest in the medium of photography came partly out of a reluctance to accept the sequestering of art within the gallery system, whose “containers” had been highlighted by minimal art’s emphasis on the materiality of the art object. As part of a larger discursive practice that stretches across writing, performance, video, models and pavilions, Graham’s photographs could be seen as visual “think pieces” within a medium that offers immediate responses to elements of the built environment that are symptomatic of his line of thought, and have proven highly influential on younger generations of artists who have taken up the issue of art’s relationship to architecture.

carriage trade is a 501C3 non-profit. Proceeds from this benefit edition will help fund upcoming exhibition programming, publications, and events. Click here for larger image. For price and avaibility please email: pscott [​at​] carriagetrade.org

carriage trade
Carriage trade was founded on Prince Street in Soho in 2008 with the mission of presenting aesthetically innovative and socially relevant group exhibitions combining the non-commercial mission of a non-profit, the programming flexibility of a small gallery, and the historical scope of a museum. Offering an alternative to presenting artists within one-person shows or art fair booths where shared influences and historical precedents may not be apparent, carriage trade’s group exhibitions assert interconnectedness among artists regardless of period, medium, or style. Filling a gap that exists between the non-profit sector’s support for younger emerging artists and the art market’s investment in established artists, many of the exhibitions include mid-career artists doing significant work that is underrepresented in contemporary art venues.

Past exhibitions
Some of carriage trade’s past projects include Jef Geys: Woodward Avenue, a variation of Geys’ Quadra Medicinale, at the Belgian Pavilion of the 53rd Venice Biennale, first developed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Color Photographs from the New Deal (1939–1943), an exhibition of 80 color photographs from the Library of Congress archives, some of which were featured in the White Columns Annual, curated by Richard Birkett, and AMERICAN INTERIOR, the first show at carriage trade’s Lower East Side location, which featured Richard Artschwager, David Baskin, Lawrence Berzon, Julien Bismuth, Barbara Ess, Terence Gower, Dorothea Lange, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Paul McCarthy, Gordon Parks, Heidi Schlatter, and Steel Stillman, and addressed current rifts and contradictions in the American psyche via domestic interiors. Picture City III examined the relationship between urbanism, perception, and the role various forms of mediation (entertainment, advertising, social media) play in our everyday experience of city life, with work by Arnon Ben-David, Morgan Blair, Jennifer Bolande, Andre Kertesz, Stanley Kubrick, Diane Nerwen, John Schabel, Cindy Sherman, Robert Smithson, and Philip Vanderhyden. 

Carriage trade’s current show, The Earth is Flat. (through May 27), focuses on a “new medievalism” in culture, where fear and suspicion displace rational thought, and includes Martin Beck, Henry Codax, Ceal Floyer, Katharina Fritsch, Sara VanDerBeek, Andy Warhol, and Horacio Zabala.