ART CITIES:Beijing-Elmgreen & Dragset
The artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset continue their critiques of cultural institutions with their latest show, “The Well Fair”. For the exhibition, the two artists have turned the space of Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) into their own fictitious Art Fair in progress, complete with booths, half-installed and wrapped work, and a VIP booth that no one will actually have access to.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) Archive
The exhibition continues the work of Elmgreen & Dragset previous installations, which examines and questions established notions of these institutions: “Aéroport Mille Plateaux” (2015), “Tomorrow” (2013), “Please, keep quiet!” (2003) and “Zwischen anderen Ereignissen” (2000). A selection of 80 Elmgreen & Dragset works created over the past 20 years is displayed in the booths and communal areas of the fair in unorthodox ways, some of them still crated, wrapped, half-installed, or leaned against the walls, creating an ambiguous temporal setting that makes it unclear if the fair has just ended or has not yet begun. By mimicking the now commonly accepted grid layout of an Art Fair and utilizing this as the display format for the exhibition in the Museum’s main hall, the artists also probe the ease with which behavioral patterns are adapted from one particular setting to the next. Visitors to the Fair navigate the space by passing from one aisle to another, discovering different scenarios in each booth and encountering museum personnel engaged to act as the fair’s staff. Elmgreen & Dragset displace the kinetic potential for commerce, situating the fair in a state of limbo without any clear indication of start or finish, and by filling the fair with only their own works, they eliminate the typical aspects of competitive valuation between artists. This fictional setting seeks to break down the social hierarchy usually present at commercial art fairs, with nothing actually for sale and a VIP lounge that remains inaccessible to all. An intentional focus on the seemingly insignificant drives several works in the show and brings usually disregarded, yet common, art institutional elements to the foreground. Works such as “The Named Series” (2012), a series of monochrome paintings consisting of the actual white wall paint from prominent museums worldwide, carefully removed by professional conservators and applied onto canvasses. The recent series “Self-Portraits” (2015), in which they appropriate wall labels of other artists’ works in classic materials such as paint on canvas or engraved marble, making the humble wall labels artworks in their own right. Personal and shared cultural identity and memory are further addressed in works such as “The Black and White Diary” (2009), part of the artists’ ongoing collection of printed snapshots which grant viewers a look into the duo’s professional and private lives. Identity is also an aspect of the recent series of works ”Side Effects” (2015), which consists of hand blown glass vases filled with the pastel colored food pigments used to coat pills in the latest generation of HIV medicines. Figurative works such as “One Day I’ll Grow Up” (2015), “The Wait” (2013) and “Modern Moses” (2006), use the lifelike human figures to articulate issues of childhood, upbringing, and identity. The fair’s inaccessible VIP lounge embodies what the artists categorize as a denial, a work that seems to invite the viewer to participate in some way, but in fact does not allow any interaction to take place, due to its dysfunctional character. The artists morph the designs of other typical art fair features, such as the bar, the exit door, and the bathrooms.
Info: Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, 4 Jiuxianqiao Rd, Chaoyang, Beijing, Duration: 24/1-17/4/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-19:00, http://ucca.org.cn
