Dragset & Elmgreen: A party I've never been to...
In the mirror universe, closer than conceived, Elmgreen & Dragset are Dragset & Elmgreen, an artist duo virtually indistinguishable from their counterparts, differing just enough to constitute a separate dimension. Mirror-Dragset's facial stubble more hobo clown than usual. Mirror-Elmgreen smokes Marlboro instead of Lucky Strike. And so on.
Meanwhile, in real time and space, Elmgreen & Dragset have installed Too Late, transforming London's Victoria Miro Gallery into 'a party that's already over', a temporary discotheque called The Mirror. White cube as black cube. Isolating that all-too-familiar moment right after all the fun's been had. The last of the secondhand smoke has settled, the patrons have moved on. So archetypal it was yesterday.
In the mirror universe, Dragset & Elmgreen accept my friend request on Facebook, letting me and hundreds before me lurk status updates, wall-to-wall chats and photos of 'All those parties I was never invited to...' and other meta-titled installations that collectively make up The Mirror. Party, OVER, comments Adam, about '(Un)Lucky Strike', a fallen disco ball surrounded by default discotecture: dancefloor, sectional sofa, glass tables, and a pile of anarchy cornered by an industrial broom. So is that the meaning? adds Rita. Possibly the saddest music ever loops in the background. I'm also listening to Adrian Searle's audio tour of The Mirror, wishing he would stop panting so that my mobile phone app can identify the song. He's out of breath from talk-walking us up and down the two-story establishment, from 'When Privacy has to be held in Public', a lavatory featuring surrealist plumbing and fauxmosexual graffiti (my favorite: 'Joseph Boys') to the locked VIP room.
Too Late is not about marveling over the mastery of materials to contrive a convincing likeness. As with most of Elmgreen & Dragset's work, technical accuracy is more of a given than a goal. Too Late offers a more contemporary notion of likeness that of scaricature, an exaggerated yet oversimplified portrait of our frighteningly paradoxical present where we lament the 'loss of common social ground', as the gallery press release suggests, from our laptops. Nor is it about 'control mechanisms'. At least not the ones listed: 'licensing and smoking laws, stringent surveillance and economic exclusion'. Elmgreen and Dragset are no nostalgists, longing not for an ideal past but for meaningful social experiences, just like the rest of us.
If Too Late is about anything, it's the mirror universe. In the mirror universe, smoking indoors is still allowed. Tom Marioni declares the act of drinking beer with friends to be the highest form of art, documenting what we missed yet already knew, ready for perpetual download. Howard Fried organizes a game of baseball on the roof of his studio and hand-picks the teams according to whether the players play mainly dominant or passive roles in their relationships with him. Tony Labat has his mother recite her recipe for black beans and rice to him over the telephone while he strips down, paints his face black, and balances on a canoe with a larger-than-average disco ball hanging from his testicles. Stories and photos that continue to inspire us to bring back the function of fun, while overwhelming us with the probability that everything's been done before, and better. The mirror universe is composed of advanced models of reality -- fictions operating between art and life, conceptual and actual, immortality and gravity. Undervalued yet vital modes of engagement, interpretation and reflection -- curating, editing, performance, publishing, recording, design, writing, and criticism -- without which the slow and space-bound system of art would not exist.
In the mirror universe, the party never ends.
Joshua Trees, Frieze Writer's Prize 2009 entry