Danh Vo SMK Sculpture Street installation, 2018-2023, photo: Nick Ash for SMK
In the Sculpture Street, the Iris B. Cantor Gallery-style atrium space between SMK’s old and new buildings, there was a meaningful cluster of plaster casts on pallets installed under an artful array of Noguchi Akari lamps. It all felt very Danh Vo, but there were no Vo works in the collection that matched, and no Vo exhibitions on the SMK calendar at the time.
There had been a Danh Vo exhibition in 2018, though: Take My Breath Away traveled from the Guggenheim to SMK from 30 August until 2 December. Surely Vo’s Sculpture Street installation of herb garden boxes, benches with Nanna Ditzel upholstered cushions, plaster casts and Akari did not stay up for nine months after the show closed.
Indeed it did not. It stayed up for five years. When I asked SMK’s press office, they explained that many elements of Vo’s installation remained in place and in regular use until 2023. They even reupholstered the cushions to match other installations as they came along.
Kafeteria at SMK, with walls, lighting, plants, furniture, and sculpture, and ceramics by [sic] Danh Vo. 📷: Elizabeth Heltoft Amby via thespaces, since SMK has deleted its Kafeteria references.
The raised herb gardens were operated in collaboration with Kafeteria, the museum’s restaurant, operated by Frederick Bille Brahe, and designed in collaboration with Vo, which had already opened in February 2018. It closed almost a year ago. Which, now I’m adding a bunch of Vo Enzo Mari furniture to the benches and cushions on my to-track-down list.
And which is all to say, maybe Kafeteria already being a permanent [sic] installation softened the surprise of Vo still hanging around SMK when Elmgreen & Dragset showed up. In a way museums are hotels for art: some art checks in, stays a while, and checks out. Then the room gets cleaned and reset for the next guest. And in that way, it felt wild to be scrolling through 2019 pictures of Elmgreen & Dragset—who had a reservation—and see Vo’s 2018 stuff still in the corner.
And this specific metaphor comes to mind because Vo had dated Elmgreen for several years, and made fascinating work about his own messiness and their relationship. There was the story—and all stories I’ve ever seen are from Vo—of forging Elmgreen & Dragset’s signatures on a grant application so Vo and a photographer friend could cover/attend the opening of Prada Marfa in October 2005, then revealing the con to everyone, including Michael, six weeks later by exhibiting the forged documents at Vo’s first solo show at Klosterfelde—the press release text is rather extraordinary; I’m reproducing it at the end of the post, because there’s only a single online source rn—which was also E&D’s gallery. Vo’s show in Berlin shared its title, Not a drop but the fall, with a group show at the Künstler:innenhaus in Bremen, which had opened a month earlier, which included Vo, and which was “conceived by Elmgreen & Dragset.”
Especially at this early point in his career and practice, the intersections between Vo’s lived experience and perceptions of his identity as a Vietnamese refugee in Europe, a queer man, and an academy-trained artist were central to much of his work. So were his relationships with family and friends. It’s almost surprising now that Vo didn’t marry and divorce Elmgreen as a work, to add his surname to his collection.
Danh Vo, Uro, 2009, three keys and a chain, as exhibited at Galleria Zero in Milan in 2009, and as published in the catalogue for Take My Breath Away, at the Guggenheim and SMK. Uro is in the collection of Tokyo Gallerist Taro Nasu.
But then, what I don’t know about how all this went down could fill a blog post. Some traces, though, are public. In March 2006 Vo organized a week-long group show in his parents’ apartment in Copenhagen that included a General Idea poster, Robert Gober wallpaper, a Felix Gonzalez-Torres puzzle, and an Elmgreen & Dragset Powerless Structures door. And a work by Henrik Olesen, Michael’s ex, which ended up not being shown. Vo’s January 2009 show at Galleria Zero included Uro (2009), a chain with three keys on it: to the Alfa Romeo Michael bought him; to their shared apartment; and to the Park Hyatt Tokyo hotel room where they broke up. It also included a framed note to the gallerists, on Park Hyatt stationery, dated 21 September 2008, letting them know the title of the show would be Last Fuck.
All of this is from the catalogue from Take My Breath Away.
When Rauschenberg and Johns broke up, Johns’s paintings filled with grey skulls and poems of betrayal and anger. Johns decamped to South Carolina. There are stories of them avoiding each other for years, one leaving parties when—or before—the other arrived. One of their most foundational early works was, through a sort of art custody agreement, erased from public view or discussion, and had its central element stolen, never to be recovered. Time passed, some things settled down, &c., &c. But it feels like relevant context that gets downplayed or dismissed for decades because it was socially awkward, devalued, or, in extreme (or queer) cases, taboo.
All that said, I just was surprised, and then chill, to see works sharing a museum space by artists who had been rather messily together, and then rather messily were not. And that has an impact on the work—often on why it exists at all—and how it’s understood.
[APPENDIX] Press release for Danh Vo’s first solo show at Klosterfelde, Berlin, 18 Nov – 23 Dec 2005, which, incidentally, does not mention the title the show has been known with since: Not a drop but the fall, as reproduced for archival purposes from artmap.com]
Danh Vo 19 Nov – 23 Dec 2005
On the work of Danh Vo at Gallerie Klosterfelde
When appropriation art turned into focusing on the deconstruction of property on the level of freely competing individuals, it limited its scope to the public sphere of the art market – to the circulation of the object. This work, in contrast, articulates the disarticulated of this articulation of the economy and thereby the economy itself.
The artist exhibits a work which began after having spent a night together in the office of his lover, where he stole the concept and information of a current project to write a fake application to the danish arts council. The misappropriation took place not in public but in the privatised intimacy of the as well debureaucratised bureau, a seemingly safe space of (sex/ love/ tender) reproduction, which also is the ground and source for artistic productions. The question (not in terms of intention but on the level of effects) would be: where does the work (of the artist involved) start? Violating the border makes the border visible. The obvious exploitation of sexuality hints to the structural exploitation, which (especially in heterosexual contexts) operates behind the scenes of exhibitions and which constitutes and selects subjects before they have ‘a name’ in the double sense of the word.
Robbery here, “first step in redistribution”, is primarily a robbery of privacy itself, its etymology hints to what it is dealt with here (Latin: privare = to rob) – deprivatisation. But neither in the sense of a banal gesture of provocative exhibitionism for the means of itself, which supports and reproduces the ‘self’ by exposing it. Nor in the copy of the original that decentres originality and in the end originalizes the copy. But in the articulation of the amicable collectivity, of sexual reproduction that produce artistic labour as well as the artistic ‘self’ before it’s value realizes itself. The work places itself in a feminist tradition, that claims the private to be political and reveals reproduction as supporting production. Articulating reproduction today means to deal with its very crisis – visible or invisible. The question of caring for others, for yourself and being cared for touches the society’s sore spot facing the neoliberal wage labour centred discourse of individualization. It is specifically the art world that ever since reproduces the glamour of singular authorship, the myth of the sovereign individual producer, while at the same time radically marginalizing the paradox conditions of its reproduction. Love is always also if not nothing else than an ideology supporting and veiling exploitation.
Instead an appropriation that is an ex-appropriation in the best case, this work sets an expropriation, that is an exprivatisation. An exploitation of privatised sexploitation. A artificial deprivatisation in times of societal (economical, cultural, sexual) privatisation.
For further information please contact the gallery.
opening: 18. November 2005, 6 – 9 pm duration of the exhibition: 19 November – 23. December 2005 opening hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays 11 – 6 pm and by appointment
