Elmgreen&Dragset with “Tomorrow” at the V&A: the exhibition begins when you are back home

The script of an “unrealized film by Elmgreen and Dragset” that your are invited to take at the entrance of their current show (we found this thin black book in the first room, laid on a side table) is effectively the core of the matter. But, of course, you have time to read it only once you have visited the exhibition. Therefore it is only when you are back home that you will learn the entire story of the poor architect Norman Swan and his former and successful student Daniel Wilder. Before, visiting the elegant apartment staged in the five V&A’s former textile galleries, and with the only help of the few infos reported in the introductory text at the entrance, you just feel yourself displaced and moved by the desire of knowing what has actually happened there.

 

This work, in line with Tom McCarthy’s “Remider” and many other “reconstructions” in contemporary and fine arts, somehow refers to what Orhan Pamuk did in 2011 with his famous novel titled “The Museum of Innocence”. In this case, however, it is the novel that leads the reader to the real museum, founded in Istanbul by the protagonist-writer-and-author-of-the-book. On the contrary, in the case of “Tomorrow”, you discover the existence of the book when visiting the exhibition. But in both instances, the main effect produced by this sort of double life of the fiction – we may call the two parts the software and the hardware – seems a time extension of the experience of the artwork. And the reader/visitor feels captured in the distance between fiction and reality. 

 

July 15, 2015