Tuesday, June 17, 2008

A window of opportunity


The Boros Collection: Part 2
By the time we got to the fifth floor of the windowless bunker even the most sanguine of us were feeling a little claustrophobic. Then, in a small room at the far end of a corridor, we discovered a large window looking straight out onto the (new and rather stylish) Holiday Inn. As the first window we had seen in over an hour it was a bit of a shock. A shock also to find that we were sharing the room with a male patient lying in a hospital bed looking out at the view. Thanks to Maurizio Cattelan and Co, we’ve probably seen enough realistic, life-sized-figures-as-art for now (not that this wasn’t a good one) but what was impressive was the window itself. The artists Elmgreen & Dragset (Michael Elmgreen (Dane) and Ingar Dragset (Norwegian) who did that nifty Prada store out in the desert near Marfa) had convinced the collector to dig out around 2.5 square meters of 2 meter thick concrete wall to make the installation possible. And there we were, this time last year, being impressed by Cattelan (there he is again) putting what now seems a small slit in the external wall of the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt.
Images: Elmgreen and Dragset Temporarily Placed 2002