Interviews, Issue 3

Elmgreen & Dragset

From Concept to Creation: The Artistic Alchemy of Two Visionary Minds

Words PLUS MAGAZINE

Photography ROBERT RIEGER

Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have been collaborating as an artistic duo since 1995. Their artistic output, consists of sculptures that intermingle pristine surfaces with undercurrents of pathos, humor, and decay. From their iconic installation Prada Marfa (2005), to Van Gogh’s Ear (2016), they have firmly established themselves as a team with one of the most innovative and radical artistic outputs in the 21st century.

Subversive and multivalent practices are Elmgreen and Dragset’s bread and butter. Forgoing obvious optics or points of reference, they have devised objects, environments, and situations that confront the viewer’s expectations of what art means. Drawing on everything from children’s books, middle-brow aesthetics, and queer theory, Elmgreen and Dragset playfully mix the political with the mundane, discovering new ways in which art can be presented.

Love is a strong basis for the artists’ practice. Beginning as a romantic couple, the duo has worked throughout their career to find ways to transfuse love of all forms into their work. In our interview, Elmgreen and Dragset reflect on their profound personal exchange, shaped by their individual artistic sensibilities. Their love for each other allows them to be fearless, both within their own relationship and outwardly through their collaborative work.

PLUS MAGAZINE: Before we jump into the questions, how have both of you been doing?

ELMGREEN & DRAGSET: Not too bad, actually. The daily life in our studio in Berlin has been relatively normal over the last year, all things considered, and despite months of lockdown in Germany. Now we are working in shifts, so everyone comes in only 3 days a week and since our workspace is rather spacious and spread out on different floor levels, we manage to keep things running. We are grateful for having been able to continue working on projects and keep the whole studio team. Given that, so much has been turned upside down over the last year for so many, and that health itself has become such a highly valued asset, we definitely appreciate whatever can still be called normal. Who would have thought just a year back that we suddenly would find even relatively boring daily routines so precious, haha. Of course, some shows have been postponed, and others have changed shape as a result of the pandemic, but so far, we’ve been able to roll with these changes.

P: In your early careers, Michael wrote poetry (and worked as an intern for children’s puppet theatre), and Ingar did experimental theater. How did these influences affect your art practice?

E&D: Poetry and theatre led us fairly naturally into art performance as we first started to collaborate. The performance was an intuitive meeting point for us both that incorporated various elements from these other art forms: interaction with the audience, explorations of our bodies in space, and investigations into socially embedded conventions or behaviors. Having non-traditional art backgrounds made us look at the systems within the art world with somehow fresh eyes and made us question some of these seemingly set structures. As outsiders, we tried to make sense of it all through a process of questioning interactions. Being inquisitive is still fundamental to our collaboration today – although perhaps it has come as much from the meeting of our two personalities as from our backgrounds in poetry and theatre.

P: How do you work when it comes to discussing and working on new concepts/ ideas? How has this process evolved over your years working together?

E&D: Our working method is based on this ongoing dialogue. Most days, we are both in the studio, and particularly at present, so our conversations about different projects are continuously developing, and sometimes they might even change direction within a single day. Each artwork of ours evolves through a kind of ping-pong process where we discuss concepts, contexts, and details together – plotting our ideas until they feel right. Sometimes our works will take on a few different forms before we both feel resolutely sure about them. These days though, after 25 years of collaborating, we’re pretty familiar with each other’s thought processes and can usually anticipate the other’s reactions, which does make things a bit smoother. We have maybe turned into a two-headed monster.

P: To you, art has a lot to do with providing the possibility to open up someone’s mind and be a meeting place for many diverse ideas. How have you defined ‘art’ within your practice?

E&D: Absolutely, which is why we’ve never tried to define it. We don’t like the idea of placing any restrictions on what art should or should not be, either conceptually or aesthetically. The only thing it should definitely be is to be free of linguistic delineations.

P: Since 1997, you have been creating a series of works called Powerless Structures. Why have these Powerless Structures been so indelible in your practice?

E&D: Our series of works titled Powerless Structures began with us altering objects or perceptions of objects in subtle ways so that associations linked to them would begin to unravel. Our first sculpture, Powerless Structures, Fig. 11 (1997), was a diving board penetrating the window of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark. The museum is by the sea, and many visitors would spend time looking out at the view through the window as much as at the art, so we wanted to play with that reality. We heightened this inside-outside reality, blurring the boundaries but also presenting visitors with an object intrinsically linked to action – diving – which invites the viewer to interact. By putting the diving board through the window, though, we denied any potential for action. “Denials” like this can be found in many of our artworks, be it a closed door or a malfunction. Maybe Prada Marfa (2005) is one of the most well-known examples of these so-called denials – a forever closed shop in the middle of the desert. With this kind of approach, we hope to draw the audience out of the linear logic thinking that is easily triggered by straightforward interactivity.

P: From your early performance in 1997 (12 Hours of White Paint/Powerless Structures, Fig. 15) to the most recent installation (The Hive, 2020) in New York, you love to present your viewers with warring ideas, emotions, and images. Where does your drive for such dissonance come from?

E&D: Perhaps it comes from our interest in dissecting established structures and altering objects in our work, as these processes create a kind of conflict between what viewers expect to see when they look at a particular object and the reality that’s actually before them – where something’s changed. A cerebral push-pull can be built up when we play with a situation in this way. And where there are several possible meanings or dualities, there’s space for rethinking things or discovering new ideas or understandings. On a more subliminal level, though, perhaps such dualism in our work both comes from and reflects the fact that there are two of us…if you want to read deeply into it.

In our new work, The Hive (2020), which is installed in Moynihan Train Hall, part of the renovated Penn Station in New York, we created this imaginary cityscape made of 91 individually illuminated skyscrapers of all different designs and suspended it from ceiling upside down. By turning this whole panorama upside down, viewers can literally see this familiar sight from a different and unexpected perspective, which hopefully encourages a small shift in perception of moment, place, and context.