Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset’s artistic research focuses on exploring the social and political aspects of contemporary life. Playing on the sense and nonsense of Western lifestyles and the imagery evoked by them, their sculptures, installations and performances create unsettling situations and images that are both recognizable and unfamiliar at the same time. Being capable of triggering an immediate intuitive reaction in the observer’s mind, the two artists redefine the way art is exhibited and experienced.

I talked with the artists about these dynamics and the themes of competitiveness and winning starting from their work “Short Story”.

In this installation, two young boys (Kev and Flo) find themselves suspended in a tennis court as the match they have just played comes to an end. An elderly man (Bogdan) stands in the background, the only spectator, who, apparently half asleep, sits in a wheelchair in a corner beyond the field. That man is revealed to be, albeit silent, the narrator of this story and whether the story is thought or seen, or to what extent it concerns him or not, we cannot know it. Perhaps this man is dreaming and what he has seen is an extension of his thought, which transports us to the dimension of dreams, of a distant memory, in its manifestation. The dualism of this moment is also marked by the geography of the tennis court itself, which is divided into two parts presenting the two sides of a coin, the winning and the losing one, but it is however prefigured in its temporal expansion as bitter for both sides. In the face of the winner there’s not the pure joy of winning, opposed to the desperation of the loss suffered by the other side, the loss of the heirloom and symbol that the winner holds in his hands. A trophy, the only sparkling and reflective element of the scene together with the structure of the wheelchair, which leads us back to the subtle materiality of that self, alone, committed to raging on the surrounding reality, without ever really being part of it. 

The “other” whether here it is real or an abstract figure of thought, which lives in the neutral and dilated space of the court or in a dream, appears disconnected from the scene, each character seems to interact only with himself, aware of the others but no longer in relation with them. They are all busy developing their own narrative on the forces at work according to their point of view and it is precisely through the attitudes of these characters that the rhythm of the event takes shape – which is the “moment” – we can define it as what Deleuze calls the living present, that is, that form of time in which time itself unfolds and disentangles. Past and future belong to this living present, they are its dimensions, since in the past the previous instants are maintained in the present by its contraction, and in the future the subsequent instants are anticipated in the present by the same contraction.

This scene in its unfolding represents the very moment in which the event took place, takes place and will continue as the consequentiality of the event will last, guaranteed by the certainty of those who contemplate it and that is also in the characters involved who were sure that the fact would have occurred and that the process will continue. Something that stands out in this scene is that this match was probably not fair, the two boys don’t have the same physical prowess, the winner however appears in a particular attitude, he tightly holds the trophy as if it was a very important achievement from which he does not seem willing to separate but at the same time his facial expression betrays a probable awareness that it was not exactly a legitimate win but yet he doesn’t even turn around to contemplate the desperation of his opponent.

This human type, which is characteristic of contemporaneity, seems to be the one who rather loses contact with reality, suffering, in (self)deception, a loss of content of reality. But since it cannot cease to be human and since its consciousness continues to function in accordance with reality (which is comprised of society and not just by the self), it creates surrogate images of reality in order to find directions of order – and in its favor – for its propitious existence and its behavior in the world. This human type is therefore “trapped” in a parallel of the absurd where it is consciously considered correct to convince oneself of one’s own projection that, as universal justice, sees the right thing according to the self that thinks it. So much as to impose it on their neighbor as it is, albeit clearly filtered with the means of one’s individualism and therefore not universally correct, thus ending up convincingly simulating an idea of what’s right that is not fair.

There is a reality totally independent from our representations (“Realism is not how real things are, but how things really are” as Bertolt Brecht said), it is a proper objective reality where it is not enough to arrive at a solid collective lie to obtain justice, since what can really be considered right or wrong can never concretely arise from a single individual, as they are values that exist and exist only if placed in a context of otherness. To understand this aspect, however, in this sense we can refer to a main paradox that is the one put in place by totalitarianism, which based its power of domination on the denial of evidence and common sense, as for example, in George Orwell’s 1984. The doublethink in that case, was founded on the possibility of simultaneously supporting two contradictory ideas and believing in both without the analytical approach of the paradox. In the minds of officials, the line between what is “correct” and what is “true”, in the sense we normally understand it, really seems to have blurred; by repeating the same nonsense several times, they ended up believing it, or at least partially. The massive and profound corruption of language and images eventually resulted in people unable to recognize their own lies – except when perhaps in the end all is lost (let’s think of the possibility that the old man in a wheelchair is dreaming of the scene in front of him while recalling and regretting his childhood and the past).