Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset at Emmanuel Perrotin - Paris

You entered the semipublic space of the gallery as if trespassing. A group of handsome young men were busy with something normally done in private: they were writing in their diaries. Sitting at five uniformly white desks, the surfaces covered with old coffee cups, ashtrays filled to the brim and the afternoon's edition of Le Monde, the men were pouring their most intimate thoughts onto paper.

At this recent live installation of Paris Diaries (2003), the Berlin-based artist team of Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset were nowhere to be seen. Weeks before the show, they had posted an ad for 20-something nonwriter, nonartist males. Men only, the gallery explained, because women are more likely to keep diaries. Elmgreen and Dragset interviewed their candidates and then selected five diary-keepers/ performers. The gallery handled the rest of the logistics.

Since 1995, this Nordic duo (Elmgreen is Danish, Dragset Norwegian) have collaborated on "Powerless Structures," an ongoing series investigating the perceived neutrality of the white-cube exhibition space and short-circuiting expectations of this traditionally masculine, heterosexual arena. In 1998, they famously installed a minimalistic satellite gallery, complete with glow holes, in a gay cruising park near the Danish city of Arhus. Paris Diaries was a less provocative proposal about the gendering of space which returned the pair to the live performance origins of their work. Their very first show in Stockholm featured them knitting together; more recently, they hired two unemployed painters in Leipzig to apply white latex to gallery walls continuously over a period of seven weeks.

As did these earlier performances, Paris Diaries reintroduced labor--and a heightened sense of its monotonous duration--into a sealed space from which it is normally banished. Even creative labor, especially when it involves this kind of personal-reflection-on-demand, is not always the transcendental affair it is cracked up to be. For the performer, it can be downright tedious. During one gallerygoer's visit near the end of the six-week show, two of the diarists had stopped writing and were kicking around a ball made from packing tape.

Like workers in an introspection factory, each of the men had to choose a four-hour shift in the morning or afternoon. They got paid an hourly rate. Their break schedule was arranged so that at least one of them was always absent, allowing visitors to snoop in his diary. This voyeuristic element, seemingly sanctioned by the gallery, had its limits, however. A gallery assistant reprimanded note-takers. These private words could be read, but not copied. (The artists plan to sell the diaries together as one work of art.)

Paris Diaries recalled a behavioral experiment. Not surprisingly, the diaries were filled with reflections about being the object of public consumption. One of the young men taped a strand of human hair onto one page. Another jotted down a line about being the hors d'oeuvre for a work of art. Elmgreen and Dragset have sought to demonstrate Michel Foucault's idea that social structures by themselves are not necessarily repressive, that they can be opened to other activities, other relations of power. But this particular play with the dualities of public and private, viewer and viewed, in the intransigent space of a commercial gallery, fell short of an emancipatory vision.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group