Making a peep Reynolds, Nigel
National post (Toronto),
05/2004
Newspaper Article
The Tate Modern unveiled its latest conceptual joke yesterday -- a sparrow in its death throes. The little grey and brown male bird is trapped between the panes of a double-glazed window. The artists ...sub-contracted the job of making the animatronic sparrow (cost: (ps)12,000) to Crawley Creatures, the Sussex firm that won a Bafta award for special effects for the television series Walking with Dinosaurs. The Tate Modern hopes that watching the birdie die will prove as compelling to visitors as The Weather Project, Olafur Eliasson's giant sun made from 200 sodium lights. The installation, recently removed from the gallery's turbine hall, attracted more than one million hippie sun-worshippers. The choices are: The sparrow is the Cockney sparrow and represents the death of the London working classes; it symbolizes, more simply, the decline of sparrows in the capital; death is unusual in a gallery, and the sparrow makes us dwell on the unexpected; or, at a time when we are overloaded with grim images from Iraq, the true horror of death can only be conveyed by the trapped sparrow.
LONDON - The Tate Modern unveiled its latest conceptual joke yesterday -- a sparrow in its death throes. The little grey and brown male bird is trapped between the panes of a double-glazed window. ...Lying on the ground on its back, it gasps for breath, its chest heaving desperately, beak twitching, its wings convulsing and feet stiff in the air. The artists subcontracted the job of making the animatronic sparrow (cost: about $25,000) to Crawley Creatures, the firm that won a BAFTA award for special effects for the television series Walking with Dinosaurs. The Tate Modern hopes that watching the birdie die will prove as compelling to visitors as Olafur Eliasson's giant sun, recently removed from the gallery's turbine hall, which attracted thousands of hippie sun worshippers. The choices: The sparrow is a Cockney sparrow and represents the death of the London working classes; it symbolizes, more simply, the decline of sparrows in the capital; death is unusual in a gallery, and the sparrow makes us dwell on the unexpected; or, at a time when we are overloaded with grim images from Iraq, the true horror of death can only be conveyed by the trapped sparrow.
'The Bed' by Michael Elmgreen, Ingar Dragset and Georg Jensen is presented. The artists have brought along a 3D-printed model of their design for Handmade, which will be made in sterling silver and ...come to be known as 'The Bed.' It can be thought of as a futuristic interpretation of that ovoid bonbonniere, divided into two halves and containing an upholstered interior in the arists' signature cyan.
Review of exhibition, Elmgreen & Dragset's installation "The Welfare Show", at the Serpentine Gallery, London. These artists bring deadpan humour to the legacies of Minimalism, site-specificity and ...institutional critique. "The Welfare Show" builds on their infamous "Powerless Structures". A series of carefully sequenced vignettes speak of the experiences encountered by the individual confronting various forms of bureaucracy associated with institutional systems in the white cube and beyond, including hospitals and the welfare system. Some works graft broader social concerns onto a critique of the gallery by way of presenting a flexible scenario, for example "Reg(u)arding The Guards", 2005, in which seven individuals recruited from job centres are dressed as uniformed guards and seated around an empty gallery space with nothing to guard but each other. Each stares blankly ahead, occasionally making a pithy comment to an unsuspecting passerby. Their presence is intimidating, but funny too. The performative dynamic inherent in much of Elmgreen & Dragset's work is further highlighted when one of the guards breaks the imaginary plane sealing off the work from the beholder to visit the toilet. (Quotes from original text)
Review of the exhibition of the live installation Paris Diaries (2003; illus.) on show at the Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris, which was organized as a collaborative work by the Danish artist ...Michael Elmgreen and the Norwegian artist Ingar Dragset and featured men writing their diaries.
