At a Chelsea gallery, the artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset walked through their latest installation—a barren, rusty Corten-steel replica of the West Wing room, with not a gold touch in sight.
Ever since the blue tsunami crashed through the midterms, President Donald Trump has seemed more intent than ever on cementing his legacy. He recently announced plans to make the Oval Office a national monument, an apparent effort to insure that all his gold touches stick around. “You almost feel nauseous when you see a picture of it,” the Danish artist Michael Elmgreen said the other day, at Pace Gallery, in Chelsea. He and his creative partner, Ingar Dragset, were there to check in on their latest work—a spartan, thirty-six-ton Corten-steel replica of the Oval Office, called “Transition.”
“It was interesting to really go in the opposite direction,” Dragset, who’s from Norway, said. “The far right is so afraid of something minimal. Once things get more abstract, it seems terrifying.”
A rigging crew had started unloading the sculpture at around 5 A.M. Then they spent hours adjusting it up and down, back and forth, guided by blue painter’s tape on the floor. As fuel, boxes of doughnuts and coffee sat on a folding table nearby. The artists arrived around 12:30 P.M., when the process was pretty much over. “Normally, we would have been there,” Dragset, who had on a leather jacket and a silver chain, said. “Of course, we’re control freaks, but it’s also exciting.” They had been visiting a different installation of theirs—a giant swimming-pool sculpture at the Hirshhorn, in Washington, D.C., meant to comment on public access and community. The pool is empty but “ready to be filled by the imaginations of visitors,” they said in a statement.
The pair have always been interested in interrogating authority. They met in 1994, at a gay club called After Dark, in Copenhagen. “Not a very artistic meeting place,” Dragset said, with a chuckle. “But we discovered we had so much in common. The queer sensibility.” Elmgreen was a poet and Dragset was an actor, and they began collaborating on visual projects that pushed against the rigidity of the art world. “We started to really use the white cube”—shorthand for “gallery space”—“as an example of the problem of institutional space in society,” Dragset said. The resulting series was called “Powerless Structures.”
This is the duo’s first piece explicitly about U.S. politics. “We are not American,” Dragset said. “We don’t want to be preaching—it’s more like questioning.” The Oval Office sculpture, although loyal to the number of windows, is slightly smaller than the real thing. (An even smaller replica, a miniature a tenth of the size, is also on view, so that visitors can see the art work from above.) Dragset said that the exact measurements of the original room had been hard to confirm. “Maybe because they think it’s not big enough,” he said. The artists’ version doesn’t include any furniture or décor. “We didn’t want it to be an illustration of one Presidency. It just felt right to use the shape itself,” Dragset said.
The walls of an adjoining gallery room were lined with smaller art works by the pair, panels of world leaders on balconies: the British Royal Family, Javier Milei, Nancy Reagan next to the Easter Bunny. Each figure had been cut out of a photograph, revealing polished steel underneath. (“The other end of steel,” Elmgreen said.)
“You can see yourself in this personal power silhouette,” Dragset said. They had picked the photos based on the details of each balcony. “There’s a magic to how architecture becomes a symbol of power that impacts our lives,” Elmgreen said.
With the installation completed, the doughnuts eaten, and the coffee cold, the artists walked through the gallery, snapping pictures. “It feels very present in the space,” Dragset said, soberly. The rigging tools had left smudges on the sculpture, but the pair didn’t mind.
“The marks it gets by its life are like us as humans getting our marks,” Elmgreen said. Minimal and rough-hewn, the replica couldn’t have looked less like something Trump would choose. Even so, if your hand were to brush against one of the rusted walls, you’d come away with an orange stain on your skin. ♦
