Can the Oval Office be Transformed Into Art?

First, let it be said that Elmgreen & Dragset are not by any means interested in getting involved in American politics. (Nor, for that matter, is tigernoodles.)

Rather, the celebrated Scandinavian creative partners - Michael Elmgreen, who was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1962, and Ingar Dragset, who was born in Trondheim, Norway in 1969 - have for more than three decades now been, to put it in the most straightforward of ways, mocking on the iconography of power - whilst also always giving us something profound to ponder about it. In fact, they have during this whole time been carrying on with a genuinely thought-provoking series titled 'Powerless Structures', which began with a 1995 project called 'White Cube', that openly questioned, well...the way the art world worked. It got them a good amount of attention.

One could reasonably say that they became famous because of the idea, or possibly in spite of it. After all, no one, especially in the rarefied circles of the art world, likes being called out for their questionable practices.

Their newest project finds them again extending the series, with the informatively titled 'Transition' currently being exhibited at Pace Gallery in New York. That title refers here to the period after an election, when a new American president is stepping into the role in a...transitional manner. Remarkably, it's something that had gone off pretty much without a hitch until 2021, the events of which we won't bother recalling here - though it's reasonable to assume that E&D were at least partly influenced by precisely those events.

Many a joke has been made, of course, about the, um...slight differences between the decorating styles of presidents 46 and 47 - and even a few more about what 48 will be walking into on January 20, 2029.

Indeed, the Oval Office has been given the full "Dubai-meets-the-Vegas-Bellagio" over the last two years. So the duo here strip it down to its barest essence, to remind us that structurally it's really just another room (and smaller than you might think) - though one from which world-changing decisions might be made on a fairly regular basis.

As we know, incoming presidents always replace the previous photographs, furniture, and assorted symbols of power and partisanship with their own accoutrements, as a way of "claiming" the space for their own oncoming tenure. But there is also a very real statement-making and messaging that has to do with the dispensing of the old ideologies, with the office acting as something of a visual showcase for the new president's political and philosophical doctrines. So seeing the room in its barest form like this does pretty much relieve it of its mythology, leaving the viewer to consider of it what they will.

As we've also come to know, the provocative duo are never stingy when it comes to giving us something to think about. So in an adjoining gallery space is installed 'The Balcony Series', in which very famous world leaders - you can spot the late, behatted Queen Elizabeth II and her royal family - have been whited-out of photographs of themselves waving and projecting power from balconies attached to their lavish palaces and state buildings. Someone in a bunny costume hilariously adorns one of the reworked images, and we're not even going to attempt to understand why.

Elmgreen & Dragset's 'Transition' will be on view at Pace Gallery in NYC through January 16, 2027.

(Watch: This video shows Elmgreen & Dragset's monumental sculpture 'Eight' - a 28-foot-tall "swimming pool" turned on its end - recently being installed in the new Hirshhorn Museum Sculpture Garden in DC.)