NEW YORK - Dan Graham shuffles around the Whitney Museum of Art galleries dressed in a "Rock Is Hard" T-shirt, shorts and battered running shoes, running his hand through his spiky white hair while answering queries from art writers.

A pioneer in conceptual, video and performance art and a maker of site-specific pieces who has created a fascinating blend of art and architecture, Graham is, at age 67, in the midst of the first U.S. retrospective of his work. He was impishly meeting the press during its New York opening last month.

"Dan Graham: Beyond," organized and originating at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, opened at the Whitney on June 25 and will be on view there through Oct. 11. It then will travel to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, opening on Oct. 31 and running through Jan. 31, 2010.

Filled with film projectors splashing his old movies on the walls, photographs, conceptual wall pieces, architectural "pavilions" and rooms of mirrored trickery, "Dan Graham: Beyond" is like a midway funhouse with something new and entertaining waiting around every corner. That was by design.

"To paraphrase Jeff Koons, I want this to be fun and to have fun," Graham said in an interview during the press preview. "I don't want it to be easy fun. I think this fun is difficult."

The fun starts with Graham's earliest work, conceptual pieces that were designed for printing in magazines - even though none was ever run. Some are instruction-type pieces. Others, like "Side Effects/Common Drug," are inspired by pop culture. In that case, Graham took off from the Rolling Stones song "Mother's Little Helper" to chart the benefits and side effects of the drugs most prescribed to housewives in the mid-1960s.

"I think all great art is about humor," Graham said. "I always disliked conceptual art. It was too serious. My work is anarchic, fun art."

Graham, a self-described troubled youth who didn't go to college, educating himself by reading the likes of Sartre's "Being and Nothingness," opened a small art gallery in the early '60s, giving artists like Sol LeWitt and Dan Flavin some of their earliest shows. He also shared values with LeWitt and Flavin. The minimalist, everyday-object aesthetic anchors "Homes for America," his groundbreaking 1966-67 slide-show piece made up of photographs of New Jersey homes.

The restless Graham soon moved on to video and performance. Most of those works were time-based, working on the principle of glimpsing the "just past" and dealing with issues of gaze and consciousness. While the films look a shade dated, they're plenty valid and clearly groundbreaking.

Also of note is his series of music-based films, including 1982's hourlong video essay "Rock My Religion," which traces a continuum from the early-American Shakers to the underground rock of Patti Smith and Sonic Youth.

So why do so many things? "What I like to do is originate new narratives; everything I do is a hybrid," Graham said. "Basically I get bored with what I'm doing, and I don't want to do the same work over and over."

The most impressive pieces in "Dan Graham: Beyond" are large, mirror-based installations he often calls "pavilions." Some are playful, like the gently curved "Girls' Make Up Room" (1998-2000). Others are most rigidly architectural, designed to resonate with the museum spaces in which they were initially installed.

Most impressive is a large room with a glass wall down its center and mirrors on each end called "Public Space/Two Audiences" that he initially constructed for the Venice Biannale in 1976. When one is in the big white box alone, the mirrors and reflections make for a minimalist isolation. When others enter one of the two rooms, the work becomes about the group that is inside - an ethnological study, in Graham's word.

"All my work is about spectators seeing themselves," he said. "I don't tell anybody anything. It's not didactic."

The fact that Graham doesn't try to explain anything combined with the wide range of work on view, none of which is "conventional" painting, drawing or sculpture, makes "Dan Graham: Beyond" baffling for some viewers and frustrating for others. But for those who buy into Graham's ever-questioning, always entertaining view, as I do, it is great, difficult fun.

Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com.