ART-PRESENTATION: Elmgreen & Dragset
Based in London and Berlin, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have worked as a collaborative duo since the mid-1990s. Drawing from disciplines as divergent as institutional critique, social politics, performance and architecture, in their sculptures and installations the artists reconfigure the familiar with characteristic wit and subversive humour. From the transformation of New York City’s Bohen Foundation into a 13th Street Subway Station in 2004, to the siting of a Prada boutique in a Texan desert in 2005.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Perrotin Gallery
Elmgreen & Dragset’s new body of sculptural works that is on presentation at Perrotin in Galerie in Paris continues the artists’ ongoing interest in how we interact with spatial contexts. In a new large-scale installation on the ground floor of the gallery, the entire room seems to have chewed up an expanse of urban streetscape. The massive, broken shards of asphalt stack up like the wreckage left in the wake of an arctic icebreaker and recall both Caspar David Friedrich’s “The Sea of Ice” (1824) and early land art projects by Michael Heizer and Richard Long. Their flat black surfaces are embedded here and there with the remnants of common street fixture, the anchor pole for a lost traffic sign, twisted metal that may have once been a bike rack. These tools that once were used both to limit and to encourage social use of public space are now gone or at least useless. But what happened to them, who is to blame, and what comes next are questions left for the viewer to puzzle out. The contemporary white cube figures quite literally in the exhibition’s next work, a polished stainless steel street sign with no instructions or warnings to be found. Titled “Adaptation”, this new series of mirrored signage reflects the spatial context: instead of a warning or a direction printed on the sign board’s surface, the viewer will see the image of him- or herself in the space. The street sign is here reduced to pure form, which adapts to its surroundings rather than being a tool for controlling and directing. On the second floor, several rectangular fragments of asphalt are displayed, each framed and mounted on the wall as paintings or reliefs. Parts of what seem to be street markings in white paint can be discerned, however upon closer examination, it becomes apparent that the designs do not indicate any instructions at all, or that they signal unrealistic or even absurd directions. By isolating and exhibiting these fragments, the artists draw attention to and subtly alter some of the most common visual aspects of public infrastructure that are usually designed purely to communicate law and order. In the other upstairs rooms, works from three ongoing series find new meanings while manipulating formal elements that have been in the artists’ repertoire for two decades. In the first room, an oval bar complete with stools and beer taps harkens back to “Queer Bar/Powerless Structures, Fig. 21” (1998). This negation of the essential purpose of everyday objects is at the heart of the “Powerless Structures” series, which the artists began in 1997, with the installation of a diving board jutting out through a window overlooking the sea at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark. In the following room, three artworks made of diving boards are mounted vertically: one standing alone, another showing a pair hanging side by side, and the third featuring a trio displayed together. The unusual orientation renders the objects useless, but more significantly it aligns the colorful planes with the tradition of Western abstraction.
Info: Perrotin Gallery, 76 rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration: 13/10-22/12/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.perrotin.com
