Bitter Reviews: Jacob Dahlgren, When Anxieties Become Form, Workplace Gallery

Jacob Dahlgren, When Anxieties Become Form, Workplace Gallery

My semiotic relationship with tinned cans of food is currently economic exclusion. I’m thinking about those clad metal bins that seem to have sprung up in the post-checkout zone of any substantial supermarket.

“Dried goods, cans” etc have become a staple of our declining neoliberal capitalist economy that is now working for fewer and fewer of the population (who’d have guessed!) The state now relies more heavily than ever on food banks, who in turn rely on the donation of canned foods.

These same cans become the stimulus, or the visual apparatus which compromise Jacob Dahlgren’s current solo show at Workplace Gallery.

A large sculpture, made entirely of cans is aptly titled From Art to Life to Art. The sculpture consumes the first floor of the gallery space. The cans, digested by the artist, are visible from outside the gallery on street level. Inside and up close the mish-mash of branding reads like a schizophrenic billboard.

The sculpture is imposing but not cumbersome - you must navigate through it to reach the rest of the show, but you can also engage from a distance.

Whilst I think this work is largely successful I feel it is only provisionally political. Simply, the artist/gallery could’ve used the contents of the cans more effectively. For example, the food could simply have been donated post-exhibition. The removal of the contents from the cans adds little (I think rather subtracts) from the weight of the installation. Specifically, the mirage of the sculptures angled turns fall a little flat here.

Or for fans of the Nicolas Bourriaud and relational aesthetic: the relationship between food and eating could have been pushed further. The contents might’ve been prepared into a meal bringing a community that often feels - dare I say it, exclusive, - into contact with those outside the traditional “art world” creating an arena for exchange. After all isn't artistic praxis all about social experiments?

Aside from the works upstairs, in the lower level gallery Dahlgren has made a series of ‘paintings’ (their language). These push&pull the post-medium condition narrative that is currently swirling around the London art scene. It kinda feels like everyone is making ‘paintings’ that aren’t “paintings”. - The expanded field! But I do enjoy these and they are definitely worthy of Krauss’s definition.

Materially speaking they are readable but not obvious. David Ostrowski showed several paintings of clothing hangers at Ramiken last year which I thought had a charming wit. These are arguably better. I like the intervention of the theme Dahlgren successfully re-aestheticises with these as well.

I also enjoy the names, Dallas, Blackpool etc. The stacking up of the hangers abstains the productivity of the object, removing the ontology and thus the capability to realise surplus value or vis-a-vis, what Deleuze and Guattari would call Anti-productionism. Bravo!