White on White: The Art of Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset

ArtForum, April, 2002 by Daniel Birnbaum

The artists' unconventional education may be of relevance here. Elmgreen worked as a window dresser for a Copenhagen florist, and Dragset studied to become a mime. Elements of both activities are somehow apparent in their art, and it's what separates their work from the drab institutional critique that one finds all over Berlin. The minimal aesthetic of empty white walls, as closely associated today with Gucci or Prada as with contemporary art, clearly attracts the artists, and their projects can be said to combine this allure with an increasingly sophisticated questioning of everything that such a tradition of whiteness stands for. Some of their projects, such as the brightly lit Dug Down Gallery/Powerless Structures, Fig. 45,1998, in Reykjavik, can of course be said to mimic and hence call attention to institutional conventions, but all the same that work is a surprising and beautiful public intervention. It looks great in photographs--like a mysterious swimming pool filled with light emerging from darkness --and I can only imagine the effect it must have had on Icelanders our on an evening stroll.

Male bodies at work and white liquid on semitransparent walls are what one remembers of the performance piece called Powerless Structures, Fig. 44, 1998, which took place inside a large glass cube. The artists state: "From the inside we paint the transparent wall white and wash down the white paint ... over and over again, until the discreet features of the white-cube architecture slowly dissolve." The white walls are no longer part of a power structure that excludes life, change, and time. It has become porous, permeable, and increasingly transparent. If one way to open up the monadic structure is to reintroduce life, another way is to introduce time, which also implies bringing in anticipation, boredom, repetition, and delay. In the seven-week-long performance Zwischen anderen Ereignissen (Between other events), 2000, presented at the Galerie fur Zeitgenossische Kunst in Leipzig, two unemployed housepainters slathered the gallery spaces with coat after coat of white latex. Nothing else happened: Layer upon layer of whiteness was added by two middle-aged men. When nothing much changes in space, another dimension--time--becomes that much more conspicuous.

In recent works Elmgreen & Dragset have returned to their old theme but with various new twists. In the projects Descending Gallery/Powerless Structures, Fig. 145; Tilted Wall/Powerless Structures, Fig. 150; and Elevated Gallery/Powerless Structures, Fig. 146 (all 2001), the white cube is displaced or fragmented. The artists have explained these works as attempts to show not only the powerlessness and flexibility of all structures--that white walls do not have to carry the kind of transcendental significance they are sometimes assigned--but also a gay "infiltration" of Minimalism's famously macho high aesthetics.

The white cube of High Modernism may be history, but the endgame can go on forever. Elmgreen & Dragset will never let go of the white monster. "And from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue of shroud in which we wrap them," Melville wrote in his list of white instances describing the terrible attraction of the whale. "And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?"