With a New Show at Musée d’Orsay, Elmgreen and Dragset Are Writing Fragile Masculinities Back Into Art History

In a city like Paris, full of monuments to famous conquests and heroic figures from history, the artist duo Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset take a different tack. For a new exhibition at the prestigious Musée d’Orsay, their vision is to bring a different cast of characters into the room, masculine protagonists, and ones of a more fragile nature. The artists will remind you, too, that these characters have always been there with us throughout history. We just tend to forget them, because they get written out of the hero tales we tell ourselves. They are in soft focus.

Their exhibition, called “L’Addition,” opens to the public this week at the French institution, a venue that presented some unique challenges even for these seasoned artists. The rules at the Musée d’Orsay are different. For one thing, the museum’s main concourse is open six days a week, so installation timelines were tighter than usual, leaving less room for improvisation or error. Another thing: The institution’s 19th-century sculptures and paintings had to remain in place, staying right where they have been for some 40 years, since the former Gare d’Orsay train station was first converted into a museum. Absolutely nothing could be rebuilt or reworked. “There are a handful of museums in the world that this is worth the sacrifice for,” said Dragset.

A Mirror World

For these two artists, subverting or playing with the museum structure is a core aspect of their practice. One of their early works was of an animatronic bird, installed between the interior and exterior glass at the Tate Modern in 2004. It was twitching on its back. Their very first sculpture was of a diving board, and it penetrated surrealistically between the interior and exterior of the museum wall at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark. “We always do some kind of transformation and we use a museum as our material,” noted Michael Elmgreen. “And the Musée d’Orsay is not a place that is normally up for big changes.”

Since 2006, the museum has been building contemporary art into its historic program with ongoing temporary exhibitions called “Correspondences.” But this marks the first time that the grand hall, with its most iconic Belle Époque clock looming above. It is a place of deep history and identity for Paris. The duo, then, have flipped the museum’s concourse on its head with some “additions,” an intervention Dragset described as a “queering of the space.”

In spite of the main hall’s epic beauty, it remains a passageway that visitors move through in order to get to the Van Goghs. “It’s an overlooked part of the museum in a way,” said Dragset. “People perceive it as almost ambient.”

They innovated a replica of the floor that hangs above the 19th century sculptures in marble and bronze. In this reflected area overhead, a sort of shadow world, Elmgreen and Dragset have hung their sculptures depicting soft and poetic visions of masculine youth upside down. “Fragile depictions of masculinity have been written out of art history,” Elmgreen said. The two wanted to focus on “the expectations one still has of young male persons and what they’re supposed to become.”

A hyperrealistic sculpture of a boy hunched over a piece of paper, drawing a stick figure rendition of , which appears towering above him in a painting of a bacchanalian Roman scene, a sumptuous painted critique of Rome’s decadence. He’s also crossed the delicate barrier that protects the painting from the public. “We could somehow imagine that we are at a similar stage of our culture before it implodes,” said Dragset. “They are having more fun, but that also imploded when it became moralistic and puritan.”

Youth

Nearby Eugène Guillaume’s marble rendering of the Greek poet Anacréon, who has his arm outstretched to receive a small bird on his hand is (2024). He echoes the gesture of the poet, but is about to let his toy machine lift off. Another young masculine figure sits (well, hangs) on a laundry machine, presumably waiting for his clothes to clean; it echoes a tradition in painting depicting society performing of quotidian tasks. Another of Elmgreen and Dragset’s figures gazes out from a V.R. headset, hands on his hips.

It is hard to say how old these figures should be—they seem to exist in a suspended period of youth somewhere between 12 and 20. “These are our children growing up in troubled times,” Elmgreen said before a large group of guests that had gathered in the hall during its press preview earlier this week.

Behind the two artists loomed one of the most striking works of the show: a boy standing at the edge of a diving board, contemplating the marble expanse below him. Carved in stark white, he cuts a peculiar figure against the ornate opulence of the museum’s domed ceiling. “When a child is looking off a diving board, which is the bravest decision, to jump or stand back down?” he added.

The metaphor of waiting for adulthood seems to also be a stand-in for wider societal change as well; a sense of a pent-up potential energy is almost palpable when you look at this new group of sculptures. Everyone is alone and waiting, in between two action points in a plot line. They feel deeply melancholic, captured in interior states.

Questions & Answers

The origin story of Elmgreen and Dragset is one of human connection, and it is both romantic and almost fateful. They met in a nightclub in Copenhagen.  They pieced together that, by chance, they lived in the same building; they were a couple for many years before amicably splitting—their art practice exists, they have said, as a child they share.

When we met at their studio in Berlin in late September, we stood among the sculptures set to head to the French museum. The converted water facility in Neukolln makes for a striking workspace: It is resplendent, and not far from the river, on a quiet cobblestone street, with towering factory-like ceilings (a good height for prototyping their towering boy on a diving board). The interior balcony is set up with working spaces for their team members, and an in-house chef was preparing lunch. They always eat together when possible. The top floor of the studio is an exquisite apartment with a grand piano, a library of books, and a suspended fireplace. We drink from Moomins mugs.

“We are attempting to understand what’s going on around us, what’s happening to the world,” said Dragset. “It’s probing and testing, a research into what’s happening to us emotionally rather than trying to find answers, because they are probably not there.” There is a political bent to all their work, but a tidy answer does not emerge, nor do their exhibitions preach a moral lesson. They do, however, conjure empathy.

It is an interesting moment to take up the question of the male gaze. There are important discussions about the male gaze as it is directed to women, but the male gaze also lingers on itself, on young men and idealized male bodies. “Feminism has been much better at discussing women’s position in society, whereas men are still finding complexity in conversations around masculinity,” said Dragset.

The Gaze and Technology

The two say they watch keenly how the public navigates their installations, which always have a dramaturgy that incorporates interactive elements. One feels a natural pull to build out a narrative, and they nurture this by planting some prompts. For their major exhibition that recently opened at the Amorepacific Museum of Art in Korea, a hyperrealistic sculpture of a young woman sits alone in a realistic restaurant that the duo completely designed and invented. She is on her phone, listening to a looping FaceTime call; a photograph of that same character seems to reappear in another part of the installation, a luxury apartment that they duo built inside the museum. The audience may try to piece these strands of a narrative together, but it would be in vain.

Visitors to their shows often pull out their phones, too. There is something particularly captivating about Elmgreen and Dragset’s work when it comes to online consumption. Their famous work , installed in rural Texas in 2005, came years before Instagram; by now, it has become an influencer destination and a self-sustaining internet phenomenon and not the hidden land art project they intended it to be. Many of their sculptures reflect the duo’s concerns about the isolating aspects of technology and of how we, as viewers, relate to technology, with the audience’s own connection to it becoming an integral part of the experience.

The pieces invite a form of self-reflection—just as the VR-goggle-wearing youth in Paris is immersed in technology, so too is the woman in the Korean show, absorbed in her digital world, in a private moment in a public space. This mirroring highlights the pervasive role of technology in our lives, prompting viewers to question their own engagement with it.

The artists are always intrigued by which elements of their work resonate most with audiences. It’s often surprising which details capture attention. For example, in the Korean exhibition, a fridge magnet in the fictional restaurant that reads “Home is the place you left” has become a focal point, with many visitors sharing it online.

This detailed-oriented engagement, even through social media and phone screens, is something Elmgreen and Dragset find encouraging. “It creates a dialogue that previously didn’t exist in the art world. You’d present your work, people would visit, but you rarely got direct feedback or insight into their reactions,” says Elmgreen. “Now, there’s a whole new level of communication between the artist and the audience.”

The artists are comfortable with the varying interpretations and evolving meanings of their works. “It’s like parenting grown-up children,” Dragset explains. “Once they’ve left the house, you can’t control their lives. You offer something, and the world interprets and uses it in its own way.”

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com