Artistic Added Value
by Magnus Bons

The title of Jacob Dahlgren’s exhibition Retrospektiv kommersiell: Live in Your Head is both instructive and playful—chosen with the characteristic twinkle that defines his practice. For a “commercial retrospective” is precisely what this is. The presentation takes place in a commercially run gallery—an aspect rarely foregrounded in art contexts—and brings together a selection of works spanning from the beginning of his artistic career to the present.

One of the works originates from an idea Dahlgren conceived while studying at The Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm and consists of a number of thin wooden slats of equal length stacked upon one another. They are not fixed in place but can be moved and shifted at will. The short MDF pieces retain their natural colour, while also being painted white: initially just a small section at the edge, then progressively more, until finally the entire piece is white.

When placed edge to edge in sequence, their outer form creates a square, intersected by a rectilinear white triangle that cuts across the picture plane. But if the wooden slats are turned and arranged alternately white and unpainted, they form various striped, pyramid-like shapes whose tips meet at the centre. They can also be arranged to produce a multitude of other pattern effects—the possibilities for variation appear virtually endless. And, as mentioned, the slats can also be shifted laterally.

The visual effect is at once difficult to explain and entirely self-evident, and bears a striking resemblance to the plastic hangers in Open Time Project and the folding rulers in Units of Measurement, or perhaps most clearly to the work Subject of Art. In that piece, pencils of varying lengths are packed together into cubic forms that create relief patterns, sometimes resembling letters.

Beyond the optical effects generated by the accumulation of materials, the works are united by the way quantity simultaneously alters each individual element—and by how, together, they create a kind of surplus. Both visually and conceptually—perhaps one and the same in this case. Something unforeseen and unplanned emerges as the result of a process initiated simply because Jacob Dahlgren wanted to test an idea he had.

This, I imagine, is what the second part of the exhibition title—Live in Your Head—refers to: an attempt to give form, within the gallery, to something of all that has taken place in his mind over the years. The constant streams of thought from which new works grow, the impulses that surface, and the reflections on how they might be realised. An inner making.

The repetition and regularity of stripes runs through the exhibition as a guiding thread, as does the contrast with the disorderly flow of impressions that surrounds us in everyday life. We recognise most of the materials he uses; they offer a sense of familiarity and clarity—precisely because the works have been pushed so far into abstraction. Jacob Dahlgren’s works possess a distinct lightness, as if he were drawing out qualities that have long lain dormant within the materials themselves.

Yet there is another reference embedded in the exhibition title Live in Your Head, one of Dahlgren’s many allusions to art history. Almost in passing, he introduces a reference to the now-classic 1969 exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern, curated by the star curator Harold Szeemann. It featured several of the era’s most prominent figures in conceptual art and post-minimalism, including Lawrence Weiner, Bruce Nauman, Eva Hesse and Robert Smithson.

The full title of that exhibition was Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, and it is the latter subtitle that Dahlgren also appears to draw upon—albeit implicitly. Nevertheless, it contains parallels that are deeply resonant with his own artistic practice.

For what the title describes is an ongoing existential condition: a materialisation of interests and attitudes. “When attitudes become form”—is that not precisely what Jacob Dahlgren’s works articulate? They show us how he relates to his surroundings, a set of positions and observations that emphasise abstract fragments but ultimately convey a worldview.

This is his way of seeing the world—imbued with curiosity and humour—and expressed through an art practice that often activates and involves the viewer.

I recently read a note by Lars Olof Loeld, in which he described his working method as a “simplification of a simplification.” He transformed the memory of a sunset into geometry. And Jacob Dahlgren, too—somewhat simplified—transforms the phenomena of everyday life into abstraction, if by simplification we also mean condensation and grounding.

Magnus Bons