the making of, by greg allen
I had a jumpscare back in the spring, when I was looking at the frameless Wilhelm Hammershøi paintings Claudio Santambrogio sent, which Elmgreen & Dragset showed at SMK in Copenhagen. It was from Inge Pollet’s blog post about visiting the show in August 2019, but it wasn’t from the show.
Continue reading “SMK Joint Custody”I understand the important protection and handling convenience frames provide. And I get why it’s cringe to call it rawdawging, but I have stayed wanting more art without frames.
A couple of months back, after that frameless Da Messina situation, Claudio Santambrogio sent along a link to a fascinating semi-frameless show I’d completely missed at SMK in Copenhagen. There I Belong. Hammershøi by Elmgreen & Dragset was a group show of Vilhelm Hammershøi paintings along contemporary artists curated by Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset in 2019. The duo highlighted the ominous feelings of Hammershøi’s interiors and the sense of foreboding they could engender.
One particular pairing jumped out—actually, that’s too energetic, maybe it bubbled over: a 1980 Thomas Ruff Interieur photo of a door and Hammershøi’s 1888 painting, Interior, The Old Stove. Albertinelyst, which is also largely about a door. Hammershøi gets called serene and austere, but Elmgreen & Dragset’s sense of an unwelcoming stillness is also correct. When I think about hygge, it is now not this.
I have to think that showing the paintings naked, without frames, only heightened the unease. Except the image above, also frameless, came from SMK’s incredible Wilhelm Hammershøi Digital Archive. The VIHDA is the culmination of a five-year research initiative into the methods, materials, and construction of over 130 Hammershøi works. Every painting is photographed frameless, naked as the day it was made. And then, in addition to digital scans, there’s a whole range of technical images for each work, too; the dawgs have never been so raw.
There I Belong. Hammershøi by Elmgreen & Dragset, 27 April – 1 September 2019 [smk.dk]
The Vilhelm Hammershøi Digital Archive [smk.dk]
[Thanks to the SMK press office for their kind assistance with details about the exhibition.]
In July 1992 Felix Gonzalez-Torres showed “Untitled,” a photograph of a figure silhouetted against a curtained window, in Paradise Europe, a group exhibition in Copenhagen of 120 artist billboards organized by Bizart, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, and five galleries. [One, the local gallery, Stalke Out of Space, had already begun postering Copenhagen as an artistic practice and distribution platform in 1991, and was itself part of the exhibition, in addition to representing four of the artists. But let’s come back to that.]
Felix traveled to Copenhagen and presented a lecture there, which we know from a 1993 interview, published by A.R.T., when Tim Rollins mentions “grumbling” over “the lack of overt political or Latino content” in his work:
I had a problem just recently in Copenhagen where I went to give a lecture. A man in the audience immediately started talking about winning the battle for multiculturalism. I said: “Look, okay, first I have trouble with that kind of language about winning battles. That’s too male-oriented for me. That’s too macho, that’s too much about war.” Then he said something about numbers-a certain amount of women, a certain amount of Hispanics, etc. No, multiculturalism is not about numbers, it’s about inclusion. It’s about opening up the terms of the argument, opening up the terms of the discourse so that everybody can participate with equal footing. It’s not about naming two female, three Hispanics, four whites, five blacks… It’s not about quotas. Sometimes quotas are necessary when it comes to concrete things like businesses, but in culture it’s more complex. It’s about opening up the terms of argument, and it’s about re-addressing the issue of quality and who dictates and defines “quality.”
Now in the latest episode of The Art Newspaper’s podcast, A Brush With…, where Ben Luke interviewed Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, we learn that Michael was in the audience for Felix’s lecture. Michael, who still considered himself a poet on the threshold of being a fine artist, wrote to Felix, inviting him to dinner, “because I had a lot of questions about how to do art, and how to deal with identity in such a fantastic way, like he did.”
It’s a wonderful story which the super-prepared Luke had never heard, and which I, who’ve been immersed in these artists’ work for decades, had never heard, either. And yet it seems to have been profoundly important to Michael’s work: “We spent a long night where he generously gave me a lot of inspiration, and a lot of hope for continuing doing art projects.”
In the interview Michael didn’t mention the year, so I pulled that, and the show, from Felix’s exhibition history. Felix’s response to Rollins resonated anew with Elmgreen’s response to Josh Spero in the Financial Times in October:
He is slightly less delighted when I read out a quote from a 2002 review, which says — in an apparently supportive way — that Elmgreen & Dragset had staged “a ‘gay infiltration’ of minimalism’s famously macho high aesthetics”. “Minimalism has been infiltrated by queerness from the very start,” Elmgreen says. “I’m sorry, dear heterosexuals, but you can’t trademark minimalism as yours that will [then] be infiltrated by queers . . . You don’t need to accept being boxed in as a queer artist and having certain sets of aesthetics that are provided to you because you are not a heterosexual man.”
What I did not expect to find was the full artist list for Paradise Europe [pdf]: Lorna Simpson, Guillermo Paneque, Sean Landers, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Emilio Fantin, Federico Guzman, Formento-Sossella, Tommaso Tozzi, Lars Bent Petersen, Stalke Out of Space, Alan Belcher, Olafur Eliasson, Lothar Hempel—and Elmgreen & Olesen.
So not only was Michael in the audience, he was in the show. And in a collaboration with, I think, Henrik Olesen. Olesen’s CV does not include this show, or any work before 1995. Elmgreen & Dragset, meanwhile, mark the beginning of their artistic collaboration to 1995, after becoming a couple in 1994.
Besides that Stalke poster above, the only other prominent online mention of Elmgreen & Olesen is of work held at the Esbjerg Kunstmuseum.
But as much as I want to know more about this collaboration and their work, I’m even more intrigued by the idea of Elmgreen— and Dragset—being inspired by Felix’s work. And not just because I have a work from the 1990s by them, that is a slide projection on a wall of the silhouette of a man. For years, I’d lowkey regretted not also buying the emptied pairs of jeans and underwear on the floor, which was in the same show. But now I think I’m good. And I want to dig that piece out of storage again.
UPDATE: NEVERMIND.
I thought of the Fourth Plinth, empty. And the sixteen artists who’ve made sculptures to fill it, (counting Elmgreen and Dragset and the two who are in the queue).
Actually, I thought of the Corgis first. The Queen had had over 30 Corgis, most bred from a dog named Susan, who was given to her on her 18th birthday. Though the royal breeding operation had ceased, in 2022, The Queen still had at least two Corgis and a Dorgi, a dachshund/Corgi mix The Queen and her sister Margaret delighted in since an errant hookup in the 1970s, and which was facilitated, The Queen once actually explained, by the use of “a little brick.”
“The Queen is said to be unwilling to leave young dogs behind when she dies,” the BBC also blithely reported in June, so the thought of some household staff carrying out The Queen’s dying wish to have her dogs killed after her own death–even if it should be a shock–can’t be said to come as a surprise. People should know and remember that decision.
Which is when I thought of the Fourth Plinth. A dog killed and buried with its royal owner. A dog on a plinth. I thought of the Anubis Shrine unearthed in the tomb of Tutankhamun.
The Anubis statue was wrapped in a linen shirt which was from the seventh regnal year of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, according to an ink inscription on it. Underneath was a very fine linen gauze tied at the front of the neck. Over this were two thin floral collars of blue lotus and cornflowers, tied at the back of the neck.[4] Between the front legs sat an ivory writing palette inscribed with the name of Akhenaten’s eldest daughter, Meritaten.
Howard Carter documented in 1927.
No, that’s not the vibe. Anubis led the funeral procession of the pharoah, and, as was evident by the inscription on a “magic brick” of unfired clay found in front of the statue on its palanquin, was positioned to guard the Necropolis:
It is I who hinder the sand from choking the secret chamber, and who repel that one who would repel him with the desert flame. I have set aflame the desert (?), I have caused the path to be mistaken. I am for the protection of the deceased.
Plus, Anubis is too big. Corgis are small. Like canopic jar small.
And that is it. So when I looked for an image of the empty Fourth Plinth, I was also surprised to learn that “The Fourth Plinth is Reserved for The Queen.” Even in the mid-2000s, the group in charge of what it calls, “the most important public art commission in the world,” and even the Mayor of London himself were unaware of this plan to commission an equestrian statue of The Queen for the Fourth Plinth after her death. “It’s as if Boris was told the nuclear secret,” a source said to the Independent when the royal family’s plan was revealed to the then-mayor in 2008.
So since 1999 everyone involved in the Fourth Plinth has really just been running interference, keeping the plinth busy–and clear from any competing permanent proposals. Did Elmgreen & Dragset know? Did Hans Haacke?
So it’s been a fait all along, just waiting to be accompli. Fine. Just as long as when the statue of The Queen on horseback is finally unveiled, the edge of the Fourth Plinth is lined with canopic jar-sized memorials to the Corgis The Queen had killed at her death.
I have never been able to understand* why the Whitney hates the Whitney so much that they moved out, but they do, and they did. And now, as Katya Kazakina reports at artnet , there’s talk of selling it when the Met’s lease runs out in 2023.
[June 2023 UPDATE: They sold it to Sotheby’s, for around $100 million, a pittance for an iconic UES townhouse.]
Of course, there was talk of selling the building in 2008, too, when the plan to build in the Meatpacking District was a thing. Those rumors were floated and batted down immediately, but also repeatedly, in the Times. Now, with the Met a mess and not exercising the purchase option Kazakina reports was in their original 8-year lease, and the Frick just subletting while its own building is renovated, the question is no longer, “Is it for sale?” but “How much could they get, and who would buy it?” [Or as Kazakina actually put it, “Now, the multi-million-dollar question is: If the building is sold, can it be developed?”]
Kazakina’s list of hypothetical buyers includes a random country, Sotheby’s new owner Patrick Drahi, a future Larry Gagosian foundation, or a condo tower developer** who’d want to turn Marcel Breuer’s museum into “a really ritzy gym.” Which is all well and good–or spiraling levels of cringe, depending, obv–but which also misses the most obvious solution: turn Breuer’s Whitney into a house.
Continue reading “The Whitney House”
I just learned that Joseph M. Carrier, the former RAND Corporation analyst in Vietnam, who cruised Danh Vo in 2006 at an artist talk for a residency in Pacific Palisades, then invited him to his house, showed him his vast archive of photos, documentation, research, ethnographic material, and erotica, then invited him to go to Vietnam together, has been alive all this time, and only passed away at the end of November 2020.
Carrier has been an important presence in Vo’s work and career. Vo first showed creepshots Carrier took of young men on the streets of Vietnam as Good Life (1966/2007) at Bortolozzi in Berlin, but these homosocial images have been included in many of Vo’s shows since. He’s discussed them both in terms of Carrier’s own experience as a gay man fired for his gayness, and as projected autobiographical content of Vo’s own lost life in the war-wracked country he fled as a child in the 1970s.
As Vo explained to Adam Carr in 2007 before the Berlin show opened:
What is incredible is that he kept diaries, papers from the RAND Corporation, love letters and lots of photos and original negatives. What’s more incredible is that he gave it all to me!
Primarily I think this whole affair I have with Joe’s material is an act of divine justice for not really having my own history. As a refugee my parents left it all behind, mentally and also physically. No pictures or documents of my family’s life in Vietnam exist, and its a kind of magical coincidence that I got this archive which I strangely but sincerely feel belongs to me.
Sure enough, at an Art Basel Statements installation in 2008, Vo exhibited a copy of Carrier’s will, which mentioned Vo’s inheriting Carrier’s archive.
The three-way affair between Vo, Joe, and his material also manifested in a 2009 show at Buchholz in Cologne, “Boys seen through a shop window.” Carrier wrote the press release for the show [pdf] in strikingly personal first-person non-artspeak, but the show really did look like Vo had cleaned out Carrier’s house and turned it into one giant installation piece.
But Carrier was still alive and going strong in 2010, when Vo talked of staying with him on another trip to LA, before his Artists Space show which featured photogravures made of Carrier’s images.
At the time the perceived dynamic of Vo’s relationship with Carrier was colored by Vo’s relationship with Michael Elmgreen, who he was dating at the time, but whose signature he also secretly forged on a Danish Arts Council grant so he could go to the opening of Prada Marfa as a photographer’s assistant.
Vo talked a bit about the ambivalence and instrumentalization of relationships and relationship structures in 2007 [when he was still marrying friends and immediately divorcing them, just to add to his official last name], in the context of a refugee’s desperate survival tactics. But, as he said even then, “I was a boat refugee when I was four, but I’m pretty dry now.”
Vo’s work, and his collaborations, especially early on, were unsettling, not just because of what he called “parasitism,” but because of his forthright ambivalence even then to forefront his questioning of the fundamental assumptions of human interaction. Finding out about Carrier’s death–and the fascinating, complicated and varied life he led–underscores the efficiency of the art context to reduce him to a sort of found object. But it also exposes the limitations we all face in understanding the nuances of someone else’s relationships. Which feels like part of Vo’s point all along. Meanwhile, I think Danh’s gonna need a bigger storage unit.
Obituary: Joseph M. Carrier [palipost.com]
I was looking for information on an early Elmgreen & Dragset piece where they laid pristine, white carpet at the entrance to their gallery. But the only Google result was for an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist for their 1998 “Powerless Structures” catalogue. It had been hosted on Nicolai Wallner’s website, but seems to have been taken down after 2016, when they stopped working with him. So I have reproduced it here, for Google’s sake.
The installation I had in mind was for Nuit Blanche 1998, at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris. I came for the quick debunking of J freaking R acting all, tant pis, his paper artwork unfurled across the entrance to the Louvre got trampled on, and I stayed for Michael’s story of meeting Felix Gonzalez-Torres and discussing the infiltrative power of Minimalism.
Anyway, it’s wild how not online that 1998 catalogue is. I may have to do a photocopy bootleg version a la Wade Guyton’s Avalanche.
When Katya Kazakina reported that GOP finance chairman/sex predator Steve Wynn’s Picasso was damaged by Christie’s and withdrawn from sale this week idgaf.
But when Kazakina reported it had a hole punched through it by the pole of a falling paint roller, dropped by a contractor, I immediately thought, “Paint roller? Elmgreen & Dragset’s Powerless Structures Fig. 87, “Back in a minute” (2000) is a loaded paint roller!”
“Paint roller through a Picasso, well, there’s your Powerless Structures right there,” I said. “But can it really be that easy?” And then I remembered that Michael & Ingar hadn’t thought so back in 2004 when they put a safe behind a Hirst.
And then there’s this quote, mentioned in the Ganz sale catalogue, from Jacques Prevert, who visited Picasso two weeks before Le Marin was painted, and a month after the artist had been told by the Gestapo he was to be sent to a German concentration camp:
Picasso, more than any other artist, reacts to the things around him. Everything he does is a response to something he has seen or felt, something that has surprised or moved him. (Quoted in M. Cone, op. cit., p. 135)
So yes, I will react. And if you need me, I will be honing my paint roller throwing technique until the #chinesepaintmill Picasso arrives.
[update: wow, Christie’s did a whole catalogue for Le Marin, which, unlike the painting, is still available.]
update update: Thinking about how to actually make this work, I look back to an even earlier Elmgreen & Dragset performance piece, 12 Hours of White Paint, Powerless Structures, Fig. 15 (1997) [above], where the duo repeatedly painted and washed off the walls of a gallery space. The downstroke is the key. I bet the painter was painting the wall opposite the Picasso and so had his back to it, and on the end of his downstroke he stabbed it. Which is fine, but I had hoped to work a rollerful of paint into the disaster somehow.
Well that’s an unexpectedly awkward situation I just stumbled into.
greycu.be: what, you mean your car doesn’t have a domain name?
A week or so ago, I decided my new car needed a domain name. So I registered greycu.be. Partly because the tweeters these days are all hot for the short URLs. But mostly because my car, a little art hauler and storage unit runner, is a Scion xB. Which is the perfect canvas upon which to realize my previously all-talk idea of commissioning artists to do vinyl wrap art cars. [additional posts here, here, and unfortunately, here.]
Needless to say, greycu.be was available. But it did get me to thinking, so I threw whitecu.be into the whois search for the Belgian DNS operator. And it wasn’t registered, per se, but “quarantined.” A 40-day limbo following the non-renewal of a domain name on dns.be. Which went until April 1. And sure enough, when I checked in this evening, whitecu.be had been released. So I registered it.
I confess I have no plans for it at this point. And also that buying it was motivated partly by the sheer novelty of being able to buy a domain name again after it has expired, something the shady/annoying backorder/resale adsquatting “services” in the US domainspace have made basically impossible. [I happen to be at least the second owner of greg.org; the first, an outfit called Global Real Estate Group, had let it expire in 1997.]
But even in this somewhat oddly punctuated, awkwardly unpronounceable incarnation [whitecu dot be? whitecu point be? whitecu pwahn be? It just doesn’t work, except as web text], a chance to connect with one of the foundational paradigms of contemporary art theory was too awesome to pass up.
Since they first appeared in Artforum in 1976, Brian O’Doherty’s essays, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space have provided a powerful critical framework for examining the impact of the commercial art market on the creation and exhibition of art. Even 35 years on, artists grapple every day with the political and financial implications of the white cube, which persists as the central site of art’s instantiation as a commoditized luxury good.
Which has been deeply influential on my own education and experience with art, and with my history as a collector, and more recently as a writer and maker.
Powerless Structures No. 15/12 Hours of White Paint, 1997, Elmgreen & Dragset
Which is presumably why, in 1993, Jay Jopling chose to name his London gallery White Cube. Now he has three, and they’re among the most important and well-known in town. Their website is whitecube.com.
Which would seem plenty clear, distinct, and obvious, unlike, say, whitecu.be. Yet it turns out that Jay did not think so. Or at least he thought that the artist and gallery portfolio hosting service that went up on whitecu.be last year looked a little too similar to his gallery’s web presence. Or that any reference to a white cube was de facto confusing to his 2008 [!] trademark on the term. Because he filed a trademark infringement claim with dns.be against the service’s creators attempting to have the domain name canceled.
Still from The Cube, a 1969 NBC teleplay by Jim Henson about a guy who finds himself stuck in a white cube.
The site’s creators, a pair of young designers in Florida, prepared a lengthy response to Jopling’s claim, but apparently they did not formally respond to it. And so the third-party arbitrator appointed by dns.be issued an extraordinary ruling in Jopling’s favor. The findings for which seem to ignore the entire basis of the domain name and TLD system:
The mere fact that the Licensee inserted a full stop between the letters “cu” and “be” is not likely to outweigh the massive similarities and the replications of all the letters contained in the Complainant’s trademark, in the same order, with the same meaning.
And which also ignores the highly significant, and widespread common use of the term “white cube” in an art context and its history which predates Jopling’s commercial use and [very recent] trademark claim for the term. And which ubiquity was, in fact, the reason Jopling chose it.
The existence of legitimate interests in the litigious domain name appears quite dubious…
And then there’s a remarkable finding of bad faith:
It is obvious from the record that the intention of the Licensee was to divert internet users from the domain name by creating a likelihood of confusion with the Complainant’s trademark.
It is the opinion of the Third party decider that this clearly constitutes a case of typo squatting, with the intent of commercial gain and potential damage for the distinctive character or the reputation of the Complainant’s trademark.
Well, I still don’t know how to say it, or what it’ll be used for, but the new owners of whitecu.be can assure you that it will not be in the business of being mistaken for Jay Jopling’s fine and reputable establishment. Which is at the obvious, widely known, and easily pronounced whitecube.com.
All this Rapture hype reminds me of this old school Elmgreen & Dragset piece from their Powerless Structures series. Even though I’m sure the Rapture people are sure the two guys not wearing these outfits are goin’ straight to hell.
Image via art21, where this piece appears to be titled, “Home Is The Place You Left,” which is actually the name of their 2008 exhibition in Trondheim.
For that matter, everyone from Perrotin to Konsthall Malmo lists the jeans as Levi’s, but when they were at the Swiss Institute back in the day, they were Diesel. Just sayin’.
But enough about muscly, young, naked performance art hustlers in Venice staging homoerotically charged events for attention and acclaim for a moment.
My friends Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset just won a Special Mention Award at the Biennale for their awesome, curated installation at the Nordic and Danish Pavilions, The Collectors. Here’s a picture from the Guardian:
Yeah, I’ve got a post about the MoMA gig with Jim Mangold on Tuesday, which was a lot of fun. Great guy.
But first, this picture from Curbed, which was taken on 21st Street between 10th and 11th Avenues:
Now compare it to this 2003 shot from the same block:
In the end, we’re all just food for worms, boys, warming the bench until Miuccia comes.
Art is in the Eye of the Property Holder [curbed]
Elmgreen & Dragset, Opening Soon / Powerless Structures Fig. 242, 2003 [tanyabonakdargallery.com]
My boys Elmgreen & Dragset are opening their show, The Welfare State, at the Serpentine tomorrow, and there’s a conference related to the show at the Goethe Institute on Friday, and there’s a fat catalogue on every day, whenever you like. [oops, actually, it’s not out in the US until March.]
Kultureflash has images from the show’s first incarnation at Kunsthall Bergen, Norway.
Meanwhile, here’s a photo they sent me from just before their Prada Marfa project opened last fall. That there’s Boyd on the left.
Right after their installation, End Station, opened at the Bohen Foundation (415 West 13th Street, Tu-Sa 12-5), I did a back and forth email interview with Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset for the NY Times. The paper ended up reviewing the installation and not using this piece [I’ll get you, Roberta Smith! And your little– oh, never mind.], so here it is in its entirety, cleaned it up a bit, but with all my essay questions in their full, self-important glory.
Continue reading “Elmgreen + Dragset + Me: The Not-Fit-To-Print Interview”
From my friends Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset comes a show, er, a work that could be titled, Untitled (Hah, made you look!). Right before they left town–and after the opening of their installation at the Bohen Foundation–the artists installed a piece at The Wrong Gallery, Maurizio Cattelan, Mass Gioni, and Ali Subotnick’s foot-deep-gallery-in-a-doorway, next to Andrew Kreps.
They dressed a Mini with all the paraphrenalia of a long trip abandoned–maps, lotion, crumbs and change on the floor–and a sleeping baby in the backseat. The car’s been collecting parking tickets all week; I guess the show will end whenever DOT decides to tow it.
Or else… It just occurred to me that there’s a women’s prison on the corner. Maybe the baby mama is in there doing some firm–if not hard–time.
Elmgreen & Dragset at the Bohen Foundation
[update: Someone apparently called 911 on the baby in the car, because NYPD come to investigate this afternoon.]
