FK: Did you originally plan for these to be art pieces?
ID: We didn’t think too much about things being art or not art. It was part of a scene, mostly with people going to the art academy in Copenhagen, but I didn’t think of myself as an artist at that time at all. Sometimes the performances were in galleries or artist-run spaces, sometimes it was more like “Oh, let’s do a performance festival in the public toilet.” They were things you just did.
ME: There was a very small art scene in Scandinavia at the time. There wasn’t any pressure from galleries. You wouldn’t be invited by museums to show anything as a young artist, which was quite liberating actually because it meant you could do exactly what you wanted to. I started doing art because I was writing poetry, and when
you do poetry you sell very few of your small books, and if you do poetry in Danish you sell extremely few of your small poetry books and reach a very limited number of readers. So I was like, “This is a waste of paper, let me do it in another format.” So I started to experiment with text that would morph on computer monitors. These were old IBM computers at that time and the place I ended up showing these texts on monitors happened to be in an art space – though I didn’t think of it as ‘visual art’. People from literature didn’t turn up, but people from the art world did, and they thought it was conceptual art. So I started to get these weird invitations from other young artists to participate in shows. I think everything in our careers has purely been due to coincidences, it has all been very unprofessional, it has been based on some random opportunities and us saying, “Why not?” After doing performances for a while we thought, “Let’s give them a shock and make a sculpture.” We made one of our first sculptures in a big group show about young art in Denmark, back in ’97. It was a diving board penetrating a museum window, in the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark that was situated by the sea. The museum profited from people going just for the nice view and having a coffee in the cafeteria, which they were embarrassed about, so we wanted to play with that idea. We installed the diving board in a room that normally wouldn’t have any art in it, only some sofas where people would sit and look out over the sea. So we played with this inside-outside situation. We did it partly because we had started to get invitations from curators, if they made a show that was maybe too classic, they would invite the two of us to spice things up with some activity in the corner. We thought, “No way, we’re not going to be boxed in like that, let’s give them a sculpture.”

FK: I feel like the audience is quite important in your work. Can you tell me a bit more about the interaction between your ideas, and what you want the viewer to feel or think about?
ID: Coming from theatre – you [to Michael] were also interested in theatre way back – you have to be much more aware of there being an audience, it just doesn’t work without one. That’s one aspect, the other is that, through doing performance, you discover space in a different way and you become much more aware of movement in relation to physical structures. That makes us think about how the audience moves in a space where you show art. Maybe because we didn’t go to an art academy or have a formal art education, we always felt that it’s important to communicate clearly on these ideas. We felt a little bit ‘outside’ sometimes because we didn’t have this training that maybe some artists do, and they take it for granted a bit that people know what they know.
ME: There’s still an arrogance in parts of the art world where some look down on the general audience, like they’re an evil necessity. The Tate Modern didn’t trust their audience when they cancelled their Philip Guston show because they clearly thought the audience would be too stupid to understand it – how his paintings ironically feature KKK like cartoonish figures – and the museum freaked out because they feared people would misunderstand this. Besides, one has to remember that artworks always look very different with an audience. We once had the opportunity to go to the Louvre with a curator when it was completely empty, and we saw the Mona Lisa. She looked totally lost without the audience, almost like she wanted to ask, “Where are all the people?” It was a completely different experience seeing her without having these huge hoards. Often, we do whole environments where we use the audience as part of the exhibition, because when you go to a show you also look at each other, you notice that there are other people in the room, how they behave or how you appear in relation to them. When we did the show This Is How We Bite Our Tongue at Whitechapel Gallery, London in 2018, where we transformed the venue into an abandoned public swimming pool, you could really notice how people walked around and made stories about each other, stories about the history of the room. Some people even claimed they remembered when Whitechapel had been a public pool… it had never been one, it has always been an art space, but the experience became so much about how people behave in the space.

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