Dan Graham
«Rock my Religion»

Dan Graham
Rock My Religion

«My intention is in opposition to the historicist idea that everything we know about the past is dependent upon the interpretation of the fashion of the present. In historicism there is no real past, only an overlay of interpretations or a simulation of the past [...] in opposition [...] there is possible the idea of an actual, although hidden past, mostly eradicated from consciousness but briefly available in moments not obscured by the dominant ideology of newness. This mysth of ever-neu is linked to the role of the commodity. Commodities produce a dream of eternal newness [...] amnesiacal the period of time just prior to the newest present [...]. The mythic dream produced by the neu commodity — the dream of eternal ‹progress› in the near future is never achieved, for it is always superseded by next ‹new›.»

Dan Graham, Rock My Religion, 1994, p. 188.