Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Elmgreen & Dragset: Suspended Space

Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Elmgreen & Dragset: Suspended Space

by John McGee

Elmgreen & Dragset, Suspended Space, 2002, mixed media (installation view)
(Photos: John McGee)

Elmgreen & Dragset is not a law firm in a Pulp detective novel nor a paint manufacturer for race cars. In business together since 1995, the art duo of Michael Elmgreen (b. 1961) from Denmark and Ingar Dragset (b. 1969) from Norway deconstruct the physical and socio-political architecture of art institutions. 

“New museums and McDonald's are the most standardized forms in the world now,” says Elmgreen. They should know. Over the past few years, the two have traveled the international art biennial circuit, stopping in Sao Paulo, Istanbul and their current home base of Berlin. 

But new museums are good, right? “The problem with them is that they are not flexible,” says Elmgreen. He says they are built for the monumentalism of modern art—big paintings and stand-alone sculptures—not the free-wheeling installations and multi-screen videos of contemporary art.

Mostly, however, museums suffer from being public institutions. “Public architecture always pretends to be neutral space, but it's not,” says Elmgreen. “It's too rigid, we feel alienated and forced to behave in a different way than at home.” Look around—many Japanese municipal and prefectural museums are worse than neutral and rigid. The drive to build cultural trophies in the 1980s and '90s left more mediocrity than even a bureaucrat could love. 

Inside Suspended Space 
by Elmgreen & Dragset 

The duo's dream, says Elmgreen, is to deal with museums in a different way. “With a small twist or two, most public architecture could be more challenging,” says the artist. Their site-specific installation at Taka Ishii Gallery, however, is more twister than twist. There are four walls and a glass skylight ceiling of a typical “white cube” gallery. But none of the walls touch the floor, all the parts hang from wires at cockeyed angles, floating separately as if in zero gravity. 

The installation could be read as theater flats, a set in the process of being put up or taken down. Except once you step inside, the suspended walls feel stable yet dangerous, a house of cards frozen in the moment of being blown apart. But the wood and plasterboard walls are real—they took two days just to install. For authenticity, the pair also tacked on what Elmgreen calls the essential details of a public space—a fire extinguisher mounted on the bottom of one wall and a green exit sign on top of another. A glowing white “museum” sign hanging vertically on one of Taka Ishii Gallery's real walls also helps. 

Thematically, Elmgreen & Dragset trace from well-worn blueprints. They admit to being influenced by the work of minimalism and conceptual art of the late '60s and '70s, for example, Gordon Matta-Clark's sculptural extrusions from buildings and Michael Asher's socio-political reorientations of museum space. But Elmgreen says that he hopes their work offers something new, a playful edge with a touch of drama. 

On a different note, Elmgreen & Dragset's break-down-and-reformulate strategy is especially poetic at Taka Ishii Gallery: This show is the swan song for Ishii's present space. In the beginning of 2003 he's moving his gallery from his family home in Otsuka to the new Shinkawa gallery complex near Kayabacho. According to Ishii, the new space will be much larger, more centrally located, and surrounded by other white cubes, presumably with all the walls attached and grounded. [Update: Taka Ishii Gallery has since moved again (in Dec 2005) to the gallery complex in Kiyosumi, Koto-ku, Tokyo.]

The Elmgreen & Dragset: Suspended Space exhibition was held Dec 2002 at Taka Ishii Gallery in Otsuka, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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