The Collective Eye

“Any artist who claims that he’s doing it all by himself is lying.” Michael Elmgreen (b. Copenhagen, Denmark, 1961; lives and works in Berlin) and Ingar Dragset (b. Trondheim, Norway, 1969; lives and works in Trondheim) have been making art together on the intersection between art, design, and architecture since 1995, staging provocative situations animated by sly humor. In sprawling installations and sculptures—their work has been shown at the 53rd Venice Biennale and in numerous countries and picked up by international collectors—they probe questions of identity and belonging. A key creative device in their art is radical recontextualization: by transplanting spaces into new functional contexts or implementing architectural interventions, they transcend and reinterpret the meanings traditionally assigned to a place. Among their best-known works are Prada Marfa (2005), a full-size reproduction of a Prada boutique in the middle of the Texan desert; Short Cut (2003), a car and trailer bursting from the floor of Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II; and Van Gogh’s Ear (2016), a 30-foot-long pool set on end in front of New York’s Rockefeller Center. In conversation with The Collective Eye, Elmgreen & Dragset discuss the romantic idealization of artistic creation, suggest that artists should openly embrace collaborative work, and question the myth of artistic genius. Elmgreen & Dragset lift the curtain on their own creative process and provide insight into their production of the past two decades, realized in collaboration with their studio—or lovingly so-called “family members.” ABOUT THE COLLECTIVE EYE The Collective Eye (TCE) is a project collective whose membership fluctuates. In interviews, symposia, exhibitions, and books for which TCE engages selected partners in dialogue, it seeks to strengthen a multinational dialogue between collectives and theorists grappling with collective creativity and practices in the arts. Its scope transcends boundaries of discipline, encompassing forms of collaboration in the visual and performing arts, in theaters, museums, and the interstices of cultural production.