Dan Graham | Shopping Bag

Dan Graham

Untitled Shopping Bag

Toronto, Canada: Art Metropole, 2001

49 x 40.5 cm.

Edition of 1000 [29 of which were signed]

I had dinner once with Dan Graham (w/ Anthony Kiendl, Micah Lexier, Roula Partheniou and a few others) but the closest I came to working with him was when I was at Art Metropole and we published this shopping bag.

We began producing a paper shopping bag to take to the Basel Art Fair in Switzerland each year. The first was War Is Over! by Yoko Ono, and others in the series included Michael Snow, Maurizio Nannucci, Ross Sinclair and Jonathan Monk. This may have been the second. 

John Goodwin approached Graham about reproducing his work March 31st 1966  (see image below, from the MoMA collection). This text had apparently not been reprinted in twenty-five years. It reads: 

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.00000000 miles to edge of known universe 100,000,000,000,000,000,000.00000000 miles to edge of galaxy (Milky Way) 

3, 573,000,000.00000000 miles to edge of solar system (Pluto) 

205.00000000 miles to Washington, DC. 

2.85000000 miles to Times Square, New York City 

.38600000 miles to Union Square subway stop 

.11820000 miles to corner 14th St. and First Ave. 

.00367000 miles to front door, Apart. 1, 153 1st Ave. 

.00021600 miles to typewriter paper page 

.00000700 miles to lens of glasses 

.00000098 miles to cornea from retinal wall"

The work was originally produced in an edition of 31, and was first shown in 1967, at Finch College. It was also included in Lucy Lippard's wildly influential book Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. 

Graham referred to the piece as "a [solipsistic] insight represented as a one-dimensional point-of-view extension making up a perspective from [at] my [its] limits of inception [...] the 'interior' plane inverted 'outside' as it is 'inside'."

The artist signed bags for each of the staff, as well as copies to sell to raise funds for Art Met's programming. 

The bags were distributed for use as shopping bags at the art fair and therefore many were likely discarded, making them pretty rare. Unsigned copies sell for around a hundred dollars, and The Archive is Limited has a signed copy, here, for 850 Euros. Art Metropole still has a single copy available, for only $500.00 CDN, here.