Artist Jacob Dahlgren will conduct his performance DEMONSTRATION in Bellingham, Washington
Saturday, June 27, 2015 at 11 AM (gather at 10:30 AM)
Starting at Whatcom Museum’s Lightcatcher Building, 250 Flora Street, Bellingham, WA 98225, and ending there (see map below for route)
Dahlgren’s performance, DEMONSTRATION, consists of a walk by a group of people carrying placards/paintings with abstract motifs based on the work of Swedish painter Olle Baertling (1911-1981). Prior to the performance the artist conducts workshops where the placards/paintings are fabricated. Participants in the workshops and others are then invited to participate in this performance.
Drawing both from abstraction and from a form of protest, the artwork represents the art medium of social practice, which invites collaboration with individuals, communities and institutions. The social interaction completes the work, which afterwards resides in the participants and passersby memories and in documentation.
The work has been performed in several places since 2009: Mexico City (Mexico), Stockholm (Sweden), Frankfurt (Germany), Swansea (Wales), San Francisco (USA), Bergen and Moss (both Norway) in a variety of rural and urban settings.
Demonstration 5 December, 2007 - Moderna Museet Stockholm 2007 / Photo: Per Anders Allsten/Moderna Museet
from the artist:
The event is titled Demonstration and includes making placards and marching together. The placards are reproductions of paintings by the artist Olle Baertling (1911-1981). Baertling’s paintings are all abstract. The act of demonstrating takes on a different meaning; it moves in and out of its original context. The idea behind this performance is both formal and spiritual, which also corresponds with Baertling’s work.
The placards become mobile paintings and each participant brings his or her reason for carrying it around the city. This is not a political manifestation. It is (more) about making a public artwork together. It is about rehumanizing the public sphere. The placards carry no explicit message, but can be read as something collective. A collective past in the modernist ideas they represent, and in a collective future that encourages us all to take part in creating our collective landscape.
ACTIVITIES
See documentation of the Frankfurt workshop and performance here.
WORKSHOP
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
10 AM to 12 noon, and 2 PM to 4 PM
Allied Arts of Whatcom County
1418 Cornwall Avenue, Bellingham, WA 98225
BROWN BAG LECTURE
Thursday, June 25, 2015
12:30 to 1:30 PM
Whatcom Museum Old City Hall - Rotunda Room
121 Prospect Street, Bellingham, WA98225
WORKSHOP
Thursday, June 25, 2015
5:30 TO 7:30 PM
Whatcom Museum Lightcatcher Building
250 Flora Street, Bellingham, WA 98225
WORKSHOP
Friday, June 26, 2015
3TO 5 PM
Make.Shift Art Space
306 Flora Street, Bellingham, WA 98225
PERFORMANCE
Saturday, June 27, 2015 (gather at 10:30 AM)
Starting at 11 AM (expected to last 60 to 90 minutes)
Whatcom Museum Lightcatcher Building
250 Flora Street, Bellingham, WA 98225
The artist will be in Bellingham to participate in the installation of his new work Constructing a New World, a publicly sited sculpture commissioned by the Barkley Company and the Talbot family to be placed at the NE corner of Barkley Boulevard and Newmarket Street. The invitation to perform DEMONSTRATION is inspired as an additional social engagement with art for the Bellingham community.
Jacob Dahlgren (b. 1970) lives and works in Stockholm Sweden. He studied at The Royal Institute of Fine Art Stockholm and he received his M.F.A. 1999.
Jacob Dahlgren's work is concerned with a dialogue between the authoritative singularity of pure formal abstraction and its position within a variable, complex and social shared culture. Dahlgren's repetitious collections of ubiquitous and ordinary objects, often domestic, industrially manufactured; stand in their gestalt form as proxy for High Modernist Abstract Painting and for all of the ideological territory that Twentieth Century Art Theory has staked out for it. The contributing objects, however, signify a collective and human aspect of society, each representing an individual choice, to be used or consumed in a unique way by its consumer. Together these objects stand for the group or community, and as such they become democratic rather than authored.