Dan Graham’s Rock My Religion
(An Expanded Screening)
Sunday, 7 Feb 2010, 4.30pm
Auto Italia South East
1 Glengall Road, SE15 6NJ, London

Dan Graham’s artistic practice has been influenced by music from early on and this interest becomes more explicit in the late 1960s through some of his first writings such as Live Kinks, 1969 a review of a concert by the Kinks. During the 70s and 80s, Graham developed close working relationships with composer Glenn Branca and musician and Sonic Youth founder Kim Gordon, who supposedly started her music career by taking part in one of Graham’s performance pieces, which didn’t quite go according to plan and turned into a fully fledged concert. Through “a shift towards the documentary” as described by LA MOCA’s Bennett Simpson who recently curated a Graham retrospective, the 1980s saw the release of two video works by the artist which explicitly deal with the subject of popular music: Minor Threat from 1983 on a concert of the American punk band of the same name and the more complex Rock My Religion (1982-84), developed in discussions with Branca, Gordon and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, all of whom contributing to the soundtrack of the work.