Some Notes on Sublimal Messages and Remarks on Air Conditioning
Marcel Buehler’s studio emanates the nostalgic atmosphere of a funfair whose lights have just been turned off. Sleeping funfair lights on the wall and on the table, confetti machines in the making, striped column stumps. Childhood memories evolve, memories of the feeling to wander around the fair at night captured by a strange sense of melancholy. So lonely and almost fragile seem the stalls resting in the dark.
But Buehler is not nostalgic. Rather the opposite. He appreciates the high attractiveness and dispersion of art in contemporary society, the impressive density of artists in Berlin, the continuously increasing number of collectors, the agile gradually more glamorous art market. Buehler’s works function as a commentary to these developments, neither positive nor negative. A certain humour connects the works with each other, a sense of wit that provokes a smile within the viewer even though he/she might not exactly know why. It is these kinds of reactions that Buehler aims at creating. Has he established a bond between the viewer and the work, he leaves it to the viewer to individually further investigate it.
This exhibition is also not nostalgic despite the sense of playfulness that dominates the ambiance and calls upon the naive and disregarded instincts of the (adult) viewer. The now functioning funfair lights glow in the most different colours, the confetti machines rotate; only one work alludes to the fragility of the situation created here: tristesse bourgeoise. A light box sends a reminder about the middle-class unhappiness, which is to be dispelled from this place. Flashing objects, lurid light – a shrill manoeuvre that is to distract from the monotone reality of daily life. Simultaneously, a remark towards the artificial nature of the contemporary art market. A reminder, not to take everything and especially oneself as an artist not so seriously. Through the use of familiar materials from his direct surroundings Buehler succeeds in dissolving the existent reservation between art and the viewer.
The wildly twirling confetti and the various colours of the fun fair lights invite the viewer to escape into a different world. The obvious exaggeration of the works and the numerous references however retrieve the viewer in this very reality. The initial apparent playful- and light-heartedness emerge into an associative field of manifold allusions.
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Jacob Dahlgren’s studio is his immediate environment. In demonstrations, performances, or interactive works, Dahlgren identifies the viewer and his surroundings as protagonists of his artistic interventions. Besides this communal aspect Dahlgren’s oeuvre furthermore investigates social phenomena. Placed in a shopping mall and dressed exclusively in striped shirts, the Dahlgrenian performers occupy various locations, from which they expel the non-striped, therefore indicating the behaviours of grouping, of inclusion and exclusion inherent in contemporary society. At another occasion, they demonstrate in the countryside outside of San Francisco, equipped with signs, which show reproductions of the Swedish painter Olle Baertling who Dahlgren greatly appreciates; or they prance on scales busy hiding their weight from their co-prancers – an allusion to social constraints as well as to the increasing dissolution of the line between private and public. Similar to Buehler, Dahlgren’s works emanate a light-heartedness that animates the viewer to engage with their vis-à vis.
In the tradition of the relational aesthetics movements of the 1990s and 2000s, Dahlgren emphasises the viewer’s role in the creation of the work – the candy mountains of Felix Gonzales-Torres or the culinary ceremonies of Rikrit Tiravanija come to mind. However, not all of Dahlgren’s works reveal the participation of the audience. Like Buehler, Dahlgren uses diverse materials from daily life, a practice to which also the titles of the works allude to, such as From art to life to art.
Art encompasses Dahlgren’s attitude towards life. He only wears striped shirts, every day another one, and develops based on these patterns abstract paintings. The artist as a living work of art. Art as life. Life as art.
The artworks in the exhibition give an overview of Dahlgren’s various approaches. I, the world, things, life (2007), an installation of numerous dartboards, depends purely on the audience’s participation. Arrows on the floor are waiting to be used. Immanent codes of the art world as well as general social behavioural codes are challenged here. Who dares to touch the work? How does the co-audience react? Are there viewers who do not seem to be familiar with these ‘conventional conventions’? Who asks for permission? Who hesitates?
In Dahlgren’s settings the line between art and life begins to crumble. Firstly surprised by the unconventional demands of the work, the viewer understands and engages in the possibility of creating a dialogue with the work of art.
In a similar way however without the direct participatory element function the two pieces Dubrovnik 2006 (2010) and Oslo 1976 (2009). From the distance, Dubrovnik 2006 resembles an Op Art painting of Bridget Riley or one of the visually irritating vibration images of Jesús Rafael Soto. Oslo 1976 evokes the formally plain minimal installations of Carl Andre.
By closer observation the works dissolve into ordinary objects: black and white coat hangers stacked on top of each other and numerous identical food boxes of one and the same product – the poetry of the common. Also in Dahlgren’s universe nothing is as it seems.
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Some Notes on Sublimal Messages and Remarks on Air Conditioning shows the encounter of two artists whose jaunty approaches to art coincide with each other. Instead of creating slightly forced situations, in which the audience avoids any sort of reaction in fear of exposure, Buehler and Dahlgren attempt to create situations that evoke genuine emotions and reactions within the viewer.
Already in 1964 the American author and critic Susan Sontag observed in her essay Againt Interpretation the weakening of the sensual skills of human beings – especially in the art context. In order to be able to fully appreciate a work of art, Sontag writes, the sensual experience, the pure perception must come to the fore again: “We have to learn to see more, to hear more to feel more.”
Buehler and Dahlgren’s work fulfil this demand.
Sandra Teitge studied Media Studies and French (BA) at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK, and art history at the Humboldt University, Berlin.
She lives as a freelance curator in Berlin.
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