Dan Graham Art Work

The piece I chose to write about from the MOCA field trip was Dan Graham's media piece titled "Yesterday/Today". In this piece of art, a video monitor in a public space displays a present-time view of the visual activities of the cafe located outside the museum. The cafe is a space that has different people entering it daily, but the motions acted within the cafe are generally quite similar. The daily activities follow a defined routine related to a specific time of day. For example, there is generally always a breakfast rush, a mid-morning coffee rush and a lunch rush, with quiet periods in between. The video being displayed on screen is accompanied by an audio playback of sounds recorded for the same room the day before but at exactly the same time of day. I watched the video for about 15 minutes. What I found really interesting was the fact that there were moments when the sounds that I heard matched the actions present onscreen even though the sounds took place a day before. This piece of art depicts the mundane activities of a human's everyday life, and how the actions in a certain space are actually very limited in variation from day to day.