Scandinavian artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset are known for their installations that examine society through an absurdist lens.

Cover photo: Elmgreen & Dragset (undated). Via the Bangkok Art Biennale.

WARNING: The following article features and/or discusses sexuality, eroticism, NAZIs, and violence.

Queer Minimalism

Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset met in 1994 in a nightclub in Denmark; they became boyfriends and began to collaborate as artists, creating performances together (the two would split romantically ten years later). Elmgreen & Dragset’ have seamlessly transitioned from performance into sculpture and installation.

For the past two decades, Elmgreen & Dragset’s art has examined themes of sexuality, masculinity, public space, and society itself. It is impossible to fully appreciate Elmgreen & Dragset without an understanding of postmodernism, and specifically queer theory, which permeates their every work.

Postmodernism is an art and philosophical movement that began in the late 20th century characterized by a skepticism of authority, suspicion of reason, and questioning of reality. Elmgreen & Dragset maintain these values with a distinctly queer perspective.

Professor of Sociology, Steven Epstein poses that the aim of queer theory is to “expose the deeper contours of the whole society and the mechanisms of its functioning” especially as it pertains to sexual and gender binaries and heteronormativity. In this way, queerness investigates and interrogates convention, tradition, and authority.

Elmgreen explains, “I think there’s a craving for expanding the truth in the world today, more than ever, because things have become so simplified and boiled down, so black and white, and I think there is a need for looking at the world in a less linear [and logical] way.”

Elmgreen & Dragset pair this outlook with a comfortable and recognizable framework. “You can trace in many of our sculptures our Scandinavian heritage, the Scandinavian design approach, very clean, minimal lines, but then we fill it with different content than normal,” Elmgreen explains.

In this way, the duo employ minimalism to infiltrate the art world with their queerness. In another interview, Elmgreen recalls, “Minimalism was always the thing that was shown in large scale in the most important American art institutions. . . So dealing with Minimalism was a kind of challenge for a gay person—also to break the stereotype image of gay people being interested in camp and being very feminine in their way of expressing themselves.”

Irreverence

Elmgreen & Dragset’s queer perspective is amplified by the fact that neither Elmgreen nor Dragset are academically trained in fine art. When they first met, Elmgreen was writing and performing poetry while Dragset was studying theater. This outsider perspective translates into an irreverence of institutions.

Elmgreen notes, “I think that our fascination with the “art world” came from the fact that we never had any formal training in art, and so we began by approaching it from an outsider’s perspective. We were enchanted by the classic notion of minimal art: how to subvert the institutional power structures and the language surrounding these. It was all a mystery to us.”

For one of their first performances, 12 Hours of White Paint / Powerless Structures, Fig. 15, the Elmgreen & Dragset repeatedly painted and hosed down a gallery room for twelve hours. The pair was inspired by Brian O’Doherty’s critical essay Inside the White Cube in which O’Doherty argues that the white cube of modern galleries sterilizes and decontextualizes art. Dragset recalls, “We found the physical structures themselves to be incredibly conformist, limiting and claustrophobic and we wanted to see how we could break this frame.”

Subversion

Elmgreen & Dragset’s entire oeuvre is characterized by subversion. Their longest lasting series, Powerless Structures is inspired by queer social theorist Michel Foucault who examined both sexuality and the dynamics of power.

“We were both fascinated by Foucault’s notion of power structures, which we read about at the beginning of the 1990s. He said that it’s actually wrong to call them ‘power structures’ because the structures themselves can’t impose any power. They’re just labels that we, as citizens, as human beings, agree upon. If the structures are changeable, they provide hope for change,” Elmgreen explains.

One of Elmgreen & Dragset’s first invented Powerless Structures is the Queer Bar, of which they have since created several iterations. In Queer Bar / Powerless Structures, Fig. 21, the traditional form is absurdly turned inside-out, with beer taps facing out and stools imprisoned inside the space. The bar is rendered inaccessible and useless.

By bringing a queered item into a formal art space the duo demonstrates the fluidity and futility of labels. Elmgreen & Dragset realize, “A trained art audience may feel on a safe playground going into a gallery space, but they will be totally alienated going into the back room of a gay bar, whereas, a lot of the gay crowd who are, uh, consulting the back rooms will be totally alienated going into a gallery space.”

“Combining these two kinds of architecture seemed for us interesting, because it points out that you don’t have spaces such as queer spaces, and you don’t have spaces such as art spaces. You only have spaces that are, say, occupied for a certain period with artistic behavior, and you have places that are occupied by queer activity for a certain time. The borderlines are not that strict. They’re much more fragile than we imagine them.”

Bars function as a meeting place for friends and potential partners. The first Queer Bar, created in 1998, anticipated a precipitous loss of interest in such physical gathering spaces. In the UK, nightclubs have decreased by nearly 50% from 2005 to 2015. Dating and hook-up apps like Tinder and Grindr have usurped the role of the bar.

“For us, it’s important to highlight how vital being together in a physical bodily way is. And that has to happen, for a big part in public spaces. Therefore it’s a disaster that a lot of civic spaces have been closed down by the government, because they don’t really appreciate people coming together – in places such as clubs, public pools and small libraries,” Elmgreen argues.

Diving Out

Pools and diving boards are a common motif for Elmgreen & Dragset and they carry a plethora of connotations. Depending on context, such items function as symbols of public space, vulnerability, success, man’s dominion over nature, as well as homoerotica and queer joy.

The two admit that their “ongoing fascination with this subject might come from the lack of these sorts of pools in [their] Scandinavian upbringings. It’s more of an adopted ‘American dream.’ and a swimming pool is something that you can relate to directly in a bodily, almost sexual way.” One of the duo’s inspirations is pioneer queer artist David Hockney, known for paintings populated by swimming pools in Los Angeles that depict “the cheerful side of queer life.”

The first sculpture Elmgreen & Dragset ever created is a diving board installation at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. The board penetrates the window pane, inviting visitors into the beautiful landscape of the Øresund Sound. “So we wanted with our diving board to break that membrane of the museum in a way, to point out that there’s life outside that’s important to the life inside, and there needs to be a dialogue,” Dragset recalls.

“And swimming pools are, in themselves, so absurd: trying to replicate something from nature that then becomes more popular than nature.” By adding a diving board, a man-made object, Elmgreen & Dragset lend the Sound a greater economic and aesthetic value through human labor.

Elmgreen & Dragset took a different approach in urban New York City, where they temporarily installed a giant empty pool, standing upright on its side. In this position and setting the pool appears as a foreign object, almost unrecognizable.

The title of the piece, Van Gogh’s Ear, references the famous rumor that Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh cut off his own earlobe in 1888. Dragset notes that the exact event is unverified, “Maybe Gauguin and Van Gogh invented the story together? It’s a fascinating thing.” The man-made inaccessible pool plays on the ideals of passion and self-denial. Elmgreen & Dragset liken the mythologized self-mutilation of Van Gogh to that of New Yorkers who are unable to enjoy a moment of leisure.

The two explain, “We like to use displacement as a way of bringing attention to the object itself, as well as the surroundings and the local context. It is almost like an alien object had landed from outer space. The pool reminds you of lazy days under the sun, which contradicts the reality of the busy business life happening here at Rockefeller Plaza.”

Public Space

Many of Elmgreen & Dragset’s installations deal with the themes of environment, as well as the gentrification and privatization of public space. The artists are best known for their land art piece Prada Marfa, located near the Texan city of Marfa which was transformed into an art mecca by American artist Donald Judd.

Prada Marfa is a replica of a luxury boutique — fitted with six handbags and twenty shoes from Prada’s Autumn/Winter 2005 Collection — in the middle of the desert landscape of US Highway 90. The building is unattended and permanently closed, rendering the shoes unattainable and the store useless.

The work is influenced by Ilya Kabakov who recreated an abandoned former Soviet Union era school as part of Chinati Foundation. Prada Marfa also recalls the land art of Christo and Jean-Claude.

The project was self-initiated by the artist duo, though the merchandise was selected and donated by designer and fashion heiress Miuccia Prada herself. “It was meant as a critique of the luxury goods industry, to put a shop in the middle of the desert,” Elmgreen has said.

“It was not only about how a Prada shop would look in the desert, it was also about how a desert would look with a Prada store, because the desert has also been commodified as the backdrop to road movies, to commercials…”

This idea of commodity has reached a meta-commentary as Marfa has become a premier destination for art tourism, further accelerated by the Instagram-era. Texan-born singer-songwriter Beyoncé visited Prada Marfa in 2012 and the site was featured in the long-running American television show The Simpsons earlier this year.

Art critic Sarah Sharp writes, “The artists intended it to be left unmaintained until its eventual decomposition into the surrounding desert, as a high-contrast monument to desire and unattainability, and perhaps a reminder of the ultimate transience of even the most powerful social signifiers.”

Contextuality

A crucial element of Elmgreen & Dragset’s work is context. The artists reject the white cube philosophy in favor of a dialogue between their own work, the work of other artists, and the surrounding world. One of the most clear examples of such a dialogue-driven piece is the duo’s permanent in situ installation Memorial to the Homosexuals in Berlin’s Tiergarten.

In the midst of 2004 and 2005, Elmgreen & Dragset’s proposal won a design competition to create a memorial to the queer victims of the NAZIs. Often overlooked, the NAZIs persecuted the disabled, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma, and homosexuals in addition to Jewish people. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay people were deported to concentration camps.

The memorial’s form, a seventy-five-tonne cement stele, is a direct reference to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, designed by Peter Eisenman, just across the street. The work speaks to intersectionality, the fact that some of the NAZIs victims would have been both Jewish and gay.

Elmgreen explains that it was “important to have something that looked very much alike to what was on the other side, the Holocaust Memorial, and [that] it would almost be like one of the concrete slabs on the other side had been sneaking over at night and placed itself in Tiergarten.”

The memorial’s site, Tiergarten, is also known as a popular cruising location for gay men. The slab stands alone and askew, queered, featuring a small window that reveals a looped video of two same-sex people kissing. Ultimately, the memorial is a hopeful and optimistic celebration of love.

Berlin’s then-mayor, Klaus Wowereit (who himself is gay) announced during the inauguration, “This memorial is important from two points of view - to commemorate the victims, but also to make clear that even today, after we have achieved so much in terms of equal treatment, discrimination still exists daily.”

The memorial has been vandalized several times since unveiling. Elmgreen laments, “People might accept homosexuality conceptually or legally today in our part of the world, but they still don’t want to see two guys kissing.”

Sexuality

“Every artist includes their sexuality in their works. I mean heterosexuals can do it without really explaining it. But we don’t want to be boxed in by it — as if we would only deal with queer issues,” argues Elmgreen.

In 2009, Elmgreen & Dragset created a series of laser-chrome color prints that depict eight male sculptures by Danish neoclassical artist Bertel Thorvaldsen with a subtle twist, the simple addition of a contemporary accessory.

Bertel Thorvaldsen was a famous neoclassical artist whose work rivaled the Italian Antonio Canova. Thorvaldsen is crucial to Danish national identity as he was the first internationally acclaimed Danish artist. Thorvaldsen’s work was commissioned by Pope Pius VII, Napo­leon, and various royal families across Europe. Still today, Thorvaldsen’s sculptures can be found in Lucerne, Warsaw, and Rome.

By so carefully considering details such as briefs, socks, a backpack, the artists work in the same vein as Thorvaldsen, whose figures do not vary much from sculpture to sculpture, relying instead on the significance of symbolic markers such as Jason’s fleece and Mercury’s flute.

Elmgreen & Dragset’s additions transform Jason into an underwear model, Mercury into a changing jock, and Adonis into a backpacking nudist or a campus streaker. The details draw attention to their nudity amidst a public gallery setting.

Prior to the creation and decriminalization of pornography, visiting a museum such as Thorvaldsens must have been a titillating experience. In today’s world, with pornography so easily accessible online, contemporary viewers of such art are anesthetized to the eroticism of these idealized forms.

Elmgreen recalls how struck he was by the nakedness of Thorvaldsen’s figures when he first visited the Thorvaldsens Museum in eighth grade. Imagine how such sculptures can affect curious teenagers who are questioning their sexuality. With skilled precision, Elmgreen & Dragset transform these mythological figures created by a heterosexual artist into secular sex idols for a queer gaze.

Masculinity

As gay men, Elmgreen & Dragset frequently depict male figures. Often these sculptures play upon ideas of power, innocence, and violence. The duo scrutinizes masculinity through a queer perspective.

In 2012, the duo was invited to create a sculpture for the empty fourth plinth of London’s historic Trafalgar Square, dedicated to the British victory against the French and Spanish fleets in the Battle of Trafalgar. Elmgreen & Dragset designed a bronze sculpture of a boy playing on a rocking horse, evoking and simultaneously rejecting a tradition of equestrian sculpture.

Conceptually, Powerless Structures, Fig. 101 elevates the limitless imagination of childhood while reducing war to children’s games. The child is unsmiling with a hand raised in the air like an authoritarian leader. Elmgreen notes, “One thing that is absolutely forbidden in the public realm is to show emotions and be fragile.”

“The word hero is also a problematic term,” Elmgreen says, “because it is about being outstanding. But what about being a hero because you managed to grow up at all, despite all the obstacles? It is heroic to become a relatively civilized human being, despite everything.”

That same year, Elmgreen & Dragset unveiled a masculine counterpart to The Little Mermaid in Copenhagen; Han (Danish for “he”) was commissioned by the city of Helsingør. The sculpture was located in a former shipyard, overlooking Kronborg Castle. The statue was initially despised and rejected as thin, effeminate, and homosexual.

Sidsel Rasmussen reported, “Local residents claimed that placing an effeminate, slender boy in front of the former shipyard was an insult to the former dockworkers. But its interpretation of masculinity is precisely one of the work’s main concepts. “Han” is a contemporary take on presenting the male image: man not only as a conquering hero, but also as a sensitive and thinking individual.”

Elmgreen explains, “The debate around toxic masculinity is still relevant. Our small boy looking up in admiration at a rifle in a glass cabinet speaks about gun violence as a male problem. The boy on the rocking horse, which we exhibited on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square among historic war heroes, was the same thing. It has been really important for us to show different kinds of vulnerable masculinities in childhood, when there’s still hope.”

Reception

Sometimes critics or viewers interpret Elmgreen & Dragset as ironic or sarcastic but that is not the artists’ intention. In a lecture at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Elmgreen argued, “We use sometimes humor in our artworks and I will say we sometimes play with absurdity in our artworks but we’re never ironic. Ironic is arrogant, I think.”

The duo’s art is not prescriptive. Dragset says, “It’s open ended what we do, in a way, like people can come and use their own histories to understand the work and to analyze the work and to get their own content out of it.” The artists only wish to impart a new perspective.

A major survey of Elmgreen & Dragset’s work is currently on view at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, until January 5, 2020.