We were only being boring

And yet, like most jokes, this has a serious flip side. The welfare system today is more about show than anything else, the artists explain. Politicians may pay lip service to its principles, but real economic policy is focused elsewhere. The much-vaunted Scandanavian model of social security no longer really exists.

Elmgreen and Dragset (born in 1961 and 1969, respectively) met 12 years ago — in “the dirtiest gay disco in Copenhagen”, apparently. The former was a poet — though, since only about one person in a million reads contemporary poetry, he tells me, as a Danish writer he had an audience of about five. The latter — a Norwegian — worked in the theatre. And their meeting led to “the longest one-night stand ever”.

They started working together as performance artists — it seemed a logical way to combine their respective talents. At first they were lovers (they no longer are) and based their work on their lives, making pieces that challenged the clichés of gay iconography. This slowly led to a wider questioning of social structures and the way they exercise control.

They made a replica of a gallery, for instance, and then buried it in the ground so that the spectator could look into it from above to see exactly what sort of entity it was. “We wanted to view different topics from different angles,” the artists say, “to open up as many different perspectives as we could.” They made a series of pieces that explored spatial issues, questioning the design of public spaces and wondering how they could be changed.

Their new show at the Serpentine continues these investigations. Elmgreen and Dragset have transformed the interior of the gallery into a series of institutional spaces, through which the visitor is led like a passenger on a ghost ride. The spooks are boredom, anonymity, solitude and endless, monotonous, mind-numbing waiting.

“We built it especially for you here in Britain,” Elmgreen laughs. “You lot are always waiting — for buses and cabs, in pubs and clubs, at cash-machines and shop counters. You seem to love it, so we thought we will offer you that experience.”

“Socks at Woolworths £1.99 a pair,” says the sign at the show’s entrance. Clearly the main attraction is not up to much. You are offered two choices — to turn left or right. It doesn’t matter which you opt for — you will end up at the same place.

Most people turn right, attracted by flashing lights on a pole-dancer’s podium. It is empty except for the abandoned paraphernalia — the mops, sponges and buckets — of a cleaner. This sculpture evokes two types of traditional — but solitary and not particularly valued — forms of female labour.

Moving on, you push through hospital swing doors and enter a corridor with two beds: one already occupied, one waiting for you. “Hospital is a passage in most of our lives at some point,” says Dragset. “One of our democratic rights is to get a bed in a hospital corridor and wait.”

The spectator continues through a waiting room in which a number dispenser prints out its tickets while the digital display blinks an endless succession of zeros; past an airport carousel in which a single piece of uncollected baggage spins; through a room full of gallery guards who preside over emptiness.

They evoke the mindless monitoring of our social systems, explain the artists, the officialdom that, without making direct contact, constantly checks. The “guards” have all been recruited from the job centre.

“Politicians may pretend to believe still in full employment,” says Elmgreen, “but in our modern economic system this would mean making people sit about doing utterly meaningless jobs. What does our body represent in today’s post-industrial society?” he asks.

“Once it had a production value: as a unit in a factory. Now it has been reduced to the visual. Look at the papers, for instance: now the body means only sex and illness and clothes and facelifts.”

And so the journey into the heart of bleakness continues, down bland office corridors, past abandoned TV studios, and eventually back to the place from which you set out.

What do you make of it? The catalogue — a fat office file with an A to Z index — won’t help. It only confuses more with its facts, forms and fictions. But then perhaps Elmgreen and Dragset don’t want you to think so much as to feel: to experience our ludicrous systems at an emotional level.

Normally these sorts of spaces neutralise your individuality. They imprison you in their traps. They leave you numb. But now, as part of an art show, they awaken the senses instead, stirring an anarchic humour, rousing an acute sense of the ridiculous, prompting a subversive intelligence.

The queue for the post-office counter will never feel quite the same again.

The Welfare Show is at the Serpentine Gallery, W2 (020-7402 6075), from Thursday

Surreal society

Gilbert and George “Was Jesus Heterosexual?” their new exhibition asks. By way of an answer: a range of religious icons and multiple G&Gs themselves, as impassive as ever.

Richard Serra One of the world’s greatest living artists, Serra turned to the internet to publish drawings that condemned, among other things, human-rights abuses in Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

The Guerrilla Girls A subversive gang of anonymous feminists who launch poster attacks on male-dominated traditions.

Paul Noble The fictional city of Nobson, which Noble has created in a series of astonishingly detailed drawings, offers a dystopian parody of our urban planning.

David Godbold The official artist for the 2005 election produced work that was rather too honest for the parliamentary committee that appointed him.