Star of David Pavilion

1989

Object description	Model made of aluminum, glass, acrylic glass on wood panel, Video transferred to DVD, color, sound, 5 min, 4 sec
Object category	sculpture
Dimensions	Object: height: 110 cm, width: 110 cm, depth: 5,5 cm, height: 108,5 cm, width: 108,5 cm, depth: 102,5 cm, height: 37,5 cm, height: 67,5 cm, height: 151,5 cm, width: 110 cm, depth: 102,5 cm
Year of acquisition	2005
Inventory number	MP 2/0
Creditline	Sammlung Dieter und Gertraud Bogner im mumok
Rights reference	Graham, Dan
Further information about the person	Graham, Dan [GND]
Literature	Dan Graham:Beyond Leidenschaftlich Exakt.Sammlung Dieter und Gertraud Bogner im mumok

You are standing in front of a small model for the “Star of David Pavilion” that Dan Graham designed for the collectors Gertraud and Dieter Bogner and that was then built in 1996 in the garden of Buchberg Palace. The pavilion has the shape of a Star of David, formed by two equal-sided triangles placed one on top of the other. A triangular water basin is inset into the ground, forming a walk-in pavilion of semi-mirroring glass with a closed roof and a door on one side. If you were not standing in front of the model here, but could walk into the real pavilion, then you would be confronted with a number of different and permanently changing observations, as is the case with many of Dan Graham’s installations. The special glass changes its transparency and the strength of the mirror effect depending on light and weather conditions. The surrounding landscape, the visitors present, and your own mirror image are all mirrored differently and overlap each other. We are confronted here with the process of perception itself, as Dan Graham says: “The intersubjective relationship of gaze, materials and landscape that penetrates from outside becomes content . . . . The relationship of viewer to material is more important than the object itself.” Making your own perception the theme of art, linked with a clear geometrical formal idiom, and the use of industrially made materials all refer to the basic principles of minimal art. Graham‘s pavilions also cite the steel-and-glass architecture of modern cities and thus transfer the tradition of Baroque garden pavilions into the present. For this particular pavilion, Dan Graham chose the basic shape of the Star of David, which amounts to a political statement. The Star of David is a comment on Austria’s repression of its own history and an ironical counterpart to the ubiquitous insignia of Catholicism in this country.

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Star of David Pavilion