The cause of all this is a pavilion by Dan Graham, opened in late 1998 as part of the Berlin Biennale. For the first time, a Dan Graham pavilion serves a practical purpose. For this one is a café, commissioned by Kunst-Werke Berlin to support and advance in this Berlin yard new international and experimental art. The buildings there contain exhibition areas, studios, workshops, accommodation, a bookshop, and now there is this café.

The forms of Café Bravo are hard to distinguish but are essentially simple: two cubes set obliquely and tucked together. Four metres high, they are made of glass held in frames of chromed steel. But this glass is mirrored on both sides: the side that catches the most light reflects, while the other becomes transparent.

When the sky is clouded over little happens, the glass becoming partially transparent and partially reflective on both sides. A sunny day and the difference between the two sides becomes greater. And under a changeable sky the glass switches constantly from reflective to transparent and back.
The door of the café is not easy to find. Though the sign with the text ‘I am a door’ is helpful. Then you enter a totally unexpected space. The first thing you encounter is your own mirror image. For the elongated rectangular space is terminated by a large mirror and interrupted by three round pillars at the place where the cubes interpenetrate. The overriding impression is of lack of clarity, as though the space is vacillating between two thoughts.

This café recalls other projects by Dan Graham. The cubes remind one of Two Adjacent Pavilions at the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller in Otterlo. There again, a sizeable mirror figures in Alteration to a Suburban House, a model of a typically American home with a through room whose front façade was removed in its entirety and replaced by a glass plate. A mirror divides the house in two; the spaces in front of the mirror are revealed to the public, while those behind it are kept hidden. For Graham this project was about the relationship between home and street, about the connections and boundaries between inside and outside.

The house as intermediary between inside and outside, between itself and its surroundings – this is an architectural theme which occupies Venturi. His architecture is derived from the buildings around. The existing development relates to the new formally but also as a sign. Dan Graham does things differently. His forms refrain from relating directly to their surroundings and yet still drink them in.

For Dan Graham an artwork is a way of experiencing yourself. In his performances of the ’70s he sought a way to directly involve the spectator with his work. He found the mirror, first using it in his 1977 Performance Audience Mirror. But the presupposition that you will recognize yourself in the artwork with the aid of the mirror, is that you recognize yourself in the mirror. Jacques Lacan’s theory on recognition in the mirror can be found in Dan Graham’s work.

In ‘The Mirror Stage’ Lacan describes a child seeing itself in the mirror for the first time. It identifies with the mirror image; image becomes self-image. Graham draws the spectator into the work in two ways, visually through the self-image in the mirror and conceptually by letting the spectator decide for himself what he is seeing. Though Graham does proffer the spectator an object finished in both form and material, that object has the potential of many perspectives. It is the spectator who decides how Café Bravo looks.

Dan Graham realized Café Bravo in collaboration with the architect Johanne Nalbach and her assistant Tshekav Mönch