White on White: The Art of Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset.

We've all been to openings where nothing is quite finished, but the first night of Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset's recent exhibition at Kunsthalle Zurich must have set a record. When the crowd walked through the doors, they encountered a construction site in which two men were busy demolishing a concrete wall with sledgehammers while another pair of workers were erecting a new one. Still another duo was removing the rubble and emptying the director's office of its furniture. The wreckage was everywhere and the noise was deafening. What was going on? Had there been an accident? Was it all a misunderstanding concerning address or date?

In fact everything was proceeding according to plan. What the crowd was experiencing and participating in was a performance piece, Taking Place, 2001-2002, involving six men restructuring an art center in the largest city in Switzerland. Why not put the office at the entrance to the building instead of hiding it in the back? the artists asked. Why not open up the reading room and make it more welcoming? During the exhibition's ten-week run, the interior of the nearly eleven-thousand-square-foot Kunsthalle was rebuilt floor to ceiling. The construction work, carefully choreographed by the artists, took place only when the museum was open to the public. After the first few days' din of sledgehammers and concrete smashing, things quieted down. The show grew calm, approaching the solemn state we associate with the experience of art: The last weeks were about white paint, primarily; the very last days exclusively about degrees of whiteness and the fine-tuning of light.

Originally from Denmark and Norway, respectively, and now based in Berlin, Elmgreen & Dragset are among the most visible young artists working in Europe today. Together with such fellow Northern Europeans as Olafur Eliasson and Eija-Liisa Ahtila, they belong to a generation that has managed to break the longtime isolation of the Nordic art world. Thematically, their work engages art's increasingly intimate relationship with design, architecture, and urban planning, but they also display a number of more peculiar traits and obsessions. The two have lived together and collaborated since 1995, and while their early work was largely performance oriented (e.g., knitting together in public), recently their pieces have become more object related and less dependent on the artists' actual physical presence. Increasingly their art involves massive installations, almost all of which display an obsession with the color--or noncolor--white. Indeed, it seems to be a love-hate relationship, as profound as Captain Ahab's nee d to seize not only the huge body of the white whale but the very whiteness itself.

White as snow and milk. White as porcelain or a pristine sheet of paper, as the walls of a museum or an emporium in a European fashion capital. White as underwear from Calvin Klein or the toilet paper in the bathroom stall of a gay bar in Copenhagen. Much of Elmgreen & Dragset's work hinges on the noncolor's ambiguous attractions: its concrete application as well as its symbolic function in an ideological network that connects such disparate topics as rationality, fashion, homosexuality, modern architecture, and modernism itself. In their Powerless Structures works, 1995-2002, for example, the Scandinavian duo have transferred and focused their investigation of whiteness onto the traditional gallery space by creating any number of white cubes: There's a white cube dug into the earth, like a kind of pool, an elevated white cube, a nomadic white cube, an elastic white cube, a white cube made of glass, and a huge white cube that seems to have fallen from the skies and crashed to the ground. They have also produc ed white rooms for various colleagues--from artists in Slovenia to art students from other countries. In their white cubes, Elmgreen & Dragset systematically reintroduce activities like working, eating, and drinking, traditionally excluded from the solemn white walls of the museum. The body returns not only as a phenomenological subject but as a sexual entity as well.

In some work from the series, the artists have staged unexpected clashes between the aesthetic of the white cube and that of the dimly lit gay bar, providing glory holes and other facilities for swift sexual exchanges. In Powerless Structures, Fig 29, 1998, the viewer is invited to inspect the gallery through small circular holes drilled into two wooden boxes equipped with mirrors and toilet paper. In the bright white Cruising Pavilion/Powerless Structures, Fig. 55, 1998, a public artwork the pair realized in a park near the Danish city of Arhus, the artists provided a space--a visually spare gay cruising area--to accommodate all kinds of encounters and transactions.

Other projects have been less obvious in the questions they raise concerning gay culture and institutional authority. The first work I saw by Elmgreen & Dragset, Powerless Structures, Fig. II, 1997, was a diving board installed at the Louisiana Museum for Modern Art in Copenhagen, which passes through a hole cut in the pane of one of the large windows overlooking the sea. What struck me was less the piece's potential as a critique of the museum as institution, or the fact that it visually enacts an interlinguistic pun (translated literally into English, the Danish expression for "coming out" is "jumping out"), than the perfection and elegance of this surreal springboard de luxe, so reminiscent of the sunny paintings of David Hockney. I still remember the surprise and joy I felt as I walked through the museum and encountered the perfect blue board mysteriously transcending the institution and connecting us with the sky and the open sea outside. Without this element of pure affirmation and the fetishism of perf ectly finished design objects in Elmgreen & Dragset's work, it could all easily become too dry and finger-wagging. As it is, their spaces and installations are always visually seductive, like splendid stage sets or an exquisite display in a high-end boutique.

The artists' unconventional education may be of relevance here. Elmgreen worked as a window dresser for a Copenhagen florist, and Dragset studied to become a mime. Elements of both activities are somehow apparent in their art, and it's what separates their work from the drab institutional critique that one finds all over Berlin. The minimal aesthetic of empty white walls, as closely associated today with Gucci or Prada as with contemporary art, clearly attracts the artists, and their projects can be said to combine this allure with an increasingly sophisticated questioning of everything that such a tradition of whiteness stands for. Some of their projects, such as the brightly lit Dug Down Gallery/Powerless Structures, Fig. 45,1998, in Reykjavik, can of course be said to mimic and hence call attention to institutional conventions, but all the same that work is a surprising and beautiful public intervention. It looks great in photographs--like a mysterious swimming pool filled with light emerging from darkness --and I can only imagine the effect it must have had on Icelanders our on an evening stroll.

Male bodies at work and white liquid on semitransparent walls are what one remembers of the performance piece called Powerless Structures, Fig. 44, 1998, which took place inside a large glass cube. The artists state: "From the inside we paint the transparent wall white and wash down the white paint ... over and over again, until the discreet features of the white-cube architecture slowly dissolve." The white walls are no longer part of a power structure that excludes life, change, and time. It has become porous, permeable, and increasingly transparent. If one way to open up the monadic structure is to reintroduce life, another way is to introduce time, which also implies bringing in anticipation, boredom, repetition, and delay. In the seven-week-long performance Zwischen anderen Ereignissen (Between other events), 2000, presented at the Galerie fur Zeitgenossische Kunst in Leipzig, two unemployed housepainters slathered the gallery spaces with coat after coat of white latex. Nothing else happened: Layer upon layer of whiteness was added by two middle-aged men. When nothing much changes in space, another dimension--time--becomes that much more conspicuous.

In recent works Elmgreen & Dragset have returned to their old theme but with various new twists. In the projects Descending Gallery/Powerless Structures, Fig. 145; Tilted Wall/Powerless Structures, Fig. 150; and Elevated Gallery/Powerless Structures, Fig. 146 (all 2001), the white cube is displaced or fragmented. The artists have explained these works as attempts to show not only the powerlessness and flexibility of all structures--that white walls do not have to carry the kind of transcendental significance they are sometimes assigned--but also a gay "infiltration" of Minimalism's famously macho high aesthetics.

The white cube of High Modernism may be history, but the endgame can go on forever. Elmgreen & Dragset will never let go of the white monster. "And from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue of shroud in which we wrap them," Melville wrote in his list of white instances describing the terrible attraction of the whale. "And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?"

Danie Birnbaum is a contributing editor of Artforion.