A Unity of Opposites
An Elmgreen and Dragset Interview
Rajesh Punj

Given the choice between success and failure, it is likely we would want to triumph every time. But the order of things, the inevitable sequence of mistakes and melodramas that shape our lives, are what motivate the Danish, Norwegian combination of Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, to reconnoitre for the truth as they see it. Setting out to subvert our collective sensibilities, the artists have from the beginning profited from a multidisciplinary approach, of performance, installations, design, art and corrupted advertising, to critique our social infrastructures.


As artists interested in the objects and information that rationalize our lives, they come at it with an adolescent energy, as a protest against the moroseness of maturity; the idea that to surrender to the status-quo is for them the beginning of the end, or the moment when reality reveals itself as an immovable rock. A prime example of this was their bronze sculpture of a boy on a rocking horse, entitled Powerless Structures, Fig 101, 2012, for Trafalgar Square’s forth plinth. That as Elmgreen saw it, was a playful attempt at challenging masculine stereotypes. “The boy, the frightened boy of the fireplace (at Whitechapel Gallery, London) is very much about masculinity. Which also links to the small boy we had on the rocking horse, on the plinth in Trafalgar Square. Which was in stark contrast to the war heroes, grubbier on their black horses. It is very much about the problem with traditional masculine roles, which is still very present.”

Which emphasises an attractive contradiction about their work; that of their appetite for wit and ingenuous wonder manifest as a clean calculated aesthetic. In-situ their Paris works resemble the body parts of a German engineered car, specifically the 2018 bar installation and diving board series, which is turned over by their installation at Whitechapel Gallery, London, of a moribund municipal swimming pool, lined with dirt and littered with debris. When invited to speak about their collaborative relationship, the art historian and artist Coosje van Bruggen said of working with Claes Oldenburg, that it is a ‘unity of opposites’, that as a proposition appears apt when in the company of the Scandinavian artists and their artworks, and it is as if their work’s duality seeks to explain them as two people, with two kinds of work; that of the machine aesthetic of one set of works, against the annihilation of another, which is for them a testament to the wilful complexities of modern life. The sensation that the most attractive of objects, an iphone or Audi TT, can in and of themselves induce greater levels of isolation, as we become entirely absorbed by the newness of now.


When the discarding of something damaged or disused might warrant us to think beyond our own selfsatisfaction, to consider how we sustain the constant replacing of one thing for another. For Elmgreen and Dragset it amounts to the fast-forward fossilisation of our material things, and also to the loss of our environment, as public spaces become capitalist havens. Which Elmgreen sees as the slow erosion of oneself, “we take (materials) much more for granted today, because we are so overloaded with objects in our everyday lives. There is too much on offer, to feel that the object can be precious anymore. That it can be a beautiful design. People just buy, buy, buy. When they are bored of one thing, they are onto the next thing. Our electronic gadgets are a good example of that.”

Artists cum activists, they are in no way inhibited by procedures or protocol, which for them comes with the liberty of not having gone to art school. Where the instinctiveness to do is replaced by the necessary need to think, until an idea is tightened by intellectualism. One of a performance background, the other a former writer, they see it as ample reward that they are not stultified by the education and egos of the art world. Less a desire to belong, theirs is a want and willingness to remind the outsiders looking in, voyeurs positively vandalising our social structures as a way to invite us to think of something better.

Interview

Rajesh Punj: I attended the Whitechapel exhibition for the opening, weeks before coming here to Paris. Actually coming from Antwerp today via Brussels.
Michael Elmgreen: It is a short ride now.

“For the first year we only performed, and then we thought to test out making sculptures as well, because we wanted to give our audience a surprise. If we were invited for shows, they would expect us to do some kind of live activity, and we were like ‘no no, we are not giving up that easily, now we make objects.”

RP: Antwerp to Paris, without having to leave the train,
is possibly two hours, maybe a little more. So it feels so
connected, when you are on the mainland of Europe;
and I say that as a writer based in a country, the UK,
that wishes to divorce itself of all of that. Do you know
Antwerp?

Ingar Dragset: We have been once, as part of a
performance festival in 1996 I think.

ME: It was raining the entire time we were there. So we
didn’t have the best impression because it was a theatre
performance festival, and we were there doing more of
an ’art’ performance; and the audience were like ‘what
the hell is that’?