When the Pet Shop Boys made a cover version of Elvis Presley's Always On My Mind in the late 80s, it was meant to sound as unlike The King as possible. Elvis's croon was transmogrified into a lecherous disco beat, more kitschy than the original ever was. This was perhaps a very 80s way of doing things. Visual artists were also using methods of appropriation at that time: Peter Halley, for instance, created his fluorescent cell paintings partly out of the 'bad art' called Op Art.
Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have adopted a 90s way of 'interchanging' and 'replacing' (and not 'deconstructing') structures: the gay science of challenging authoritarian and heterosexually dominated styles of art with their own idioms. On the safe and predictable side of political correctness, the theoretical position of the exhibition 'Powerless Structures' is not exactly breaking ground, and in some ways the show is almost as equivocal and closed as the theoretical and artistic canons it opposes. However, it is not specific, gender-political aspects that give the show relevance, but an aesthetic articulation that unifies formal cogency with the social sphere. The plastic decisions of the show unfold in an understated, provocative and almost, well, beautiful way consistent aesthetics working without any cynicism as a vista to something else is a rare phenomenon.
The two artists have utilised 'low' materials in such a way that they collide with the idioms of, for example, Minimalism, Neo-Geo and Geometric Abstraction. The basic, transformative gesture of Dragset and Elmgreen's interventions involves handiwork: in the window of the gallery, they installed an impromptu loom, made in the most primitive way out of string and spikes. A slight, blue pattern, reminiscent of the structure of a Barnett Newman painting, has been woven. On the floor are some lengths of grey sandpaper forming a rectangular shape a Carl Andre-lookalike. (During the opening on a wet Friday night in February, this piece was miserably trashed by the artgoers, who, with their dirty winter boots, left performance-like traces on the rough surface of the unassuming artwork.) All in all there are five different compositions, which, rather than standing alone, unify the gallery as a space in which there has been human activity. This mimicking and mocking of High Modernism's transcendent aura is nothing new much other contemporary art occupies itself with poking a finger into the wound of the art of the 80s but 'Powerless Structures' gives it a new twist presenting formal virtuosity in the same domain. These tactics can be compared with the Feminist art of the 70s in which needlework was reclaimed as an opportunity to perform with consummate skill in an intimate space.
The consequence of this strange position, somewhere between formal rigour and slacker art, can be described as either fashion or idleness, depending on which aspect you want to emphasise. The fashion side represents the fact that what you wear really means something, and that it takes some measure of social competence to put together a wardrobe. The power of fashion is partly its ability to allow the revenge of the powerless: British gays made dressing up as skinheads fahionable, thereby imitating the macho look of their violators. On the idle side, fashion is transient (you can only be so hip), and also the (possibly) sad fact that as a gay person you are the end of the family line: in one of the works an open can of purple paint has mysteriously sprouted a peach-coloured patch suggesting that, unable to reproduce, you are the 'wrong' output. The productive paradox of the show is that the installation is at the same time both aesthetically resolved and as cheap and discardable looking as last season's wardrobe. Perhaps this double-sided position can simply be summed up as a casual look: Dragset and Elmgreen take over the good looks of different images and artistic idioms, wearing the different significations on their sleeves. When facing the strangest piece in the installation, it becomes clear that putting together a cool outfit as a social statement is a bit of a tightrope walk: under a square frame with rounded corners, stretched with denim and suspended on nylon strings, is placed a cactus in a pile of mould. In this iconographic constellation, resembling a cartoon sequence, it is explained to us what it feels like to wear the wrong pair of jeans at a trendy party like sitting on a cactus and getting spines up your bum.
In relation to the show's discussion of power, what doesn't work out is the coupling between the integrity of personal attitude, and the general, much broader debate on art historical, gender political, and by implication, epistemological questions. As it is, the thematics seem overfed on gay heroism even if the personal is political there are limits to generalisation if the perspective is first and foremost personal. 'Powerless Structures' brings so many elements into play on very different levels that you are often at a loss as to where the discussion is leading. The title tends to mislead: what the different compositions live off is not the 'destructuring' or recirculation of (late) Modernist significations, but the different ways in which these are literally used: the applied art of weaving your own meanings out of existing circumstances.
