Elmgreen&Dragset
Elevated Gallery / Powerless Structures, Fig. 146, 2001
Artist
Elmgreen&Dragset
Title
Elevated Gallery / Powerless Structures, Fig. 146
Year of creation
2001
Technology and dimensions
vinyl, aluminum, wood; 530x575x340cm
Year of acquisition
2003
The Hamburger Bahnhof has a new sculpture, it has more, it has a new entrance. Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset conceived the sculpture together, just as they have been working on all artistic concepts together since 1995. You were a winner of the National Gallery Prize in 2002. The price is linked to a purchase.
This work is titled “Elevated Gallery” and you can see it straight away, this gallery is not firmly on the ground, it is floating in the air and out of balance. Two black balloons anchor the work of art to the ceiling, so to speak; if the ceiling were opened, it could also fly out into the world. Furnish the airspace while floating freely.
First of all, it is an interior and exterior space, a hybrid between architecture and sculpture. It is an art gallery with an exhibition room and meeting room. In one room we see the Arne Jacobsen chair, which is still considered “absolutely modern” today. The simple, white room of the “White Cube” is also modern, classic. Galleries that trade in art, which make the artist, gallery owner, private collection and museum cycle possible, have internationally committed themselves to this “modern” form of presentation.
Dragset and Elmgreen have produced a work that deals with “places of art” for the historic hall in Hamburger Bahnhof, which has absolutely nothing of a “white cube”. They show how art should be presented, traded, archived and viewed and what different demands are placed on art: it can be a cultural asset, an object of investment and speculation, and can fulfill aesthetic, decorative or image-promoting tasks.
The function, perception and interpretation of a work of art are by no means unchanging values, but rather are subject to the respective context in which the work appears. Here it hangs in the museum, in front of the highly traded greats of the art market and works of art that are a “must” in every medium and large museum collection, such as Anselm Kiefer, Richard Long, Mario Merz, Sol Lewitt and Don Judd. In a way, they form the backbone here. But they not only offer the backdrop of a market, they also represent a quality consensus. They are also exhibited here in this location because the public museum and a private collection have joined forces.
And Marcel Duchamp had already subjected the authority and competence of the museum and the official exhibition institutions to critical scrutiny in 1917. This raised the question of context and its function for the contextualization of the work of art and was to become a central point of criticism of artistic practice in the 20th century on various levels. These specifications and conditions of the exhibition location are almost inevitably taken into account in all artistic installations.
Elmgreen and Dragset left the rooms open and visible. No floor, no ceiling. They address the presentation space itself by revealing its structure and reflect the institutional framework to which the presentation and trading of art is subject.
Because it hangs crookedly and seemingly unstable, the business with art turns out to be an extremely fast-paced and unstable system, which is completely in contrast to its efforts to produce and sell a commodity with art that has a claim to lasting validity as a cultural asset want to raise. The argumentation of the classical art historians has perhaps led to ad ab ursum, where the museum is a competence that has made it a decision-making authority about art and non-art.
By selecting the works that it includes in its collection, it has so far offered guidance and aesthetic models with which the audience has been able to train and further develop its own judgment of quality and taste. As a rule a public institute, the museum has long had state authority in artistic issues.
This has been put into perspective for decades, due to a large number of competing companies and institutions, and different standards of value are certainly an expression of modern democratic societies in which the museum only makes an offer, nothing more, and that is why we are in the middle of a transition situation with our institutional problems, which produces many symposia and essays, which are not just about questions of weak financial resources.
The work “Elevated Gallery” also has other frames of reference. It is not just a work about the art world and the places of art, about modernism and its furnishings. It is a work of art that refers itself to art. And here is a key phenomenon of the avant-garde movements at the beginning of the 20th century, which can be followed throughout the rest of the century. The equilibrium, the equivalent that articulates a dynamic equilibrium paradigm. It is a tradition from which Karl Kraus already postulated that the true end of the world is the stable state.
In 1913, Kasimir Malewitch designed a stage set for the futuristic opera “Victory over the Sun” in which the perception of space was disoriented, in which gravity was supposed to be eliminated and the directional coordinates such as up and down, inside and outside had lost their validity. From this he developed an alogical space for better optical evocation, which was further developed in 1915 to produce the icon of non-objective painting “The Black Square on a White Background”. Among other things, this square and many works of art that followed the utopian ideas behind it were intended to give the viewer the feeling of floating and thus the removal of earthly gravity.
But not only the rational measurement and hierarchy of space was to be abolished, it was a macro and microcosm in one. It was the moment from which art had to begin again radically and comprehensively.
After the Second World War, the utopian ideology of the early avant-gardes could no longer be accepted, and yet more floating works of art were created than ever before. Calder, Rickey, Miro, Tinguely, Baumeister, etc. adhered to the phenomenon of floating as a concept. As was the case at the beginning of the century, it was also a time when it was once again possible to argue about social concepts and when artists made comments on existing conditions.
This is also the time of the late 50s and early 60s when the “White Cube” began its triumphal march. Where key figures such as the American art critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg set standards to which today's young artists largely still feel obliged. Here rules were set for everything that we still understand today as “modernism”. These aesthetic ideals and art-philosophical beliefs influenced a wide area of the art scene and the Arne Jacobsen chair is only representative of New Design, which must be given a similar status as art.
The Elmgreen and Dragset sculpture “Elevated Gallery” consciously creates these references. It is a reflected reference to existing artistic and art theoretical guidelines, in which the positions of contemporary art were redefined, its rules were reformulated and paradigms and rules were set for everything, some of which we still have to accept today. Seen in this way, this artistic reference is not just a formal operation, externally motivated quotations or ironization for its own sake, but rather very conscious references in which criticism, questioning, refutation, but also continuation under different circumstances and many others Forms of critical engagement with what exists must be counted as a tried-and-tested artistic approach.
Elmgreen and Dragset, who react in this sense to recognized art historical phenomena, act very precisely and thus create space for new and re-interpretations. So these are not isolated formal questions, but rather a special form of artistic thinking, whose specific dialogue ability arises at the work level.
These, as well as the rest of the artist duo's work, are an expression of the questioning and changeability of established structures. The unbalanced, floating work of art is a metaphor and a challenging opportunity for discourse.
Britta Schmitz
