Demonstrations
Steven Wolf

Jacob Dahlgren’s Demonstration is a group march in which people carry signs with paintings by Olle Baertling on them. Just like that sounds, Demonstration is the mating of two radically different entities: the Baertling paintings and the protest march. One comes from the world of high modernist abstraction, the other is taken as a readymade from political culture. In the course of their surrealist coupling, they vandalize each other, defamiliarize each other, drain one another’s blood like vampires. Then, as husks emptied of their former significance, they escort each other into foreign realms, soak up new meanings and tell vital new stories about modern painting and contemporary political life. Little known outside Sweden, Olle Baertling produced hard-edged geometric paintings and sculptures from the late 1940s until his death in 1981. The works use a purity of line, color and composition in the tradition of Malevich and Mondrian to help the viewer access a higher state of being, a metaphysical world beyond decay and daily experience. In Demonstration, Dahlgren makes reproductions of Baertling’s paintings on plywood then mounts them on poles. That you can refer to the paintings as signs and not be speaking just about semiotics typifies his practice of tugging the exalted intellectual or spiritual thing down into the everyday world.

Dahlgren has been able to extend the sell-by date on works by some of his favorite modernists using this strategy. Heaven is a Place on Earth, his 2007 floor grid made from different-colored IKEA bathroom scales, does for Carl Andre’s steel floor tiles what Walter Murphy and the Big Apple Band did for Beethoven with their disco version of the Fifth. You can hang out in the minimalism room of your local museum for hours before someone engages Andre’s floor sculptures as a stage. Viewers are intimidated by them. In contrast, people prance on Dahlgren’s grid. The scales electrify the air above them with anxiety and pleasure by offering the prospect of doing publicly what is almost always done privately: weighing one’s self. It’s a magic carpet ride through our culture of narcissism, excessive consumption and body-image nightmares that renders a banal activity strange by turning it into a performance. It also tends to divide the genders. Men are largely unthreatened, women sometimes freak out.

Something equally rejuvenating occurs to Baertling’s paintings when they are put into the hands of the people. Out of the white cube they shed their museum profile as cryptic portals to a spiritual world accessible to none but a few historically-minded connoisseurs. Democratized on the street, their significance shifts from the individual’s quest for enlightenment to the social and political realm, and these meanings mutate depending on the context. Against the urban backdrop of a 2007 Stockholm march, Baertling’s formal orderings of space could be seen to analogize modernist urban planning and its roots in social engineering — Le Corbusier’s machines for living but also sterile worker domiciles, arid corporate plazas and ghetto housing projects. In Marin, California, 2009, the contrast of Baertling’s astral palette and geometric precision with the ruddy colors and organic shapes of the northern California hills drummed up western culture’s mind/body dualism. The paintings stood in for logic’s brick by brick construction of an eternal Christian consciousness, and the landscape played its part as the mutable, temporal and unreliable body that gets controlled, flagellated and rejected. Given the region’s well-known green politics, it was inevitable that Demonstration would look like a protest against the role instrumental rationalism has played in licensing culture to desacralize, industrialize and pollute the landscape. Specificity of site makes one wonder what a production of Demonstration in Beijing or Moscow or Washington DC or even Wall Street would look like given that Baertling was a banker as well as an artist.

The protest march, the other thing being appropriated in Demonstration, is an ancient ritual, particularly in northern Europe, where peasants marched against feudalism and Protestants — a name that contains the word protest —marched against the Pope. A tradition that began perhaps as long as a millennia ago with small, radical gestures by tiny marginalized groups, however, has evolved, at least in America, into a bigbox retail experience. There remains from America’s tradition of reform movements a tiny core of activists who have fought the negative effects of globalization, the excesses of Capitalism, and institutional racism against African Americans. However, for the mainstream, forty years of diminishing expectation in the potency of liberal democracy to solve basic problems, let alone liberate the spirit, has put a damper on political optimism and commitment. The kind of protest marches you get from people who have seen their parents’ revolts turned into car commercials, and have been drilled to believe that meaningful social change can only come through free market enterprise and technology, might be summarized this way — I went to the Iraq war protest march and all I got was this Che Guevara T-shirt.

Demonstration demonstrates diminished faith in political change by substituting the performance of dissent for the actual politics of dissent. It asks us to question the authenticity of dissent — maybe even the capacity for dissent — in the monoculture of today’s liberal capitalism. Thirty years ago, when an actor was elected US president, we remarked how the representation of political power had supplanted the old fashioned mechanics for enacting it. Demonstration invites us to consider whether we as voters and protesters, the other side of the coin, have become performers as well. Heirs to the avant-garde tradition naturally view the dissipation of authenticity from a thing like the protest march in a negative light. Kids today, they’re so unserious. They decorate themselves with the costumes of resistance — tattoos, piercings and mohawks — and do nothing with it. But Dahlgren’s Demonstration is too ambiguous to moralize about stuff. As a political protest no longer hampered by the need to foster actual political change, Demonstration morphs into a free-wheeling, pluralistic gathering in which the reasons for its being are allowed to proliferate. Marchers in the same parade can hold the same signs and have completely opposite views about them. The focus is less on an evil other than on the relative nature of the march itself. It has an existential air. One is constantly asking, what are we doing here? What does this mean? It’s a demonstration turned inside out, studying itself.

If on one level it is a funeral march for authentic political engagement, it is also a chrysalis for the production of a new kind of group consciousness. Demonstration puts you inside your own head, but you know everyone else is in their head too. You’re all alone, together. Kind of like being on the internet. For better or for worse, lots of the old binaries come tumbling down too. There is much less us versus them. We are both the rebels and the storm troopers in Star Wars. The division between the political and the private breaks down too, much as it does in the work of Sharon Hayes, who read passages in 2007 and 2008 from intimate love letters through a billboard on the street in a one-woman protest called I March In The Parade Of Liberty But As Long As I Love You I’m Not Free. As Demonstration presides over the disappearance of authenticity in political dissent, it also mirrors the disappearance of the avant-garde artist into the history of art. If Demonstration were performed 30 years ago, a spectator would have assumed the marchers were standing up for art in some way and haranguing bourgeois culture for its lack of humanity, spirituality, spontaneity — something. But in a world reshaped by Warhol, Hirst and Koons, the sign of painting itself is more ambiguous. Demonstration could be a unique form ofgallery show with the art for sale, or the coy release of a new Silicon Valley corporate logo. Sitting around trying to decode Demonstration when you can actually march in it is like reading the recipe for a chocolate cake when you can eat it. So let me tell you about my experience. Although I have to admit, when Dahlgren first emailed me about Demonstration I turned up the radio in my head and pretended not to hear. I hate to get called up on stage and most group art actions are really didactic or embarrassing. I only got back to him because I was the one who had introduced him to the Marin Headlands and I felt partly responsible for the success of this event.

Having been described as a march, I assumed Demonstration would be a relatively short walk, something circular perhaps, around the former military buildings that have been turned into artists’ studios; or maybe back and forth, like a picket line, in front of the decommissioned nuclear missile that overlooks the Pacific. That Dahlgren reconfigured it for the Headlands as a 3.5 mile hike up through the mountains and back down to the sea came as a surprise, and I thought of May Fools, Louis Malle’s tale which follows a self-absorbed French family’s 1968 country reunion while Paris burns with riots.

If context affects how we read paintings, the reverse is true as well. Baertling’s imagery infected the California hills with storytelling power. Contrasted with the art, the hills seemed like one sprawling landscape painting or one massive work of land sculpture. Not only did the steep path that dominated the first leg of the hike look more like a Robert Smithson sculpture than something designed by a park ranger, but the marchers themselves seemed imbued with art energy. This set the stage for my moment, I guess you could call it, which I had precisely at the midpoint of the hike, as though it were choreographed. We had finally made it over the ridge and we could see the Pacific, spread out before us in an endless blue. Hardly anyone anticipated the length and rigor of the hike. There was almost no food or water. Nonetheless, we were all strangely giddy, as though someone had passed around a joint. But this mountain high, at least for me, came directly from the goofy bond that I was forming with the other marchers, the first time I ever experienced that kind of connection through a work of art. I had the sense that everyone who was there was happy they chose the kind of life that had put them there, quite opposite from the non-community you experience with viewers at a museum or gallery. I think I felt a little more like Dahlgren normally feels — chilled out. It occurred to me that I should stop just comparing him to his obvious visual sources, Andre, Malevich, Judd, and start linking him up to people in participation art like Liam Gillick, whose colorful, hard-edge sculptures work to craft space for gathering and conversation that doesn’t follow a predictable neocon script like — “My house has totally skyrocketed in value. Did you see last week’s episode of The Sopranos?”

But in contrast to Gillick’s austere, architectural defiance of corporate social space, Dahlgren offers a loose, Swedish hippified dance party. That’s not to say this Demonstration wasn’t also a death march. I was exhausted by it. On the way down, I whistled the work song from Bridge over the River Kwai; I wryly noted how Dahlgren had resurrected the spiritual in Baertling’s paintings by rematerializing them as crucifixes for us to carry on our personal road to Calvary; and I caustically invoked Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, a film in which a tribe of mountain people are hired to lug a steam ship over a hill so culture can be brought to the people of an isolated valley in Peru. When the march was over people were tired of me ranting and discretely snuck away.

Several weeks later, near the end of his residency, Dahlgren told me that he had reenacted Demonstration by himself. Thirty people with abstract paintings is legible, I thought, but one man with an abstract painting sign hiking through the woods — well that’s just nutty. But where 30 abstractions against anunspoiled landscape make Baertling seem like a bogeyman of modernism and industrialization, a single abstraction against the totality of nature is like a single candle in a huge forest, or a tiny figure in a Jacob Von Ruisdale painting. And even though I adn’t seen it with my own eyes, Dahlgren had flipped the script again and made those floating shapes of angular color read as a tiny flicker of humanism in a vast cold universe. And he had the T-shirt to prove it.

/Steven Wolf