Ready to be Made
By Matthias Ulrich

Spectacle, the lifeblood of modern cities, bears witness to our insatiable hunger for excitation – cheap thrills plastered across urban façades like ever-changing clouds. One day a message on a billboard echoes in our heads like an insistent earworm that refuses to go away. Another day, adrift in a glut of almanac dates, we forget the birthday of the woman next door who keeps our spare key. Thoughts surface and submerge, setting in motion a chain of words, a string of images and sounds, both inside and outside our consciousness. It is hardly surprising that the contemporary flâneur reads the façades of the city as an endless frieze upon which a never-ending gamut of temporally unstable information unfurls, fully subordinating our gaze to constant commercial programming. So, too, there appears to be no end to the immense flood of news that converges upon us from every corner of the earth, transforming our knowledge of the world virtually by the second. Indeed the info-glut seems a necessary enabler of the ever-present uncertainty from which all this information emanates in the first place.

Instead of voicing a demand, making a political pro or con statement, or expressing an identity conveyable in language or symbols, the ‘protest signs’ made and staged in various cities by Jacob Dahlgren for his Demonstration series seek nothing more than to unveil an artistic act. Here the plein air concept is manifest in the distribution of the work, in the physical action of people holding placards in the air and carrying them through the city as the work’s producers. The mutual similarity of the paintings on the placards – all having been produced in a foregoing workshop supervised by the artist – is reminiscent of a political assembly speaking as one voice in the public arena. Dahlgren also pays homage to his countryman Olle Baertling (1911-1981), an artist acclaimed for his abstract, formalist, easy-to-mimic paintings. The idea behind Dahlgren’s collective performance is both aesthetic and political, corresponding to Baertling’s philosophy of modernist art. Dahlgren’s placards are transformed into mobile paintings and urban information boards. His Demonstration is not a political protest, however, but a simple case of people coming together to create a collective artwork in a public space. And, ergo, this act of collective demonstration subjects that very public space to a process of ‘re-humanization’. The placards do not proclaim any explicit messages, but can be read as an emblem of communality, as the Beethoven Frieze of each city in which they appear.

Subtle, too, is Dahlgren’s use of the painting as a ready-made, as if it were merely a mass-produced commodity that clamours for our attention, offered up for sale on enormous billboards across the façades of the city.

/Matthias Ulrich