Yellow dog

Modernist, Old School and Post-Colonial - Notes on the Nature of Kristleifur Björnsson's Yellow Dog series

When you first encounter Icelandic artist Kristleifur Björnsson's Yellow Dog series, usually in a pack of three, you are likely to think, "Wow, that's a lot of Lego!" And sure the dogs, each consisting of 16,384 pieces of Lego and weighing 40 kilos, outscale any Lego product found in the stores today or in your childhood memories. Yet in spite of the dogs’ extraordinary scale, monumentality, awe or 'unnaturalness' are not what Yellow Dog is about. If that was the case, the dogs would be much bigger, like the ones in Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale The Tinder Box or Jeff Koon's flower “Puppy” outside the Guggenheim in Bilbao. No, Yellow Dog is about Lego, about the system, rules and 'play well' philosophy (Lego is an abbreviation of the two Danish words "leg" (play) and "godt" (well)) that have found their material expression in the little pieces of hard plastic - the simplicity and endless possibilities.

One piece after another
As a work of art Yellow Dog explores the conceptual and visual aesthetics of Lego in a sculptural form and a presentation format that points beyond the realm of toys and connects to a number of trends and principles within 20th century and contemporary art.
Rephrasing Donald Judd's 1964 description of the logic of minimalism as "one object after another", one might say Yellow Dog expresses a "one piece after another" logic. A dog can be made with four pieces of Lego but for Yellow Dog Björnsson has increased the size, partly to make the logic clearer, partly to emphasize that dogs and humans share the same habitat, that the dog is not "a dog made out of Lego" but in the artist's words "a Lego dog". You do not need to spend much time with the dog to realize how it is made. It is simply four blocks of Lego - two for the legs, one for the body and one for the head - put together. No sophistication, no tricks. Just pieces of Lego in the shape of a dog. To quote the minimalist painter Frank Stella, "What you see is what you see."
Yet, Yellow Dog's references to minimalist aesthetics are not a question of aesthetic nostalgia or paraphrase. Björnsson's take on the late modernist tradition is more playful and delicate; it deliberately transcends the formal boundaries outlined by Judd. Minimalism positioned itself in opposition to any kind of expressionism and 'subjectivism' and marked a definitive transition from representational and pictorial space to (geometrical) physical space. Regarding the former, the smooth monochrome surface and geometrical plainness of Yellow Dog certainly has nothing in common with the dramatic brush strokes of Franz Kline or Willem de Kooning. It is a cool and impersonal object, constructed by systematic labor rather than created by psychological necessity. Yellow Dog is a dog, a figure Judd & Co. could not imagine within their non-representational, non-pictorial world of art. But as indicated above, Yellow Dog is not a representational 3-D image of a dog but a "Lego Dog", i.e. an object in its own right, at the same time materially concrete and conceptually abstract. A Lego Dog is the visualization of an idea and a system - Lego - in the form of an object rather than an image of an object, and that is a big – if subtle – difference in the world of art as well as in the world of animals.

Legoland vs. Land of Lego
So, what is a Lego Dog really all about, you probably wonder. Well, no zoologist or encyclopedia can answer that question since a Lego Dog does not fit into conventional scientific categories. Generally speaking, it belongs to the species of imaginary animals that the world of fiction is full of, animals that mark speculative paths in the course of evolution. More specifically, it belongs to the part of that world that is the 'Land of Lego'. The Land of Lego is fundamentally different from Legoland, the amusement park in Billund, where detailed miniature models of 'world history', such as the Eiffel Tower, Apollo 5 or Mount Rushmore, are built in Lego. In the Land of Lego such construction achievements - whether in the form of actual buildings or models - have no place. The Land of Lego is a world of its own, with its own animals and buildings, built not by reproducing phenomena from the outside world but by exploring the true and unique nature of Lego.
To emphasize the difference between Legoland and the Land of Lego - between a Lego Dog and a dog made out of Lego - Björnsson has increased the scale of the Lego Dog so it relates 1:1 to the proportions of our body and to the body of a real dog, rather than the proportions of miniature. In that sense a Lego Dog is as much an animal as any regular dog, although it might not be able to lay comfortably in your lap or be taught to fetch the newspaper. In another sense, a Lego Dog reverses the traditional human-dog relationship where dogs are taught to adapt to the world of humans, to behave and do mundane tricks, i.e. where they are 'created' in the image of human needs and emotions. With a Lego Dog we have to adapt to its world and follow it for an imaginary walk off to a land behind the looking glass.

A dog in/from/on a freight case
Yet, Yellow Dog also connects to the world outside through the freight cases that Björnsson exhibits them on. Aesthetically, this gesture re-introduces the pedestal, a classical element of sculptural language that minimalism did away with for good, while at the same time indulging in the self-referentiality of conceptual art (the freight cases are, well, the dogs’ actual freight cases). From a formalistic point of view, these references express paradox and inconsistency but a Lego Dog does not adhere to a single 'strand' of art history. Aesthetically it is not a thoroughbred but a mongrel with multiple art historical origins.
Of course, the freight case also refers to the industrial origin and context of a Lego Dog. Whereas minimalism proper downplayed the industrial production of the “specific objects” (to use Judd’s term) and 'hard core' conceptual art minimized references to the world outside the work of art ("art as art as idea", in Joseph Kosuth’s phrase), Yellow Dog is clearly part of the global economy (of contemporary art) where goods - like Lego and art - are transported from country to country to be exhibited and sold. So the freight case's function is double, it positions the Lego Dog in the sphere of classical sculpture and metaphysical beauty at the same time as it places it in the reality of concrete materials and transport logistics. The Lego Dog has two legs in each 'territory', and inhabits an open zone between the two, between art and non-art, the magic and the mundane, just like Lego itself.

Lego goes post-colonial
Another reality that Yellow Dog delicately plays with is the Danish origin of Lego and Denmark's colonization of Iceland from late 14th century to its independence as a republic in 1944. With Yellow Dog Björnsson sends a subversive greeting to the former colonial power by appropriating one of its finest 'raw materials' and making his own version as an expression of the freedom (to create) that is an inherent part of Lego. And the reference goes deeper or further than that. Without being explicitly political, Yellow Dog pays homage to the democratic (and pedagogical) ideals that informed early Lego and to the liberating potentials of homo ludens. The willingness – and the ability – to play are a precondition for art no less than for democracy. Systems and rules are not necessarily a means of control but can open up a world of possibilities.

Jacob Lillemose