Elmgreen and Dragset: Prada Marfa (Hardcover)

Synopsis
This book includes text by Dominic Molon, Ronald Rael. This photographic volume focuses on a new work by Berlin artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset. In the middle of the Texan desert Elmgreen and Dragset established a small Prada boutique. Completely isolated from its usual urban context, this symbol of luxury and capitalist promise sits on a country road near Marfa, a small hamlet in West Texas. In romantic landscape photographs, Marfa's inhabitants, their needs and socio-cultural idiosyncrasies are juxtaposed with the foreign structure that was built by the natives as a brick shack and inaugurated with Stetsons and beer bottles in their hands. A subtle irony hovers over the handsome photographic volume that juxtaposes high-gloss and rural life in Marfa, where Donald Judd established his Chinati Foundation. So "Prada Marfa" turns out to be a multi-layered landmark: a critique of capitalism and minimalist art.