Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset are Berlin based artists specializing in land-art works and installations. They have treated nature as part of a cultural iconography and part of a socio-economic capitalist system in the Western world. Its a form of structural three dimensional trompe-l’oeil where playful deception is employed to facilitate an institutional structural critique.This analysis is fused with an exploration of issues around public and private space.
Elmgreen and Dragset created a replica Prada Store, the size of a burrito take-out in desert of Texas. The work, called prada Marfa found the incongrous juxtaposition of luxury goods on the trail of illegal immigrants from Mexico heading north. ”The minimal corporate Prada design and the desolate surrounding ranch land make a great impression together but simultaneously the two forces also render each other useless. Today both nature and fashion can be utilized in similar ways to fulfill consumerist ideals”.
Subway Station Bohen Foundation
Elmgreen and Dragset consider Prada to be the better of ”soft” side of capitalism because in part of Prada’s ability to attach and associate itself to the art market in meaningful ways which has enhanced the image of the brand. In marketing terms the modern visual art has permitted an ”extendability” of their brand where there is a high perceived fit between the brand and its extension category (art). There is a transfer of luxury perceptions from art onto the brand. Prada has created their Fondazione Prada which which actively promotes books, events and exhibitions which are integral to their corporate and brand images.
They have also recreated a 1980′s era subway station in the basement of the Bohen foundation in New York as well as transforming the Klosterfelde gallery in Mitte, Germany into a trendy looking entry gate. The two projects are works of total deception. Elmgreen and Dragset can be bitingly subversive with regard to the public realm. Their ”Welfare Show” was an incarnation of George Orwell’s 1984 meeting Oliver Twist. The exhibit reproduced the interconnecting spaces and dry environment of civil service institutions that makes a point of the dark side of social welfare. Replete with abandoned babies and artificial limbs, the show succeeds in evoking a despondent sense of isolation and abandonment.
The two have no formal art education, and took five years before beginning to receive fees for their work. The developed the concept of ”powerless structures” that focus on alterability where the customary meanings of space are adjusted to create room for new and different interpretations.
Essentially, they are exploring all the nuances and threads of modern living including sexuality : ”So you have to wonder if things really are as they have been shaped through tradition and convention, or if they inhabit the possibility of developing into something else, something more open.”
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