While spaces for viewing art today are dictated by the vogue for warehouse aesthetics, as consciously mimicked for the RCA students, Elmgreen & Dragset arrived on the scene in the mid-nineties to find the market playing itself out in a series of identikit white cubes. The symbiosis of modernist architecture and art display has continued to preoccupy their work, as in The Collectors for the 2009 Venice Biennale. Invited to represent both the Danish and Nordic pavilions, they domesticated the performance of collecting art by staging each nation as a private house – which was, Dragset remarks, what the buildings were impersonating anyway (think the Case Study Houses and mid-century Scando-modernism). Inside, the pair curated an intricate mise en scéne mixing found objects with the works of contemporary artists and designers. Presented as a homogenous group, without name labels and therefore intentionally isolated from questions of value, the exhibition subsumed the egotism with which artistic production is often charged into a near-socialist endeavour.
Beyond these concerns, an undercurrent of carefully constructed narrative runs throughout Elmgreen & Dragset’s oeuvre. Having dealt with the biography of the art collector (specifically The Mysterious Mr. B, a gay bachelor who ends up face down in the Nordic pavilion’s swimming pool), their forthcoming show at the Victoria & Albert Museum this autumn will transform the textile galleries into the neoclassical house of a frustrated architect. Bound by the upkeep of its stately interior, his grand visions are fated to forever remain in two dimensions. In contrast, a veritable world will be constructed for him by the artists – including a living room, study and kitchen – where some previous works will be restaged alongside new pieces created with the help of objects convened from the museum’s collection. Elmgreen & Dragset’s knack for weaving fictional characters and uncanny scenarios into occupied spaces, which often resemble a life-sized game of Cluedo, will be right at home in that most Victorian of British institutions.
POSTSCRIPT:
The Royal College of Art: Outset Visual Cultures has posted a video recording of Elmgreen & Dragset’s lecture online; watch here.
Elmgreen & Dragset: Staging Space
Lecture at RCA Battersea, London
Jan 15 2013
Tom Brooks
