Kodwo Eshun Reassesses Dan Graham's 'Rock My Religion'

In a 2012 essay for Afterall, Kodwo Eshun provides a detailed analysis of Dan Graham's seminal 1983–84 video-essay 'Rock My Religion'. Eshun describes the work's dense montage of punk performances (Black Flag, Patti Smith Group, Sonic Youth), archival footage of Shakers, and voice-overs that construct a white working-class history of America through rock music. He traces the video's multiple script versions from 1982 to 1993, noting its shifting emphasis. Eshun highlights critical responses: Benjamin Buchloh (1985) and Dieter Lesage/Ina Wudtke (2010) criticized the omission of African American music and culture. Eshun argues that despite these exclusions, the video's autodidacticism and amateurism appeal to artists. He emphasizes the performative dimension of the video-essay genre, where sound and image enact rather than merely illustrate. Eshun points to the poor technical quality—collapsing horizontal hold, fluctuating audio levels, stumbles in voice-over—as scars attesting to the work's difficult existence within New York's post-punk culture. He concludes that 'Rock My Religion' operates as an object lesson in how artists rewrite history according to their own enthusiasms, and that its invocatory capacity invites viewers into ecstatic dimensions of becoming born-again.