Four eyes

Four eyes open wide onto our current age. For close to 30 years Elmgreen & Dragset (Michael Elmgreen born in 1961, Ingar Dragset born in 1969), two Scandinavian artists who live in Berlin, have been creating a kind of political art in the noblest sense of the term because it is looking at the evolution of our society. To address this, they are currently flirting with the absurd, juggling hyperrealist and surrealist images, which are generally conceived in three dimensions in the form of installations, performances or sculptures.

Duchamp, Bunuel Genet

The history of art and the seventh art are never far away, with references to Marcel Duchamp, Luis Bunuel and Jean Genet. They are the subject of a mega-exhibition until 1 April at the Centre Pompidou Metz. It is worth the trip (1.5 hours by train from Paris). Designed like a labyrinth, it transforms the visitor into a voyeur walking wide-eyed through their theatre of the absurd.

Good luck

It is called “Bonne chance” (“Good Luck”) because it is designed like a game. The spectacle can be tender, such as when they place a model of a lonely young boy who looks like them behind the glass wall of the museum, or amusing, such as when they feature a grotesque figure in disguise that seems to be tired of playing its own role, laid out on a table in the empty meeting room of some company. One can only image that this ringmaster is therefore the boss.

Taboo

But the visit begins in the nave with the view of a kind of sinister housing project from the former Eastern Europe, standing 11 metres tall, which we cannot get into. The artists comment: “the question of the places where we put people is very taboo. But we can also see this building as a minimal  work.” Through ticket booths you go into another room, blinded by spotlights and immediately applauded by extras – we have all become stars of our own reality TV show – or a little further on we find ourselves face to face in a pale room with the feet of a corpse emerging from the drawer of a morgue. As it says in Ecclesiastes, “Vanity, all is vanity…”

Be perfect!

In contrast, there are sports bars scattered all over the exhibition: “Today there is an injunction to be perfect,” explains Michael Elmgreen. “You must be happy, witty, thin, in shape… And if you aren’t you will have a guilty conscience and you will inevitably be even more unhappy.”

21^st-century still life

A huge space bathed in a strange pink light is filled with desks and computers that have been switched off. Here and there various personal belongings prove that employees once worked here. It’s an installation that is somewhere between a genre scene and a 21^st-century still life. “People now work from home. Everyone who would ordinarily be in the office is now in the building at the entrance to the exhibition,” respond Elmgreen & Dragset mischievously.

Democracy is suspended

The room with the most sombre atmosphere only contains a ballot box floating in mid-air. The message resonates like a warning: “democracy is suspended here”, conclude the two artists. This exhibition establishes an overview of the snapshots that infuse and end up oppressively flooding our brains every day. It will be an important milestone.

Elmgreen&Dragset. Bonne Chance. Until 1 April 2024. www.centrepompidou-metz.fr/fr