Holding up the Sign
By Christina Linden

The information provided was intriguing if scanty. There would be an event by artist Jacob Dahlgren at the Headlands Center for the Arts on June 14th; the forwarded email asked for volunteers to participate in a “demonstration of abstractions.” A friend added that she had heard there would be a hike, protest signs, and hence abstraction marching through landscape. I imagined the abstraction staking its claim and the all-encompassing rolling hills and scenic vistas of Marin County conquering the abstraction in turn, proximity suggesting three-dimensional illusion where flatness had been intended.

Full disclosure, important for the discussion of a participatory work: the car in which I was offered a ride took a wrong turn on the way, the GPS said it knew the way but it did not really know the Headlands we were talking about. So we missed the send-off, saw no signs of parade or protest anywhere on the horizon and wandered down to the beach to make arrangements of colored rocks in the sand while waiting for the grand homecoming. We caught the tail end of the procession as the participants mounted the final set of stairs that led back to point of departure. A group of about thirty rather tired-looking hikers seemed a bit droopy in contrast to the very brightly-colored placards they carried, all painted in a similar style of geometric hard-edge abstraction. I overheard comments about sore arms and shoulders anticipated for the following day, thirst, and enthusiasm over the imminent dinner to be served in the Center’s kitchen. We joined the crowd for dinner. My interest was piqued by what I saw and what I had imagined and so I did some research and engaged the help of a former colleague, Stijn Schiffeleers, who had been along for the entire hike. The artist sent me a short email to help fill in some gaps in my actual experience as well.

Repetition of projects staged in multiple locations and with multiple audience/participants is a frequent feature of Dahlberg’s practice, as is his preoccupation with signs of abstraction. The project “I, the world, things, life,” an interactive installation which allows visitors to throw darts at a wall-to-wall arrangements of dartboards whose concentric circles form a mesmerizing pattern was shown in the Nordic Pavillion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007 but has been reproduced at several other venues including Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery.

The Headlands event was in fact the second instance of “Demonstration.” The first took place in Stockholm in December of 2007, concurrent with a large exhibition at the Moderna Museet of painting by Swedish mid-century Utopian idealist Olle Baertling. The images on the signs at both occasions of “Demonstration,” painted by Dahlberg, were reproductions of original works by Baertling. The event in Stockholm drew about 150 demonstrators, required official permits and police escorts, and involved blocking automobile and pedestrian traffic in busy parts of the city. A significant audience could have been distinguished from participants according to the categories of marching-and-carrying-a-sign and not-carrying-a-sign.

Thirty participants carried signs at the event in June at the Headlands. With little if any instruction, they picked the signs they wanted to carry according to whatever criteria they felt fit and set out on a hike that turned out to be longer than most had anticipated. It seems that many of the participants arrived with as little information as had I, or perhaps even less. Pondering rather than explanation was given space during the event itself. If we needed to identify an audience as separate from these core group of demonstrators, then I suppose it would consist of myself, my two companions, and one woman Stijn mentioned who honked her horn and leaned out of her car window to ask what was going on near the beginning of the hike. This was before the group veered off onto wilderness hiking trails for the two-plus hours of trekking that constituted the “Demonstration” action. The title really earned its quotation marks in this case. Stijn mentioned that Dahlberg said he had done the demonstration alone on another occasion, as well. Which begs the question: Was this a demonstration of abstractions, a demonstration for abstraction, an abstraction of a demonstration, or an abstraction of demonstrations?

In order to get closer to an informed attempt at answering this question we might consider, for a moment, a few other works that take on the form of demonstration. We can start with one that seems at first to void this form of its content, Anna Halprin’s “Blank Placard Dance,” performed by the San Fransicso Dancer’s Workshop in 1970. In a piece conceived of as choreographic score, each of the dancers walked a requisite ten feet apart from the next in order that the performance not meet the city’s formal criteria for a demonstration. They wore white shirts and carried blank white signs. While various sources explains the action as “symbolizing their right to perform anywhere in the city,” or as a “commentary on the Vietnam War and its accompanying climate of protest,” Halprin relates in a recently published interview that the event was conceived of as a way to elicit audience participation. “People would say, ‘Well, what are you protesting?’ Because it was blank. And we would say, ‘What would you like to protest?’ Not just Halprin’s own statement but also the multiple various attributed causes speak to the power of the blank slate as a surface for projection. So while protesting nothing at a moment when there are indeed many pressing things to demonstrate for as well as against could naturally also be read as a gesture of apathy, the piece is effective as a means of encouraging the audience that becomes participants to consider the form taken by dissent and their own potential role in this form.

Of course asking participants about the cause they want to take up from the get-go and giving them an actual venue for doing so is another approach to generating participatory energy. In 2004 and 2005 Artist Allison Smith orchestrated a series of two events titled “The Muster” for which she enlisted participants by posing the call, “What are you fighting for?” The larger of the two events, which was presented by Public Art Fund and took place on Governor’s Island, included fifty “enlisted participants” to publicly proclaim their chosen causes within an encampment reminiscent of “the aesthetic vernacular of the American Civil War battle reenactment” for a crowd of over 2500 spectators who arrives on the ferry from New York City.

Sharon Hayes’ ongoing series “In the Near Future” (2005-) also reconsiders public speech and proclamation with the use of specific pronouncements. By appropriating historical protest slogans and reproducing their display in contexts divorced from those that originally informed their readings, she addresses the legibility as well as the platform of demonstration. As Julia Bryan-Wilson aptly points out, “A white, somewhat androgynous woman holding a sign that proclaims, I AM A MAN, in 2005 would seem more likely to refer to transgender activism than to the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike.”

Dahlgren’s signs are not blank and they don’t relocate historical forms of protest, either. “Demonstration,” has as much to do with the social relationships defined by the form of protest as with the formalism of Modernist abstraction. This gesture was more legible in Stockholm where the public is more likely to be familiar with Baertling’s work, but it must be understood as informing the piece in either context. Where we’ve come to expect words rather than images on placards “Demonstration” could still be said to function in a way that encourages a reexamination of the way we express dissent. Performing this dissent for the hills that flanked the route of the hike rather than at crowds of onlookers is another kind of inquiry. The core participants are the core audience: not infrequently the case for both political and artistic demonstrations at large, either.

We might say that the project at the Headlands was some kind of abstraction of the demonstration in Stockholm, but to consider the project at Headlands an abstraction of demonstrations in general is a dismissal of the specific content of the signs Dahlgren produced.

If we tend, in the United States, to understand abstraction in painting primarily in terms of Greenbergian modernism, than we are likely to think of it in terms of the progress he espoused in relationship to medium-specificity. It bears reminding that the abstract can be as idealistic as the relational. The Utopian dimension of prewar European abstraction and its tie to mysticism, spirituality, and metaphysics remained central to Swedish-born Baertling’s artistic ambitions even after he traveled to New York and began interacting with the American Post-Painterly Abstractionists. "The painting becomes a part of the universe, a sun, a power center broadcasting its poetic message.... Open formations of organized light irradiate at extreme velocities in unprecedented dimensions, infinite spaces of light travel with incredible swiftness to create the liberation of infinity." This is a flatness that brings attention not at all to its autonomy but rather certainly to its support, in this case the literal support of the participants that bear the weight of holding the signs aloft and carrying them forward through the landscape.

/Christina Linden

1.Libby Worth, Helen Poynor Anna Halprin, London; New York: Routledge, 2004, 22.

2. Sally Banes Reinventing dance in the 1960s, Madison : University of Wisconsin Press, 2003, 36.

3. David W. Bernstein, John Rockwell, Johannes Goebel The San Francisco Tape Music Center Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. 237.

4. Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Julia Bryan-Wilson on Sharon Hayes” Artforum Vol. 44, Issue 9, May 2006, 278.

5. Quoted in Daniel Birnbaum, “Daniel Birnbaum” Artforum Vol. 46, Issue 4, Dec 2007, 312.