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queering the cube
architecture and identity in the work of Michael
Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset
by Alison Gingeras
Dan Graham's seminal
1979 text "Art in Relation to Architecture/Architecture in Relation
to Art" provides a succinct analysis of the formal and ideological
similarities between postwar architecture and sculpture, unveiling
their shared claims to autonomy and neutrality. After twenty years
of artists (and architects) interrogating those claims, the crux
of Graham's text may seem obvious; however, his original articulation
has been the catalyst for subsequent crucial debates. Graham writes,
"Both minimal art and functionalist architecture deny connotative,
social meanings and the context of other, surrounding art or architecture."[1]
The legacy of Minimalism and Conceptualism and the lessons of context-sensitive
architecture continue to impact art making. Graham's early investigations
into public space may be seen to inform the critical genealogy behind
the work of many contemporary artists involved in practices that
seek to reveal the cultural, sociopolitical, or historical subtexts
inherent to a work of art. As a collaborative artistic partnership
working together since 1995, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset,
from Denmark and Norway respectively, have inflected their interdisciplinary
practice with a similar set of questions surrounding the spatial
construction of the self and the enforcement of normative behaviors
within the architectural frame. With their public identification
as a gay couple, Elmgreen and Dragset have attempted to engage the
manner in which identity can be inscribed in both everyday architecture
and in the more particular spaces of the art world.
The artists' first collaborative works were performances involving
people they randomly approached on the streets and asked to occupy
one of their highly constructed environments. For Try (1997), an
emblematic performance piece (their first), the artists invited
three different young men-chosen for their ability to reflect varied
social typologies-to occupy a "neutral" space. The installation
took place in a room outfitted with one carpet for each of the three
men to sit on and a beer-stocked refrigerator situated in the corner.
Subjects were asked to bring magazines, books, and compact discs
to occupy their time. These props also served to bait viewers with
a smattering of superficial clues that might be used to construct
a characterization of each man on display. The power of the piece
lies in its austere spatial arrangement and minimal physical action
and interaction. Despite the fact that they remained in close proximity,
the participants were not required to engage with one another. Headphones
on (an immediate signifier that one has chosen to disengage), their
attentions turned to whatever was being listening to or read, their
mutual exclusion/separation spoke to the way in which we socially
distance ourselves from others based solely on appearances. This
psychological separation extended to viewers, who were permitted
only to watch. Indeed, each observer was forced to participate in
an act of relentless voyeurism, virtually under obligation to project
their own cultural, sexual, or class stereotypes upon each of the
exhibited subjects. By drawing attention to the collective construction
and architectural framing of three subjectivities in this performance,
Elmgreen and Dragset already identified several of the tropes for
their later, more explicitly architectural installations.
Shifting their critical attention from the exposure of individuals
in the private sphere to the question of identity in more institutionalized
spaces, Elmgreen and Dragset began their current series in late
1997. Entitled Powerless Structures, this ongoing body of work focuses
in large measure (though not entirely) upon one of the most ideologically
charged architectural containers: the white cube. As a space designated
for the display of art in a museum or gallery, the supposed "non-illusionistic,
neutral, and objectively factual,"[2] the white cube has been under
interrogation since the mid-1960s in Minimalism and elsewhere. Conscious
of this legacy, Elmgreen and Dragset have fused Minimalist and Postminimalist
concerns, as well as some of the deconstructive strategies of Neo-Conceptualism
in the late 1980s, to question this assumed "neutrality" and to
create their own unique investigations of this space. For Dug Down
Gallery/Powerless Structures, Fig. 45 (1998), which recalls Gordon
Matta-Clark's provocative gestures of inversion, the artists lowered
a prefabricated gallery (complete with lighting and office space)
into a cavity dug into the grassy expanse of a park near the Reykjavik
Museum. Elmgreen and Dragset's subversion of any possible function
or normative expectations of a gallery, while overstating the supposedly
desired qualities of "visibility" and "exposure" in the positioning
of the space, was in response to the lack of venues for artists
to exhibit in Iceland.
Their most recent addition to the series, Powerless Structures,
Fig. 88 (2000), similarly addressed the economic and cultural expectations
that are projected on art spaces. Made for the Manifesta 3 exhibition
in Ljublijana, Slovenia, Elmgreen and Dragset wanted the piece to
respond to the particularly repressed context of the art world in
former Communist countries of Eastern Europe. The artists decided
to turn over the few square meters that would normally have been
allotted for the display of their work to three young art historians.
In the very heart of Ljublijana's Museum of Modern Art, the duo
invited these historians to open a private art gallery so that local,
underexposed artist could be seen in the context of a high profile,
international group show. Functioning as a literal frame for the
new gallery and the quotidian commercial activities of its business
office, this sculptural installation isolated a living example of
the process of public artistic presentation. A simple enclosure
was constructed: three walls made of ordinary white drywall and
the fourth was transparent glass. By setting the activities of the
gallery in this aquariumlike enclosure, the making of an artist's
career actually became the main "object" on display. What was exhibited
went beyond the artwork. All of the processes that are normally
conducted behind closed doors-the sorting of artists portfolios,
delivering sales pitches to collectors, assembling promotional materials-were
equally visible to the public. The Ljublijana project not only underlined
the random individual choices that shape this process by displaying
the dealers themselves, but also highlighted the subtle, seemingly
benign architectural determinations that impact the artistic sphere.
Two of their earliest interventions on the white cube explored the
ways in which expressions of sexuality, often quite subtle, can
transform a space from something pristine to an atmosphere charged
with meaning. For Powerless Structure Fig. 15/12 Hours of White
Paint (1997) and Powerless Structures, Fig. 44 (1998), the artists
repeatedly covered the interior of a gallery space with white paint.
In each performance a layer of paint was washed off as soon as an
application was complete. In the earlier piece, existing gallery
walls were painted; in Fig. 44 paint was applied to glass walls
placed in the center of the gallery. The tedious cycle of painting
and purging was taken up over and over again for the respective
duration of each performance. The supposed impartiality of the cube's
"whiteness" was subjected to a constant blurring and questioning
through the repetitive addition and subtraction of paint.
In its extreme efficiency, 12 Hours of White Paint recalls other
seminal works in the history of institutional critique, but with
a different aspect.[3] By using a simple repetitive action to concentrate
on a single constitutive element of the gallery's formal composition,
the artists were able to unveil the complex mechanisms behind the
creation of an institutional art space. This revelation not only
highlights seemingly unconscious or automatic choices (the Modernist
preference for white walls) and presumably innocent gestures (the
application of interior paint by normally anonymous workers), it
also evokes a number of identity-based issues that can be equally
obscured by the architecture. The symbolic interpretation of the
layering and washing of white paint has veered towards an evocation
of the artists' gay identities. Critic Bill Arning has gone as far
as to read the runny consistency of the pooling of white paint mixed
with water on the gallery floor as a theatrical representation of
semen.[4] While such a reading may seem extreme, the repetitive
processes in these two performances certainly involve an overwhelmingly
visceral, corporeal presence whose meaning is intentionally ambiguous
and provocative.
Other works in the Powerless Structures series address the more
explicit spatial inscription of sexual identity in architecture.
A commission by the city of Aarhus, Denmark, Powerless Structures,
Fig. 55 (1998), took the form a simple pavilion installed in a public
park. With very few exterior or interior details, the white roomlike
structure was architecturally indeterminate enough to invite families
to utilize the space during their daytime visits to the park. Yet
to an initiated audience, the pavilion's placement in the "gay cruising"
section of the park, as well as its schematic evocations of partitioned
spaces with inter-connecting "gloryholes" on its interior, conveys
an open invitation to use the space for anonymous (homo)sexual activity.
At the same time, the pavilion refuses to shed its allusions to
Minimalist sculpture and the white cube. Cultivating both social
as well as aesthetic sets of references, the two separate spheres
collide to create new, open-ended spaces. This collision between
the libidinal spaces of gay sex and the ideological weight of the
white cube produces an affect of inertia. The mechanisms that usually
order and control public space are temporarily suspended while not
completely dissolving. This "powerlessness" creates a platform where
behaviors and activities are no longer subject to predetermined
or normative prescriptions. Like a performer without a script, the
viewer is left to animate these spaces with a minimum of constraints
and a maximum potential for improvisation.
Notes
1.Dan Graham. "Art in relation to Architecture/Architecture
in relation to Art." in Rock My Religion:Writings and Art Projects
1965-1990 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), p.228.
Graham wrote the article in response to the argument between Richard
Serra and Robert Venturi. The debate focused on the design of the
Transportation Plaza in Washington, D.C. Serra opposed Venturi's
proposal for two high pylons on the plaza, calling them "fascistic,"
while he simultaneously claimed that his infamous sculpture titled
Arc was positively "transgressive" towards architecture.
2. Graham, "Art
in Relation to Architecture," p.210.
3. For their pieces
entitled MoMA Whites (1990), California artists Kate Ericson and
Mel Ziegler displayed eight jars of white paint on a shelf in a
gallery space as if they were scientific specimens. The variations
on white that Ericson and Ziegler showed were taken from the exhibition
design department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The labels
on the jars were telling: the shades were often named for the curators
who invented them.
While the actual tonal differences were minor, each specimen unveiled
the deeply rooted subjectivity underlying the neutrality of supposedly
anonymous "whiteness." See Kynaston McShine, Museum as
a Muse: Artists Reflect (exh. cat.). New York: The Museum of Modern
Art, 1999, pp.128-29.
4. Bill Arning, "Elmgreen
and Dragset" Honcho, no. 8 (1999) pp.73-74.
Originally published in "Hugo Boss Prize" catalogue, published
by Guggenheim Museum, N.Y., 2000
Alison
Gingeras is a Writer and a Curator of the Contemporary Collection
at the Musee National d'Art Moderne, Centre George Pompidou, Paris.
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