Not and Or
by Sara Walker

Dahlgren once had a Labrador named Blinky, named after the artist Blinky Palermo. This fact is in a sense a clue to Dahlgren’s approach to art and art history. His art is entangled with his being. The world is a platform for ideas about filling voids with abstraction and it is an artistry about ways of seeing. The works in this book are made from objects derived from different places (mostly his studio) and most of the pieces are broken or have been used for something else before they were assembled into frames and became what they are now. An examination of the works gives me this list of ingredients: broken pieces of mdf, painted sticks of wood, wood with saw marks, circles made of wood; some full, some just the outline, bits of wood with paint, negative/positive circle cut-outs. Surprisingly these rather crude elements become sophisticated and beautiful tableaus, almost wordless poems.

What should we call the works? Objects, paintings, collages, assemblages, reliefs, could be sculptures? Not and or. But they do strike me as framed paintings, so tightly snug in their metal frames, like the children game Booby trap (called Musfällan in Sweden). Dahlgren calls them “paintings but with gadgets”. These works are connected with (as are all his previous works in one sense) the piles of similar coloured objects titled Colour reading and contexture. Those piles are made up of well, everything. Books, chocolate bars, sponges, small pieces of wood and other things with four corners that fit the piles they are placed upon. The gathering of these objects is in itself an artistic method: the collective workforce Dahlgren so often makes use of. Every person is an artist (or at least a hunter/gatherer).

Order prevails in the frames, despite the broken and found bits and fragments placed there. The neatness of the strange materials in contrast to the chaos that is life.

Harold Rosenburg once wrote (in The New Yorker January 27 1968 issue to be precise) about the difference between a (constructivist) artist as a “philosopher of scale, placement, number as revelations of unseen “depths and aspects” and the artist as a designer laying claim to a new aesthetic status – a difference not always readily visible at first sight.” I would like to place Dahlgren somewhere in between these notions. He does work with scale as an emotional ingredient in his installations but he is also the harbourer of his own large scale eternal aesthetic project: him wearing a striped t-shirt every day, him naming his dog after an abstract artist. The repurposing of objects is something Dahlgren is known for, for example in his dartboard installations and scales on the floor, but those objects are pristine and solid real things made into abstract large-scale installations. The intimacy of the Not and or-works and the almost sentimental use of the discarded gives these works a slightly different narrative. They are very humble and tactile.

The thing with hard edge, minimalist, constructivism, abstraction yada yada.. is that the tough guy approach (I’m looking at you Donald Judd) sort of loses its toughness and rules over the years. Installations of gigantic Richard Serra sculptures become places of worship, they become places of great beauty and emotion. It’s not just mathematical and technical forms and space. It might have been that once but time has a way of changing the fundamental aspects of stuff. Dahlgren’s works are always concerned with the history of modernism. It is a method which makes the artworks brimming with other stories, stories inside the objects, outside of the pure compositional aspects of the works.

Some scholars called constructivist art “kalte kunst”, cold art. The aura of constructivism in its core is that of the impersonal, the precise. But Dahlgren plays around with this, his works are always spirited if not personal per say. Or are they? The collection of things from his studio and other places makes the works in this publication material diaries. Its grids gone slightly wonky, broken. It is not cold art. Because these are not really unrelated materials just thrown together. On the contrary, Dahlgren always seem to find the perfect balance. The circles in the works keep changing from just the sawed outline to the full solid round shape, we see the circle as a void, as the in-between air and as the full body, the form. Both are circles, both have the same worth.

One thing Dahlgren does is that he reduces the emphasis on one creator, yes, it is Dahlgren who in fact made these works, however he is always encouraging others to join him on this abstract quest, be that in actual collective workshops or by simply laying bare the formula of how to make art. Find stuff and put them together. The anonymity of production that seemed a radical idea in the early days of constructivism is in Dahlgren’s artistry a foundation. But, and this is an important note: he also produces more intimate and sensory works and sensations within this colourful mass production. Some traces of the hand of the artist are always there. This can itself be a comment on Art and Artists with a capital A. Not and or again.

Can these works be seen as a homage to the strictness of the constructivists? Or maybe more as Louise Nevelson’s boxes from the 1960s were described, as works with a “a divine precision”.

I read a text from the early 1970s about collages where collages were described as Put-togethers and Poetic junk and I found these expressions to be suitable for Dahlgren’s works. Not and or is about montage more than construction. And he is making a splendid havoc of the classification system, there are no pure forms or materials more precious or valuable than the other.

Dahlgren works with abstractions in a variety of methods and concepts, and he collects abstract visual stories. His work is about location, history, and categorizing, etc., but it is also about how people can be engaged in making art, and how we read the world around us. He always strives to involve other people, to make people gather for a communal experience, be it making flags or demonstrating with wordless abstract placards, or just standing on grids made of scales. To work with public commissions and site-specific works is about communicating with an audience that may not have any prior knowledge about art, or might not be interested in art. Many of Dahlgren’s works are about interaction. Many of his public artworks have served as both sculptures and objects for play and rest. There is a built-in democratic idea in his art. Dahlgren wants to reduce the distance between art and the people who live near it. The Not and or works seem to say: take a look around you and you too can learn to envision a different world, a different way of seeing patterns and accidental art works, and there is beauty to be found and connection to art history to be learned in the most unexpected places.    

Sara Walker/

Curator and director at The Swedish Association for Art (Sveriges Allmänna Konstförening).