After becoming fast friends at the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program in 2001, Oscar Tuazon, 33, and Gardar Eide Einarsson, 32, made their first collaborative works in the program's downtown studios — and nearby bars. The pair then went to work for Vito Acconci, where their first job involved unpacking his entire library. While sorting and shelving the Conceptualist elder's archive, Tuazon and Einarsson would pass around interesting finds, using the office copier to make art from these discoveries. As Tuazon explains, "That's really the way we work, very immediately. We have an idea and we do it." The duo copied an issue of the '70s gonzo muckraker magazine Scanlan that was focused on "Guerrilla War in the USA" and showed the facsimile in the Wrong Gallery's "Down by Law" exhibition at the 2006 Whitney Biennial.

Around this time, Tuazon was also exhibiting collapsible housing structures built from the plans he came across in hippie survivalist publications like VONUlife and Dwelling Portably. Accompanied by 'zines with instructions for living off the grid, these structures explored how architecture might embody an ideal of personal liberty. Given the theme of itinerancy running through this work, it came as no surprise when Tuazon left New York in the summer of 2005, heading first to his home state of Washington and eventually to Paris. Although Tuazon continued to show his portable shelters in Paris — at the Palais de Tokyo as well as Castillo/Corrales Gallery, which he cofounded — the move placed his collaboration with Einarsson on hold.

Though his approach is more skeptical than Tuazon's, Einarsson has also engaged with figures of personal freedom through his precisely executed paintings, borrowing transgressive clichés from biker gangs and suburban punk bands (Black Flag, the Misfits) as well as political extremists like Theodore Kaczynski. Although his cool, aestheticized style, complete with trompe l'oeil ink splatters, complicates the heated sloganeering of his imagery, critics have still occasionally accused the work of thinness. But these paintings hit a chord in certain circles by exploiting what Einarsson describes as "the quasi-impotency of contemporary art as a vehicle for expressing ideas."

Despite busy solo careers and an ocean between them, further collaboration seems inevitable now that both artists are represented by Standard Gallery in Oslo. As Tuazon says, "It's best when it springs out of a conversation completely naturally. Not for a show, not as a kind of long-term partnership, just as a way of hanging out."

"Oscar Tuazon + Gardar Eide Einarsson" originally appeared in the December 2008 / January 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' December 2008 / January 2009 Table of Contents.