subject: Close Encounters Happy Days For Elmgreen And Dragset (not!) By Linda Yablonsky [print this page] "Happy Days in the Art World" is a self-mythologizing art-world satire by Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, the Scandinavian artist duo responsible for the superbly furnished Danish and Nordic pavilions at the 2009 Venice Biennale. As the opening night attraction of the Performa '11 Biennial at NYU's Skirball Center on Nov. 1, 2011, the premiere at was actually less theatrical than those walk-through installations. It was also more instructive.
"I think this will be theater," said Marina Abramovic, who was among the schmoozing art-world insiders in attendance -- an audience that took a good 30 minutes past the scheduled curtain time to settle into its seats. "Not performance."
The empress of performance art, who recently played herself in a theater work by Robert Wilson, had reason to doubt the purity of the Elmgreen and Dragset enterprise. The more popular performance art becomes, the closer it gets to entertainment. And though it was conceived and written by visual artists, "Happy Days in the Art World" was not confused about its aspirations to theater.
First, the playwrights borrowed half their title from Samuel Beckett's "Happy Days," which features two characters buried up to the neck in rubble and desperate to survive both their physical circumstance and their relationship. (The other half came from Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World.)
Next, the production had two stars of the British stage, Joseph Fiennes and Charles Edwards, in the principal roles of ID and ME, stand-ins for the two artists, directed by Toby Frow, a veteran of the prestigious Donmar Warehouse company.
The action, which was strictly No Exit with a bit of Waiting for Godot thrown in, began with the two principals waking up from a blackout. Dressed in skinny black suits and ties, they find themselves in a white bunk bed set in an undisclosed location. (Those familiar with the artists' work may recall the bed as an element of "The Welfare Show," a politically astute, institutional environment that Elmgreen and Dragset created in 2006 at the Serpentine Gallery in London.)
"Where the hell are we?" said ID, who was missing his Prada shoes and socks, as well as his sense of self. A hotel? With a bunk bed? Maybe a hostel? A yoga retreat? A prison? No, it must be New York.
ME, irritated at being jolted from a pleasant dream, could only protest. "In my dream we were successful artists, based in a city where everybody else was an artist too -- Berlin, I think," he said. "And all of them were young artists, no matter what their actual age."
Satire, as the playwright George S. Kaufman once said, is what closes on Saturday night -- and it threatened to stifle this Tuesday night production with art-world "in" jokes about Ukrainian oligarch collectors and Larry Gagosian that bombed with an audience that clearly had little sense of humor about itself. But the jokes also glossed over the drama of the artists' real-life situation: a mid-career crisis the two weathered when the breakup of their romantic partnership threatened their ongoing collaboration. "Remember," says ME at one point. "If one of us dies, the other won't be worth anything."
