Watch a full moon rise above the horizon and it appears awe-inspiringly outsize. But this is just an illusion. Look at it upside-down from between your legs, and — just like magic — the moon shrinks.
Such is the power of the perspective shift to jolt us out of our delusions and transform the way we see the world. That’s part of the premise behind Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset’s “L’Addition,” a massive installation in the sculpture nave at Musée d’Orsay in Paris that will be on display from Tuesday through Feb. 2.
The Scandinavian-born duo, known as Elmgreen & Dragset, are anchoring five sculptures to the underside of a giant platform inserted into the nave. These artworks will hang upside-down from the “ceiling” formed by the platform, floating above the museum’s 19th-century sculptures in what the artists call a trans-historical flirtation. In addition, five right-side-up sculptures will interact with the museum’s collection in unexpected ways, as when one figure appears to sketch a painting while another leans over the mezzanine railing to take a photograph.
“The Musée d’Orsay is an amazing, iconic museum that has historic importance, but it’s also a museum that needs to be turned on its head,” Elmgreen said.
A month before the show’s opening, the artists took time for an interview in their sun-drenched, echoey studio in the Neukölln neighborhood of Berlin. Their studio, a converted 1920s water-pumping station, was filled with the sculptures that will populate “L’Addition,” furnishings from past shows and several vulture sculptures — including a taxidermied specimen they said was from the Berlin Zoo — that represent art critics and inner critics. It’s a fittingly eccentric setting for a pair that the Musée d’Orsay in a news release called “the great troublemakers of the contemporary art scene.”
In a way, Elmgreen & Dragset embody the trickster archetype, unveiling truths by defying conventions in surprising ways. When asked about this, they laughed, and Elmgreen said with mock severity, “We are super serious. People just happen to laugh at what we do.”
In their most famous work, they plopped a fake Prada boutique — christened “Prada Marfa” (2005) — in the remote Texas desert, making four-inch heels and consumer culture seem laughable. In Rockefeller Center in New York, they propped a sculpture of a curvy swimming pool on its side and called it “Van Gogh’s Ear” (2006), creating a sight that playfully tempted harried businesspeople to chill out and enjoy life.
By placing objects out of context, the artists discombobulate viewers, nudging them to reconsider their routine surroundings and the cultural waters they’re swimming in. But their witty absurdity is always good-natured.
“We never use irony or satire because that’s poking fingers, and I don’t like that,” Elmgreen said. “The humorous side is a way to not be moralistic in our statements but to show the grotesque in something that might seem familiar in order to speak about existential problems.”
“There’s an underlying sadness” in the works, Dragset add
The exhibit at the Musée d’Orsay will play with these dualities — humor/sadness, seriousness/absurdity, drama/mundanity — to explore the complexities of the modern world and to upturn ideas about masculinity. The artists, who were a couple for the first decade of their 30-year collaboration, were inspired to explore these themes in part because of their experiences as gay men.
“L’Addition” complements the exhibition “Caillebotte: Painting Men,” which will run concurrently until Jan. 19. And it takes cues from the museum’s historic collection of male figures, which are not as macho and traditionally masculine as many people may assume, Elmgreen noted. “In the Musée d’Orsay, you have a lot of poetic, sensual, very soft depictions of boys, young men and grown-up men,” he said.
In “L’Addition,” Elmgreen & Dragset’s upside-down sculptures of boys somewhat reflect the positions of the male statues in the gallery below. The artists hope this mirroring will make museumgoers pause and consider the continuity between sensitive portrayals of men and boys in the past and the present.
Their installation’s contemporary sculptures depict boys with modern gadgets. One sits atop a washing machine in a riff on the museum’s sculptures of men in cleansing rituals. Another reclines while wearing headphones above a similarly positioned 1869 statue by Jean-Joseph Perraud called “Le Désespoir” (“Despair”). Other boys that the artists created are absorbed by flying a drone or looking through a virtual reality headset.
These works explore how technology makes us lose consciousness of our body language and isolates us from our surroundings. At the same time, Elmgreen said, “These technologies are also tools that provide us freedom of a more fluid identity, so we are not stuck in a reality that is limiting us.”
The theme of isolation continues on top of the platform with a sculpture of a lone man trudging across a faux snowscape. The scene nods to the 1904 painting “Schneelandschaft” (“Snowy Landscape”) by Cuno Amiet, which is displayed on the second floor of the museum. It also conjures Romantic paintings like Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.”
Romantic art — which arose in the late 18th century and flourished into the 19th — still resonates today, Dragset said, because it focused on loneliness and humans’ encounters with nature. “So it’s interesting to revisit these themes and think about what is happening now to nature and this sense of loneliness that is very strong in people,” he added.
Beyond the platform, two more of the duo’s works further reflect on childhood. On one wall hangs the museum’s large-scale 1847 painting “Romains de la Décadence” (“The Romans in Their Decadence”), a critique of ancient Rome’s hedonistic decline.
The duo added another, gentler layer of scrutiny by placing the sculpture of a boy kneeling in front of the painting and sketching it. The boy is oblivious to the fact that he is drawing a drunken orgy. The scene creates an awkward moment of reflection, like when a child sees you watching an R-rated movie and starts asking questions.
The boy also looks as if he has been left behind on a school field trip, Elmgreen explained. The artists’ installations frequently feature abandoned children, such as a wax baby lying forgotten beneath an A.T.M (“Modern Moses” (2006)) or a boy hugging his knees while sitting below his own portrait in an empty home (part of the 2013 installation “Tomorrow” at the Victoria and Albert Museum). These figures allude to people whom society has often neglected and rejected, including L.G.B.T.Q. people.
As Elmgreen and Dragset navigate middle age, they are increasingly looking back on their childhoods and the challenges of growing up gay, particularly as some groups are becoming more vocally conservative about masculinity and sexuality.
“We know very well this feeling of growing up not fully identifying with the world, so this almost heroic act of growing up is important for us to depict in our art,” Dragset said.
In 2012, the artists placed a golden statue of a boy joyously riding a rocking horse in Trafalgar Square in London. Amid the city’s monuments to war-winning generals and kings astride noble steeds, the boy looked as innocent as a flower in the barrel of a gun. Like their other works, this sculpture — a twist on equestrian statues — prompted viewers to look with fresh eyes at the commonplace. In this case, it might have caused passersby to think critically about the veneration of military victors and consider championing more peaceful and hopeful heroes.
Another marble sculpture in “L’Addition,” though right side up, similarly turns the idea of heroism on its head. A boy stands on the edge of a high-diving board, deciding whether to take the plunge, and possibly feeling peer pressure to jump.
“But sometimes the more heroic thing is to not take the leap and to follow your own way,” Dragset said. “People tend to celebrate big achievements like winning a race or a game, whereas we believe the small moments where you deal with a lot inside yourself are the real pivotal moments in life.”
By turning ideas topsy-turvy and glorifying the small and simple in the grand Musée d’Orsay, the artists hope to create a kind of magic that makes visitors look at the world with new eyes. “It reminds us that there’s always a different way of seeing something,” Dragset said.
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