Art in the Harbour

Utilizing a vast Rotterdam submarine port, Nordic duo Elmgreen & Dragset stage a performance critiquing contemporary populism.

This summer the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen is hosting an exhibition by the Danish-Norwegian artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset at the port of Rotterdam. The artists continue their confrontation with anti-places and the history of sexuality in a narrative manner through their encyclopaedically arranged installation. The hall of a disused submarine shipyard will serve as a suitable space for an experience between unease and awe.

In the shadow of metal tanks, almost hidden, an accordion player welcomes the arrivals to the harbour district. While there is nothing to suggest that the seated street musician is begging, the visitors' gaze will be drawn down to the floor along the checked pattern on his shirt, intuitively searching for a cap or a handwritten sign. In front of the opening of a mysterious-looking corrugated iron tunnel, he becomes the augury of an exhibition that confronts its visitors with prejudices, hopes and disappointed expectations. The evident conclusion must be that this exhibition will hardly see much of the world of privileged art collectors that could be discovered at the 2009 Biennale.
Top image: the 15-meter high ferris wheel in front of the true-to-scale reconstruction of East German prefab housing at the submarine shipyard in Rotterdam (shown here).
Top image: the 15-meter high ferris wheel in front of the true-to-scale reconstruction of East German prefab housing at the submarine shipyard in Rotterdam (shown here).
Anyone braving their way into a corrugated iron tunnel, dimly lit by fluorescent lighting, will do more than just coldly walk past a baby abandoned next to an ATM, they will also want to withdraw from the unsettling violence-prevention posters on its walls and evade the physical approaches of loitering youths. On the principle that attack is the best means of defence, visitors will advance out of the oppressive confinement into a dark intermediate space of a nighttime scene. The cuboid shape of an East German prefab housing block has been recreated true-to-scale in the hall. The illuminated windows of building number 6 exude petit-bourgeois comfort, while carefully staged interiors with a multicultural flair reveal the dreams and the everyday lives of their absent inhabitants. Poster stars, flickering computer screens and television programmes enliven the abandoned interiors with myths of everyday life and encourage scenic projections. Time is strangely stretched. Can more be found out about the building, can the Ikea furniture, the collectible plates or the chatting "Gay Romeo" be put together into a story like scattered pieces of a jigsaw?
Some of the residents installed by the artists at the performance.
Some of the residents installed by the artists at the performance.
Above the roof of the large apartment block, the white metal construction of a Ferris wheel can be seen rising up in the background. While a metal portable cabin can be identified as a public convenience and the street lamps, rubbish bins and benches as simulacra of the public space, the words "The One" "&" "The Many" flash on and off periodically in large, luminous letters. Their glaringly bright light feels like a shimmer of hope on the bleak façade and the desolate back yard. While the single mother rocks a pushchair to the rhythm of her iPod music, young men are virtually eating up the passers-by with lascivious looks and luring them to the portaloo. In this performance everyone becomes aware of his double role of actor and voyeur, because sharing the common destiny of the moment, the one and the many stage the mental and social sphere of experience as a surreal scenario: empty symbols like the inaccessible apartment block, the Ferris wheel and a parked white limousine imply a vacuum. Above the everyday life of the average working class lies an air of promise of escaping it for a moment, be it by flirting with the rentboy, riding to lofty heights cyclically reached by the birdcage-like cabins of the flashing Ferris wheel, or through 15 minutes of fame as a participant in a television show.
In this performance everyone becomes aware of his double role of actor and voyeur, because sharing the common destiny of the moment, the one and the many stage the mental and social sphere of experience as a surreal scenario.
The mysterious corrugated iron tunnels serves as the entrance to the imposing installation <i>The One and The Many.</i>
The mysterious corrugated iron tunnels serves as the entrance to the imposing installation The One and The Many.
The apartment block, first displayed in Germany, has been adapted to the Dutch context with loving attention to detail by Elmgreen & Dragset as they compile Powerless Structures and references to the exhibitions Celebrity – The One & The Many (ZKM Karlsruhe, 2010) as well as elements of the Welfare State (Serpentine Gallery London, 2006) into the final part of a trilogy. Based on conceptual projects, their artistic work has shifted since the end of the 1990s from the White Cube to an atmospheric stage in the suburban realm. Here, the functionalistic promises of Modernism have come true in the consumer culture. The concrete objects, mutated into signs, along with the omnipresent networking and isolation of the individual in technology-based communication society, reveal a non-academic system of things. In it the artists undermine social constructs such as advertising, functionality and the accumulation/collection of coded objects with the discourse of homosexuality.
The Nordic duo Elmgreen & Dragset during the performance of <i>It's Never Too Late to Say Sorry,</i> 2011, a sculpture/event made ??on behalf of Sculpture International Rotterdam (Jannes Linders, photo). Every day at noon for one year, a man pulls out a megaphone from a reliquary made ??of steel and yells the title of the piece in Rotterdam's main street.
The Nordic duo Elmgreen & Dragset during the performance of It's Never Too Late to Say Sorry, 2011, a sculpture/event made ??on behalf of Sculpture International Rotterdam (Jannes Linders, photo). Every day at noon for one year, a man pulls out a megaphone from a reliquary made ??of steel and yells the title of the piece in Rotterdam's main street.
If Frederick Rolfe talks about how his alter ego searches for a publisher for his intellectual, homoerotic writings in the romantic novella Nicholas Crabbe – Or The One & The Many, and in the process fights for recognition as someone who stands out from the crowd, then Elmgreen & Dragset's The One & The Many is tautological in the best sense not just for their performance installation, but also for the artists' reference-rich networked complete œuvre. The installation's effectiveness does not ultimately come from monumental objects, but from the inconspicuous artistic gestures that create a confrontation with norms and self-righteousness in the regulated social sphere.
Gabrielle Schaad

Elmgreen & Dragset – The One & The Many (2011). Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Photos: Tot en met ontwerpen.
Another scene inside the large set of <i>The One and The Many:</i> a girl with a baby stroller is exposed to the lens of a photographer in a surreal and degraded landscape.
Another scene inside the large set of The One and The Many: a girl with a baby stroller is exposed to the lens of a photographer in a surreal and degraded landscape.
Public toilets in front of the ferris wheel, next to a white stretch limousine amplifies the contrasts inherent in the entire site.
Public toilets in front of the ferris wheel, next to a white stretch limousine amplifies the contrasts inherent in the entire site.

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