Interview: Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset

June 1st, 2003
Art, Interview, Miscellaneous publications

Published in the first issue of Ten Verses, a now-defunct online magazine I edited in 2002–2003.

Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have collaborated since 1995. Their art fuses the legacy of 1960s and 1970s institutional critique with sexual and identity politics. In their Powerless Structures, often taking the form of sculptural installations, the “white cube” of the gallery space has been sunk into the ground, suspended from the ceiling, reproduced at ninety per cent scale, and opened up to other artists. Many of these works have actually been situated outside of the gallery or institution altogether, such as their Cruising Pavilion / Powerless Structures, Fig. 55, 1998. A park in Aarhus, Denmark, became the site of a gay cruising pavilion; its form mimicking the architecture of galleries while mixing private with public and bringing before visitors the activities that are often conducted in parks, however surreptitiously. I spoke with the artists via e-mail during May 2003.

Brian Sholis: Your decision to move to Berlin was a conscious one, and it coincided with the city’s emergence as a contemporary art center. What prompted the move and why did you decide on Berlin over cities like London, Paris, or New York?

Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset: Well, first of all we have always been a bit lazy; Berlin was right next to Copenhagen (only 375 kilometers), where we used to live. Working as visual artists and also being a gay couple, the context of the Scandinavian art scene had become a bit claustrophobic for us. It was not exactly as liberated there as it might appear from an outsider’s perspective, especially not if you, as a gay man, had to do your stuff within the very macho-dominated art scene of the post 1980′s Denmark. There were few progressive art institutions and we began to know them all a bit too well. So we were looking for some new inspiration and energy, some new challenges. Rents and living costs were extremely inexpensive in Berlin around 1997 when we first moved to the city. Berlin Mitte was still a total shithole, full of squat houses, illegal clubs and small alternative galleries. Nobody really had a clue about how the city would develop or what it would turn into; the entire urban structure was chaotic and open-ended. It was quite a relief when we first arrived here from the hyper-organized Scandinavian society, where anyone thinks that the world is about to go under if the bus is five minutes late.

In 1999, we had a residency in New York and were seriously considering staying there—we made so many fantastic friends—but today we are quite happy that we decided to move back to Berlin. The Berlin scene seems more concentrated on content and dialogue than the scene in New York. The artists here support each other in a different way; it’s not so competitive. Somehow the art community in Berlin has kept its innocence whereas it can be hard to find a gallery show in Chelsea that is not just a “wrap-to-go” kind of show.

BJS: The flourishing contemporary art scene in Berlin mimics a structural transformation of the city unparalleled since post-WWII reconstruction efforts. How has the changing cityscape affected your artistic practice? How do power dynamics in the city of Berlin affect your thinking about the Powerless Structures?

ME & ID: The title of our ongoing series of works Powerless Structures is derived from our misreading Foucault. He speaks about how the structures themselves can impose no power—only the way we deal with them. The structures as such only reflect the public opinion and any structure could in fact at any point be altered or interchanged with a new set of structures. As a new or rather re-born capital, Berlin was undergoing a transition that gave the city a specific dynamic: it was probably triggered by a general confusion among the decision-makers since no one really knew what to do with a city that had doubled in size overnight. It was as if the regular control mechanisms had broken down. Even today the city planning is rather out of control in both good and in bad ways. Many temporary spaces have made important contributions to the cultural landscape here; venues open, close, and move to other locations all the time. These nomadic tendencies have certainly had an impact on our work and on our ideas of a more flexible public infrastructure.

BJS: In an earlier interview with Daniel Birnbaum, Michael, you stressed the importance of close communication with other people involved in your projects the need to have an interest in the specific exhibition place/community. Miwon Kwon has recently argued that notions of site-specificity have expanded from a sedentary model (physically site-specific artwork completely bound to its exhibition space) to a nomadic one wherein the artists’ expertise becomes a mobilizable force placed in exhibition spaces across the globe. As your practice becomes more well-known and as you travel further and more often to exhibit, how do you manage to develop/maintain ties to the quite specific communities and locales in which you show? If this proves too difficult, what do you think will replace these concerns?

ME & ID: In those cases where we do something site-related or when we do a project related to the local socio-cultural conditions, our personal contact to the community—which we may address or incorporate—is still highly important for us. Of course, it adds up to many research trips each year and we are not spending much time at home, but compared to when we first started working, we now have a much better setup in Berlin. We have some absolutely fantastic assistants that we collaborate with in our studio. This leaves us with the ability to concentrate more on the “software” part of our production and less on logistics and practical matters.

We resist ending up in situations where we just fly in, dump our art project, and fly out again the following day without having any impression of the city, the venue, or the larger context that frames our exhibition. It simply doesn’t make any sense for our working method. We keep in contact with a lot of the people with whom we have collaborated in our projects: the team of local female curators taking care of our gallery set up at Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana; the woman who lives above the Massimo de Carlo gallery in Milan; and some of the guys we just included in our project “Paris Diaries” in Paris. We consider this communication the fun part of the whole process, not an extra burden.

Doing more shows gives us the option of saying no to invitations if the conditions are not right, if there is a lack of communication or seriousness, if preparation and planning time turns out to be far too short, etc. Somehow we are still some fucking amateurs as we are driven mostly by our desire and curiosity. The difference between artists who did site-specific works in the 1970′s and today’s artists is not that big. Artists’ practices have always been mobile and artists have always been nomadic, but both the increased interest in this field and many practical factors (such as a faster access to information through the internet, cheaper air fares—and last but not least—a bigger economy in the art scene) makes it possible for us and most of our colleagues to operate with more flexibility and within a larger radius.

BJS: Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant write in “Sex in Public” that acts not commonly recognized as part of sexual culture (paying taxes, investing for the future, owning anything ‘his’ and ‘hers’, running for president) disperse “heterosexual privilege as a tacit but central organizing index of social membership.” They argue: “…the space of sexual culture has become obnoxiously cramped from doing the work of maintaining a normal metaculture.” It seems that the Powerless Structures can be read as attempting to “open up” space in public for queer cultures and other “nonstandard intimacies.” To what extent was this effort conscious, and, now that you have moved beyond the Powerless Structures, is opening up this space still an important part of your practice?

ME & ID: Almost all public architecture and city planning is based on totally outdated, Victorian nuclear family values. (Even for the average nuclear family of the new millennium.) Rigid public spaces in which all signs of diverse cultural inheritance or sexual backgrounds are erased do not function as common platforms anymore. They appear as void-spaces that only exist through the sub-cultural layers added to them, by their unintended use by different populations’ more-or-less hidden activities.

Because today most Western societies are comprised of multiple minority groups and communities, the meaning of “mainstream” has radically changed. The problem is that the urban landscape hasn’t kept up with this development. The standardized architecture that we experience in schools, hospitals, prisons, public squares, and parks—:as well as in most contemporary museums—reflects a moral codex, a lifestyle, and a demography that are not longer present. To challenge such structures—and the perception of public space as something that can be shaped like a neutral or objective entity in society—is an essential part of our practice.

Our Powerless Structures became at a certain point too much of a brand, a label or a formula by which the work could be quickly decoded and read. So we decided to title our projects in a different way. However, the topics that interest us remain the same.

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short takes

“Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph”

While in Chicago last week, I visited the exhibition “Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964-77” at the Art Institute. It’s a remarkable show. Although its argument about the role of Conceptual Art in bringing the photography “definitively into the mainstream of contemporary art” is debatable, it succeeds in several other arenas: first, as an exhibition of conceptually oriented objects that is neither dry nor didactic; second, as a sketch of the precedents available to the artists included in Douglas Eklund’s 2009 exhibition “The Pictures Generation”; third, as an eloquent testimonial to the importance of southern and eastern European art to the histories of Conceptualism (a reclamation project spurred on a decade ago by Jane Farer’s wonderful “Global Conceptualism” exhibition). “Light Years,” curated by Matthew S. Witkovsky, is on view in Chicago until March 11, and I highly recommend it. The catalogue, too, is well done, and available for more than forty percent off at Amazon. For those who can’t visit, Witkovsky published a reconsideration of photographic abstraction in the March 2010 Artforum, the text of which is available here.

40 Watt Sun

Brandon Stosuy’s roundup of the best metal albums of 2011 alerted me to the London-based band 40 Watt Sun, now also one of my favorite discoveries of this year. Other reviewers were sharply divided on the record’s merits, something Stosuy acknowledges when he notes that the “sweeping hooks, painful, introspective lyrics, and [Patrick] Walker’s clear, soaring voice” are “elements that could be cheesy if not handled with such delicacy or well-earned confidence.” Four of the album’s five tracks stretch over nine minutes each, and their consistency means you’ll know very quickly know whether you’ll like the whole record. Imagine a British Eddie Vedder singing over the top of Jesu, or Isis covering Red House Painters, or a 45 RPM record by mid-1990s emo band Mineral played at 33 RPM. The songs are crunchy, drawn out, and so sluggish as to seem static—perfect for late-night cross-country drives, as I discovered last night. Find out more and listen to samples here.

Arizona Politics, Considered Twice

By coincidence I’ve just read two sharp analyses of Arizona politics in separate publications. At The New Inquiry, Alex Aums and James Broulard discuss the #OccupyWallStreet-influenced protests in Phoenix, and meditate in the process upon geography, demography, and “symbolic politics.” Meanwhile, in a recent issue of the London Review of Books, Jeremy Harding reports on the state’s transformation into a “militarized desert principality.” His thoughtful presentation of first-person accounts from both sides of the border is well worth the time it takes to read his 11,000-word essay.

Simon Kuper’s Soccer Men

In a recent interview with the New York Times, journalist Simon Kuper, coauthor of the acclaimed 2009 book Soccernomics, claims that he thinks “people are almost as interesting as numbers.” His new collection of soccer profiles, titled Soccer Men, gave me a chance to test that claim; having done so, I think the emphasis in his statement should be placed on the word almost. To read my review of the book, head to Bookforum.com. “Kuper’s admiring portraits of an earlier generation of great talkers—from Johann Cruijff to Lothar Matthaüs to Jorge Valdano—reveal that his irritation with today’s players is due as much to broader developments in the game as it is to their individual traits.”

Ferguson and Faust

Last week, during the friendly match between Manchester United and the New England Revolution, the ESPN commentators said that United’s coach, Sir Alex Ferguson, is a Civil War buff, and that during last summer’s tour of the United States he made a pilgrimage to  Gettysburg. Today the Telegraph presents a slide show of the English club’s “extra-curricular” activities on this year’s tour, including a visit to Harvard University. Does Ferguson know that Harvard’s President, Drew Gilpin Faust, who is standing next to him in this photo, is a world-renowned Civil War scholar? Has he read her most recent book, This Republic of Suffering? This could be a Missed Connection of epic proportions.

Foner and McGirr, eds, American History Now

Today I received a copy of American History Now, a brand-new collection of historiographical essays edited by Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr. Published for the American Historical Association by Temple University Press, the book supplants The New American History, which came out in 1990 and was revised in 1997. The new volume is an imaginative overhauling of the invaluable sourcebook of essays on recent developments in American history, increasing the total number of texts and dividing them roughly evenly between accounts ordered chronologically and those ordered thematically. If you have the earlier edition—I do, and it was very useful for my comprehensive exam—you’ll want this one, too, as the editors have invited a new generation of scholars to weigh in with fresh surveys of their particular fields of expertise. A few examples will suffice: Alan Taylor on the colonial era; Kim Phillips-Fein on the last four decades; Erez Manela on “The United States in the World”; Sven Beckert on the history of American capitalism; Mae Ngai on immigration and ethnic history.

The Los Angeles Review of Books

I’d like to point you to the Los Angeles Review of Books, a new and ambitious book-review publication. A temporary site was launched last spring, and despite its interim nature it boasts some wonderful review-essays. I’ve been reading it since April, and scanning its Table of Contents reminds me of some thoughtful and sharply written pieces, including Kathryn Schulz on Sarah Bakewell’s life of Montaigne; Barbara Ehrenreich on human-animal relationships; Chris Kraus on Simone Weil; and Mark McGurl’s controversial response to Elif Batuman’s controversial review of his book on MFA fiction-writing programs. I eagerly await the unveiling of the full LARB site, and hope its funding (from UC Riverside and other places) creates a sustainable platform for such writing for a long time to come.

The 1970s

For those whose thirst for commentary on the 1970s wasn’t quenched by Rick Perlstein’s recent summary of a dozen or so books on the topic, the December/January issue of Bookforum features another such round-up, this time by historian Kim Phillips-Fein. For assessment of another side of life during that decade, consider the discussion taking place at the US Intellectual History blog concerning Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s paper, delivered at the group’s recent conference, on Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Lastly there the recently published anthology The Shock of the Global, edited by four eminent historians, which I mentioned in passing here.

Luc Sante on “The Last Newspaper”

Several years ago, when Robert Silvers spoke at 192 Books, the New York Review of Books editor was asked what subject he felt was the most difficult to write about. “Contemporary art” was his answer, and he said that he was hoping to cover more recent art in the pages of his journal. While I haven’t seen much that qualifies as discussion of contemporary art from the likes of Sanford Schwartz, Luc Sante visits the New Museum exhibition “The Last Newspaper” and reports back for the NYRBlog. He doesn’t like what he finds: “For all that numerous artists and curators genuinely believe themselves to be engaged, the art world is too rich, too hermetic, and too pleased with itself to have any more rapport with what is happening ‘on the street’ than did the art establishment Hans Haacke and cohorts were trying to overturn circa 1968. But then, in taking on the lame-duck medium that is the newspaper, the show is even further insulated from actuality.”

Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind

In recent weeks I’ve found myself thinking frequently about Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, an experimental 2008 documentary by filmmaker John Gianvito. I saw it that summer at Anthology Film Archives, and was happy to learn that this hour-long plaintive meditation on radical American history—and how it has been encoded in the country’s landscape—is available as a free online stream at SnagFilms. As A.O. Scott noted in the New York Times, “The calling of birds and the rustle of trees provide most of the commentary, and the effect is somehow to make history more mysteriously distant and more concrete—a matter of stone and weathered plaques inscribed with the records of half-forgotten deeds.” Here is a longer meditation on two of Gianvito’s films by Jonathan Rosenbaum, who compares the film to those by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Rosenbaum says, “Gianvito’s various ways of approaching the graves, memorials, and shrines through the surrounding landscapes that nestle and sometimes hide these largely unremarked sites is every bit as important as their inscriptions.” I highly recommend the film.

Blogging the Civil War

Huge fanfare surrounded the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth in February 2009—and occasioned a flood of books on our sixteenth president. (Here is Sean Wilentz’s controversial take on seven of them.) The ruckus has hardly died down, yet historians of nineteenth-century America are once again being tapped by newspaper opinion pages, this time to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. The Washington Post has already launched Civil War 150, a site that has incorporated A House Divided, a blog about the war run for two years about Linda Wheeler. In recent weeks it has featured posts from the eminent historians Joan Waugh, David W. Blight, Kate Masur, and others. The New York Times is getting in on the act, too, with Disunion, a subset of its Opinionator blog mostly written by Adam Goodheart (though already featuring a few guest posts by Ted Widmer). The torrent of writing will only increase in the coming weeks: South Carolina seceded on December 24.

Stanley Greenberg

Urban Omnibus has published an interview with Stanley Greenberg, whose “photography explores hidden systems, infrastructures and technologies, both state-of-the-art and antiquated. New York City’s unseen workings, the region’s complex water systems, architecture mid-construction, physics labs, telescopes and a decommissioned dam have all been the subject of Greenberg’s careful eye.” A slideshow of Greenberg’s photographs accompanies the text; to see more, click here for a page on the Gitterman Gallery website and here for a selection published at the site of the Architect’s Newspaper.

The Original Tea Party

Why not spend this election day, in which the modern Tea Party figures so largely, reading Benjamin L. Carp’s Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party & the Making of America (Yale University Press)? The well-timed book is not only a lucid, detailed explanation of what took place in Boston from the mid-1760s to that fateful December night in 1773. It also sets those events into a global context, with a chapter on the East India Company and “Great Britain’s struggle to manage its expanding empire”; highlights women’s roles in the related boycotts and non-importation agreements; and builds on the nexus between the urban environment and political mobilization that Carp laid out so clearly in Rebels Rising, his first book. Carp offered a brief summary of “the real history of the Tea Party” in the Wall Street Journal, and spoke about the book in this podcast.

Pied La Biche

This summer I caught World Cup fever, which has morphed into an obsession with European soccer. I’ve been watching a game or two a week, as well as watching highlights from dozens of others and reading blogs and newspapers’ sports sections. There are a handful of intersections between the sport and contemporary art—another of my interests—most notably Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s 2006 film Zidane: A 21st-century Portrait. Now I’ve come across Pied La Biche, an artists’ collective that has riffed on soccer several times. Their video Refait re-creates, on the streets of Villeurbanne, France, the final fifteen minutes of the 1982 World Cup match between France and Spain. The group has also realized artist Asger Jorn’s 1964 proposal for a three-sided football match, which was played in Vénissieux, France, in October 2009 during the Lyon Biennale. Learn more about the group at their French-language website. (Via soccer blog From a Left Wing. Also, if you’re wondering, I’m rooting for Arsenal.)

Interview with Jace Clayton (aka DJ/Rupture)

My friend Alan Gilbert recently conducted a lengthy and fascinating interview with Jace Clayton (aka DJ/Rupture) for Bomb Magazine. Clayton is behind the consistently great blog mudd up!; is the creator of stunning DJ mixes that incorporate music from around the globe; is the author of insightful articles (one, two) on changes in music culture; and lives, I think, down the block from me. Clayton’s Gold Teeth Thief Mix, released in 2001, opened up my ears to musical cultures with which I was unfamiliar, and was a large part of the reason why, when his 2008 album Uproot was released, I was not surprised to discover I was familiar with many of the “obscure” musicians it samples, including Ekkehard Ehlers, whose 12″s under the collective title Plays (later released as a CD on Staubgold) remain favorites of mine. In the interview, Clayton discusses “friction as a process,” the computer as the “folk instrument of composition,” and the economics of DJing. And really—if you haven’t yet heard Gold Teeth Thief, go download it. It’s free.

Michael Greenberg

For several months I have read, in a fugitive manner, Michael Greenberg’s essay collection Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life. A compilation of roughly thousand-word essays he has published in the Times Literary Supplement, the book, so far as I can tell, amounts to a haphazard index of New York, a careful and sympathetic accounting of its odd places and characters. I peruse it standing up. I read in a West Village bookstore about a longtime fixer in the Brooklyn neighborhood where Greenberg grew up, and in an Upper West Side indie about Hart Island, a potter’s field where thousands of New York’s anonymous dead lie buried. Now I’m pleased to discover that Greenberg has inaugurated a new column, “The Accidentalist,” in the new issue of Bookforum. Read his first entry, about a “strange fever,” here.

Reconsidering Christopher Lasch

One of my summer goals is to read (or re-read) several of Christopher Lasch’s books, from The New Radicalism in America 1889-1963 (1965) to The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1994), as a prelude to reading Eric Miller’s new biography of Lasch, Hope in a Scattering Time. Reviews of Miller’s study have begun coming in over the transom. Andrew Bacevich warmly welcomes the book in the new issue of World Affairs, and Alan Wolfe reviewed it in a recent issue of The New Republic. Rochelle Gurstein, once a student of Lasch’s, takes issue with Wolfe’s piece, recommending Bacevich and Jackson Lears as better guides to Lasch’s thinking. (Lears’s 1995 consideration is not yet available online.) I would add two enjoyable, deeply thoughtful essays to Gurstein’s recommendations. One is the reminiscence Lasch’s University of Rochester colleague Robert Westbrook published in Reviews in American History in 1995, and the other is Louis Menand’s 1991 NYRB essay. Unfortunately both require subscriptions to read online, though Menand’s piece was reprinted in his 2002 collection American Studies (it begins on page 198). Also useful is the Christopher Lasch bibliography-in-progress, maintained until 2003 by Robert Cummings. UPDATE, 5/25: Former Lasch student Chris Lehmann reviews the biography in the summer issue of Bookforum.

Christopher Gray’s “Streetscapes”

For several years I have enjoyed Christopher Gray’s “Streetscapes” column in the New York Times. This morning, looking online, I discovered Gray has been writing about buildings and blocks in New York for over two decades. These pieces comprise a huge and diverting archive, from which I learned, for example, that until the early 1990s my block housed an Episcopal church constructed in 1838 on land donated by Clement Clark Moore. Moore is the author of “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” (more commonly known as “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”), and his family estate, Chelsea, is the source of my neighborhood’s name. Click here for the archive with a brief introduction to the column by Gray. Two books, Changing New York (1992) and New York Streetscapes (2003), also contain materials from the column.

The Voice Literary Supplement

I’ve just surfaced from a particularly pleasant internet-as-black-hole experience. After reading Craig Fehrman’s entertaining article on Mark Twain’s house, I wandered over to his website. There I found a link to Rick Perlstein’s 2002 essay on plagiarism and writing history, published in the Voice Literary Supplement. From there I found a page with links to the contents of more than a dozen issues of the VLS. Good reads abound: Mike Davis on Jane Jacobs (April/May 2000); Luc Sante on street vendors (December 1999); Benjamin Kunkel on W.G. Sebald (June 2000); Michael Eric Dyson on Stanley Aronowitz (September 1998); and much, much more. For those wanting to learn more, Joy Press compiled a brief oral history of the VLS on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary.

John Gray on The Shock of the Global

John Gray has written the first review I’ve seen of The Shock of the Global (Harvard), an anthology of historians’ writings about the 1970s edited by a super-group of three Harvard-based historians and a colleague from Berkeley. His assessment: “While what one contributor calls ‘the declining autonomy of the United States in international affairs’ is occasionally acknowledged, the idea that globalization might be undermining America’s position in the world is nowhere systematically examined.” Read more in The New Statesman.

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