Michael Elmgreen / Ingar Dragset

For skulptur projekte münster 07 the Danish-Norwegian artist duo Michael Elmgreen und Ingar Dragset, collaborating with Tim Etchells, conceived the play Drama Queens, which premiered in June 2007 in Münster City Theatre. However, the play’s protagonists were not actors but seven canonical 20th-century sculptures.¹ Removed entirely from their respective contexts, the artworks began to chat and argue in imagined dialogues. “You might wonder what kinds of conversation the sculptures would have when no one is left in the museum”², is how Elmgreen and Dragset described their initial idea in an interview about the project. Each figure had a character of its own, personifying ideas and aesthetic concepts of the different art movements from early modernism to post-modernism. The artist duo staged these hypothetical relationships between the sculptures and their various clashes as an entertaining psychodrama. Using mobile plinths Elmgreen and Dragset set the inherently inert sculptures in motion, enabling them to move around and rotate on stage. The gaudy light concept heightened the comic situation of sculptures brought to life and illustrated the absurd spectacale of the art business.

Ronja Primke

¹”Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Drama Queens”, in: Brigitte Franzen, Kasper König and Carina Plath (eds.), sculpture projects muenster 07, exhib. cat. LWL-Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster, Cologne, 2007, p. 75–81, here p. 75.

²Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset in an interview as part of the film documentation skulptur projekte 07. Die Filmdokumentation, 2007.