Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset: Prada Marfa

In the middle of the West Texas desert, on a country road leading to the small town of Marfa--made famous in the 1950s by James Dean's last film, Giant, and in the 1970s by the cantankerous Minimalist sculptor, Donald Judd and his Dia-supported Chinati Foundation--the Berlin artistic collaborators Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset recently erected a very small, unmanned Prada boutique--a permanent sculpture for the art tourists who now flock to this region in higher numbers each season. The year was 2005. Completely isolated from its usual urban context, Elmgreen and Dragset's symbol of luxury and capitalist promise still sits in that romantic landscape, jarringly juxtaposed with Marfa's hard-working native inhabitants, albeit with graffiti now scrawled on the exterior walls. This concise project book documents the construction of the adobe structure, the installation of the shoes and bags, the surrounding landscape and the opening party.