By Jude Jones
L’Addition is the latest museum installation by Scandinavian sculptural duo (and former couple) Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset. Located in Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, the installation is a simultaneously child-like and sophisticated play on space, masculinity, and time to question how we construct masculinity in the technological age.
Addition: the most basic of mathematical principles, whereby disparate units congeal to birth a total new. In this way it is both banal, the simplest and most innate arithmetic principle that we have, and magical, a certain sort of alchemy through which a many transmute into a unitary, singular whole.
Addition (albeit, translated into French as L’Addition) is also the name of career provocateurs Elmgreen & Dragset’s latest exhibition in Paris’s Musée d’Orsay. Here, “addition” becomes too a sort of temporal sedimentation, the layering of new, everyday mythologies onto those of old. And, through this ritualistic act, new stories are told that comingle past and present, placing archetypal statues from the artists’ canon – a poised man brandishing a camera (The Examiner), a little boy masked by a VR headset (This is How We Play Together) – into trans-historical dialogue with the lean neoclassical bodies – a martyred Saint Tarcissus, a young Aristotle – already populating the museum’s halls.
In doing so, the Scandinavian duo, who have been working together since 1995, toss a playful challenge to the rigid, Apollonian masculinities that dominate the museum space. ‘The Musée d’Orsay is an amazing, iconic museum that has historic importance,’ said Elmgreen in an interview on the installation, ‘but it’s also a museum that needs to be turned on its head.’ So they tack on – indeed, add on – their little footnotes to examine boyhood and masculinity against a backdrop of Western art history’s canonical “body fascism”; the Andrew Tate-inflected new-age masculinities of an online world; and the challenges of constructing identity in a technologically evolving world. Their new masculinities, in the face of this, are pliable and mushy, innocent and intimate.
The two therefore turn conventional masculinities, represented by the Orsay’s usual residents, on their heads – literally. Constructing a small canopy in the hall’s heart – the first architectural alteration made to the space in forty decades – they hung a curated selection of their works upside-down, dangling above statues from the Orsay’s regular collection like reflections in a fun-house mirror. These statuesque bodies thereby ripple and dint into new, imperfect shapes whose fragile limits are upended and uncharted, whose fragile masculinities (and, sometimes, humanities) are exciting and intoxicatingly remedial.
One such plays begins with Eugène Guillaume’s Anacréon (1869), an aged rendition of the great poet as he sits, lyre in hand, feeding a small bird from a chalice clasped in a skywards fist. Created during the Academic sculptor’s Roman stay, the ‘conservative’ statue represents a bilateral exchange: both humanity’s dominion over the Natural as the bird drinks tenderly from the paternal poet; and humanity’s desire to escape from the throes of political and personal tumult as Anacréon stares longingly at the open-winged bird.
Reimagined by Elmgreen & Dragset, Anacréon speaks with Drone, a scrawny child balancing a drone device on his fingertips. Whereas Guillaume’s masculine ideal, however pensive, had been confident of his anthropocentric place in the Natural order, Elmgreen & Dragset’s lad becomes uncertain, staring apathetically at the technic contraption. The transformation of the bird into the drone teases at the existential decentring of man’s place in the world as technologies continue to evolve, as well as the possibilities for new forms of embodiment. So, whereas Guillaume’s Anacréon could only dream of soaring heavenwards, even a young boy may do so now.
On a personal note, my favourite of these reinventions is Elmgreen & Dragset’s Dirty Socks, a play on Jean-Joseph Perraud’s Désespoir. The former is a recreation of a sensual photograph (Christophjer Street Pier 2) by Peter Hujar, the mythic American photographer who died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1987. The latter is a melancholic ode to Apollonian masculinity: a beautiful, curly-haired, and unclothed youth who bats something of a resemblance to Caravaggio’s Boy with a Basket of Fruit (or perhaps to American Horror Story-heartthrob Cody Fern).
Dirty Socks is filthily disembodied, cut off at the waist. The legs and feet, traditionally among the body’s basest extremities as those furthest from Heaven, are put thus into fetishistic focus. And against the pure, totalising marble of Perraud’s statue, Dirty Socks is a work of perturbed materiality, its own feet ending in just that: dirty sports socks, a polyester blend sullied slightly with a winking patina of muck. The eroto-romantic masculine ideal of Perraud is thereby upheaved. For Elmgreen & Dragset – via Hujar – male beauty starts anew as that which is other and incomplete, that which is dirty, that which is ill, and all that which is furthest from Heaven.
Taking this all in, I can’t help but think of Derek Jarman – dead to AIDS seven years after Hujar – when looking at Dirty Socks’ neighbour piece, 60 Minutes. Presenting a boy sat upon a washing-machine plinth as he patiently waits for its cycle to end, it is an anatomical musing on the passage of time. But refracted through these inferences of illness and trans-historic interaction, the scene reminds me of a moment in Jarman’s Modern Nature, as he reads medieval mystic Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Love to ‘the gentle whirring of the washing machine,’ slowly passing time until he knows he will die.
Jarman found profound spiritual comfort in Julian’s transcendental Christian metaphysics and her own experiences of plague, having lived through the Black Death in England’s most affected corner. Similarly, Elmsgreen & Dragset seem to find profound comfort in Peter Hujar’s soft, sensual portrait of masculinity from the perspective of now. As much as the duo insist, through his exhibition, that the past scars and must be rethought, they also begin to show how we can remold and rework it into new revelations, fit for the modern age.
The Drawing, Fig. 3 is their final reminder of this. A startingly hyperrealistic statue of a child (at first glance, I’d thought it was a particularly precocious kid cut off from their parents) sprawled before Thomas Couture’s Les Romains de la décadence (1847) – the largest painting displayed in the Orsay – the hoodie-clad infant attentively reproduces a section of the canvas in paper and pencil, rebirthing it in thin, almost ghostly, graphite outlines.
As a painting, Couture’s Romains was a gluttonous allegory commenting on the material and moral excesses of nineteenth-century French society, on the scourge of decadence. As a statue, The Drawing, Fig. 3 is an allegory of another kind, on the ways we can cut, remix, and redraw the past into new possibilities, ones the ancients might never have imagined. Historical masculinity, in Elmgreen & Dragset’s mind, might be a sort of prison, but by presenting a new vision of it based on whimsy, childishness, and play, the duo refuse its absolutes. By redrawing and retracing the ideals of the past – as Elmgreen & Dragset do in L’Addition – we become part of that positive process of addition: assembling disparate units so that we get something new, something both banal and magical.
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