Elmgreen & Dragset | A Greater Perspective | 2015

Photography: Kevin J. Miyazaki / Sculpture Milwaukee 

Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset have been working together since 1995, integrating art, architecture, installation, public art and performance in tragic-comic ways. They create situations of farcical futility, whose light-hearted images—empty sinks, stranded starfish, refuse from rave night, an empty public pool—carry darker meanings that force us to confront the absurdity and beauty of everyday life. 

Their works are described as cheeky and irreverent, poking at the institutions that regulate our lives. By virtually kidnapping objects and placing them in unexpected situations, the artists question how culture shapes and frames our environment. Their iconic Prada Marfa store, for example, sends up the austere Donald Judd compound in Marfa, Texas, by plopping a faux Prada store on a dusty road nearby. Judd’s foundation has created a luxury arts getaway in the desert, and with exclusive experiences comes high end fashion, the artists seem to say. Elmgreen & Dragset eliminate the distance between inside and out, between artistic white cube and daily life. 

Elmgreen & Dragset used the phrase “powerless structures” in their 2012 commission for the Fourth Plinth project in London’s Trafalgar Square, and this phrase captures the regal uselessness of their giant bronze telescope A Greater Perspective, commission for the High Line in New York. The telescope is not accessible given its height, and anyway, it is solid bronze, meaning there is no vista to be enjoyed.

The artists’ use this old-fashioned, romantic tool of discovery to suggests the perspective of the great explorers who shape history is too narrow to accommodate the wide world around us. For Sculpture Milwaukee, A Greater Perspective is sited on the edge of Wisconsin avenue, overlooking the lake. No telescope could reveal the traces that successive generations of visitors left on our shore. The sculpture feels lonely, bereft of its’ purpose, a lingering monument to clouded vision, a call to knowing our own past.