- Venue
- Victoria and Albert Museum
- Location
It is not the sense of self one has while traversing the space inside Tomorrow that is the power zenith of Elmgreen and Dragset’s latest installation at London’s V&A Museum, but what happens to us when we leave.
Throughout our affair with the work, we are balanced on a fence, a precarious involvement which is only determined as we exit and gain perspective on the work, because the artists are playing not only with notions of abstracted space, but the politics of that space, and it’s direct relationship to it’s psychological and physical surroundings.
On entry to the work, we don’t notice the huge glass door, but instead glide through a portal into another world, one that resembles – in part – the one we know, but cannot exist within it. And yet, here it is.
We’re very much aware of ourselves as we childishly revel in the fact that we’re allowed to touch artefacts and objects, to explore, as we never have done before inside this museum (or, indeed, any other). We skirt the gallery assistants, who are in costume, dressed as butlers, adhering to the theme. It’s brilliant fun.
We continue to travel through the space, experiencing a tangible and time-based encounter. It is somewhat convincing, and pure logic is overcome by the realistic iconography the artists employ… a sign outside insists that the apartment is for sale, and whispering onlookers declare aloud what the sign states; there’s propaganda, and hearsay, and Chinese whispers that defies what we all know to be true; that it is impossible for the museum to suddenly house a… well, a buyable house.
It’s only when we leave this marvellous construction, through a door in a bookcase so joinlessly woven into the installation that a bubble of happiness deflates within us when we realise we’re back in reality, in the boring museum where we can’t touch anything. But that’s the crux… Elmgreen and Dragset haven’t only created a space within another space, and impossible space, but they’ve created a rather large bridge between those two spaces, and allowed us to cross. We recognise the discrepancy between each reality: the odd butler/maids who were also invigilators; the ‘shower’ we knew to be an audio track, but of which our brain was convinced was real running water; and, most potently, in it’s forbidding of sketching and meandering, and encouragement of exploration and touch, the fact that Tomorrow is the very opposite of everything a museum stands for.
