L’Addition by Elmgreen & Dragset|L’Addition by Elmgreen & Dragset work in progress.Photography Spyros Rennt|Details from L’Addition by Elmgreen & Dragset

Elmgreen & Dragset: Fine Art and Swimming Pools

We are soft and neurotic, we work on the finer polishing and coating details – we don’t keep the surface of our work rough: it is smooth – but also smooth can be rough

Interview with Elmgreen & Dragset – everything happened in Copenhagen

Everything happened in Copenhagen in the early nineties. We met one night at the After Dark club. Michael wrote poetry and Ingar came from the performance theater scene. We were working in the cultural world and then started collaborating, mixing our backgrounds and doing art performances. In Copenhagen, there was an open scene at the time. It was like a generational shift where we learned a lot from our peers.

There was freedom, because institutions in Denmark were quite conservative. We would never get an invitation to show our work there. We didn’t have to live up to anything, to please anyone, or to get a position to be loved. We could do what we wanted with our friends. We were immersed in the whole queer and identity studies in the US, which just arrived in Scandinavia. We met Felix Gonzalez-Torres at some point. He was already sick, but we were inspired by our conversations with him. We met Connie Butler who’s now the director of MoMA PS1 in New York, she looked at our few first artworks and helped us formulate thoughts around it. We weren’t quite aware of what we were doing, we acted more from intuition.

Roughness according to Elmgreen & Dragset

We are soft and neurotic. We work on the finer polishing and coating details. We don’t keep the surface of our work rough. It is smooth – but also smooth can be rough: we take objects and hang them up from the ceiling upside down, or push them into the ground. We twist the situation. In 12 Hours of White Paint (1997), one of our first performances, we attacked the gallery, painting it over and over again from noon till midnight. We washed down the paint with a water hose in between, making a mess out of the white cube. In our first performance Untitled, (1996), we were unraveling our long knitted skirts in slow motion. It was done to create a much softer masculine image than what you would have at the beginning of the grungy nineties. Part of Ingar’s theater education was about juggling and miming. Every time we are in a car in Berlin together and there’s a juggler in the middle of the street, Michael says: ‘That could have been you.’

We didn’t come from the art world, we didn’t go to art academies. We were surprised to experience that most places that show art are quite standardized in how they look. It didn’t matter if we would go to Asia, to the United States of America, or anywhere in Europe, all the white cubes looked more alike than McDonald’s. The Zurich Kunsthalle and its display looked like an art fair and we were like, ‘Maybe we can make our exhibition about transforming it into a nice exhibition environment.’ So the idea at the basis of our art production is to use museum or gallery spaces as our canvas. This is our raw material. Today we may not work so much about transforming the white cube by breaking holes in it or repainting it, but we do what we call ‘dressing it up in drag.’ We make it look like something else for the period of our exhibition. It can look like a home, a public swimming pool, a hospital room, or an airport.

The first project we did in Milan was an exhibition at MASSIMODECARLO Gallery, in 2022, How Are You Today?. The gallery used to be in a different place from now – a working-class or lower-income area of town. There was no relationship between the gallery and the surrounding neighborhood, or even between the people in the same building complex. We cut a hole in the gallery’s ceiling and put a ladder in the empty gallery space. When people climbed the ladder, they stuck their heads into the kitchen of the woman that lived above.

Elmgreen & Dragset portrayed by Spyros Rennt

Daria Miricola. Berlin is still the city where you live and work. Your studio in located in Neukölln within a 10,000-square-foot water pumping station from the 1920s. From the exterior, the building presents a pristine, industrial brick facade whereas the interior is designed as a bright open space divided between a ground floor and a mezzanine hosting the team members’s desks and workstations.

We have a group of about 16 people working with us in the studio. Some are working with images and graphic design, some are doing computer renderings. A few people are working in the workshop, doing the preparation and modeling of our figurative sculptures. Sometimes we do live casts, sometimes we scan people here and elaborate the data and print out. There’s not one day that looks like the other. There’s also a lot of traveling to bronze or steel foundries or to our marble carver in Carrara, who we work closely with because, of course, they help us turn our prototypes into a different material.

One of the first sculptures we ever made was a diving board penetrating a panoramic window with a view of the seaside: Powerless Structures, Fig. 11 at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, in 1997. Because they invited us late, there was no space left in this big group exhibition for our performance, and the only place we could find was this panoramic viewing room not normally used for art. We said, ‘oh, but can we have that room? Because there are no other rooms left’ and they said yes. We were happy about that because doing the same thing is never fun. We were always getting invitations to do performances, and we felt like we were more of an entertainment element in a group show, ‘oh, we need some activity, let’s call Elmgreen & Dragset.’