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Preferring to see themselves as artworld outsiders, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset began their collaboration in 1995 by subverting the idea of the white cube. Having recently done the same for the bellicose statues in Trafalgar Square they are now taking on the V&A and its collection, through the medium of a fictional architect’s apartment

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Words by Shumi Bose

Portrait by Andrew Meredith

By-laws dictate that no more than two people may sit at a single table on the pavement in Kensington where I stand, parched and confounded, on a blazing summer afternoon. I'm trying to grab a drink with Scandinavian art pranksters Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset. The local council also prohibits us from claiming two tables in a row on this particular stretch. So finally, we sit as if outside the headmaster's office, chairs against the wall, giggling at the Kafka-like absurdity of inflexible regulations. There could be no better place to start talking to these long-term rule-breakers, whose collaboration over two decades is notable for consistent and acute irreverence.

'Especially in this city, there's such a widespread fear of chaos,' offers Elmgreen, who spends some of his time living in London's Covent Garden. 'There's this crazy belief in regulating people's behaviour with neon jackets and CCTV. My experience is the more rules you make, the more fun it is to break them.'

Copenhagen-born Elmgreen is more voluble, with a drier humour than his Norwegian collaborator. Dragset bases himself in Berlin, where the duo created their important Monument to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism (2008); quieter at first, he is prone to sudden and infectious peals of laughter. Recalling their grimly titled Omnes Una Manet Nox (One Night Awaits Us All) at Louis Vuitton's London flagship store in 2012 - which included a bed intended for staff to use during their regular nine-to-five - he says: We had to change the atmosphere of the shop floor. In the beginning, the staff were afraid to sleep, we had to get the manager to encourage them!'

Breaking rules -- or at least poking fun at artistic conventions -- heavily informs Elmgreen & Dragset's collaboration, which began in 1995. As a latecomer (or as the two insist, outsiders) to the art world, Elmgreen & Dragset displays a liberating impudence in tackling mechanisms of control. Entering the contemporary art scene of the mid-Nineties, the two found in it a particular freedom and energy -- both in terms of the potential to work in various disciplines and in its energetic commerce. But maintaining a maverick distance helped them to interrogate the ecology of the art world from within -- taking on the white cube, that most ideologically charged of architectural containers, as a primary target.

Social Mobility Fig.2 (Emergency Exit), an installation for The Welfare Show (2006)

One of Elmgreen & Dragset's early performance pieces, 12 Hours of White Paint (1997), demonstrates its bemused reaction to the formulaic vacuity of identikit gallery spaces, which proliferated at the time. The pair spent a whole 12 hours continually washing down and repainting a typical white cube with white paint until all semblance of depth, perspective and 'place' became blurred. The tools of the contemporary gallery space were turned on itself, pointing to a deliberate erasure of context; this evokes the duo's attitude towards political and social questions, which they tackle with directness and acuity in the majority of pieces.

Powerless Structures, Fig.101 was commissioned by the Mayor of London to occupy the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square

The Welfare Show at the Serpentine Gallery in 2006 featured a cash machine (with an abandoned baby beside it) and a text commissioned from MP Tony Benn -- no oblique academic references here. 'The Welfare Show held the last leftovers of the Welfare State, the sentiments of New Labour. Now that's definitely over,' says Elmgreen.

Elmgreen & Dragsest's work only recently vacated Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth, one of the most prominent public art spaces in London. The latest figure in its long-running series Powerless Structures sat here from February 2012 to April 2013. Bellicose and triumphant in his posture, a little golden boy sat on a rocking horse, goading his static steed into perpetual war.

A previous work, Reg(u)arding the Guards (2005), is still more explicit in dealing with structures of power: it features a group of uniformed security staff with gazes fixed solemnly on each other. Depending directly on architectural and spatial qualities to create layered atmospherics, the pair's productions question prescribed behaviours, coded into (the physical apparatus of) our built environment. 'We were interested in people and space in the use of architecture: how architecture influences our movements, identity and actions,' says Dragset.

Painting becomes a Sisyphean task in 12 Hours of White Paint (1997)

Some of their works involve fairly serious construction work, too. The solo exhibition Celebrity: The One and The Many (2010-11) involved building a four-storey apartment block in an atrium of Karlsruhe's ZKM Centre for Art and Media. Visitors moved voyeuristically through it, observing a tableaux of impoverished, lonely inhabitants engaged with (or escaping from) reality through mass media channels. In another part of the installation, visitors are trapped on the wrong side of a glamorous party -- different modes of exclusion, manifested through the careful staging of space.

Above and below: the artists built a four-storey apartment block at ZKM (2010-2011) in which voyeuristic visitors found fictional narratives

Their forthcoming exhibition at London's Victoria and Albert Museum, entitled Tomorrow (1 October-2 January) makes a similar attempt at implicating the visitor in an artificial narrative, even as it takes a dig at the conventions of viewing art in a gallery. For the duration of the installation, the 'rooms' that Tomorrow occupies are not a gallery space at all, but the temporarily uninhabited apartment of one Mr Norman Swann, architect. With half-smoked cigars, artfully faked grime stains, dishevelled bedclothes and a fusty mixture of antique and 20th-century furniture, the transformed Textile Galleries bear a convincing similitude toa richly furnished West End apartment in full, if slightly solitary, use.

Rosa makes her fifth public appearance in the Tomorrow installation; here she is at the Venice Biennale

The stage-set suite is extremely evocative. The carefully considered placement of creature comforts holds a sense of the uncanny; a space in which to read a life lived almost to the end, through subtle clues of inhabitation. These intimate cues have been arranged with meticulous attention to detail, planting back-dated postcards, archival copies of architecture periodicals and collected objets d'art -- more than 100 of which come from the Victoriaand Albert's vaults. Exhibiting museum pieces in a naturalistic setting -- with no labelling or signage whatsoever -- has pushed the boundaries at the V&A, and set curator Louise Shannon some serious challenge.Working with the artists for more than two years, one major hurdle has been in negotiating the display of artworks with eye-watering insurance values; the greatest of these must surely be a 19th-century oil painting by Sir Edwin Landseer of the Newfoundland dogs famously dear to him. Other loan items include beautiful examples of Oriental and equine ceramics and bronzes, a Louis XVI mirror and a poster for the seminal 1956 exhibition, This Is Tomorrow.

High Expectations (2010) also reappears, becoming meshed with the story of Norman Swann

That you're actually in a museum rather than someone's apartment washes over you only occasionally, each wave a testament to the artists' success in blurring reality and fiction. Approaching and interacting with the refined trappings of Mr Swann's life is a strangely tense experience. It conveys the voyeuristic sensation of rifling around the cupboards of a host in whose home you are an especially nosy guest. And yet -- are these not artworks from the V&A's priceless collection, and if so, why are we allowed to touch, handle, breathe on them? And don't some of these pieces seem a bit wrong here, somehow too familiar?

Prada Mafia (2005) makes an absurd gesture by taking the iconic luxury brand out of context

Fragments of Elmgreen & Dragset's recognisable back catalogue lurk among the period replicas and artefacts borrowed from the V&A. Motifs from the artists' greatest hits almost blend in, but for their deliberate exaggerations, giving themselves away with a bluffer's whistle. Rosa, a sculpture of a maid at about two-thirds scale, is a piece from 2006. She has appeared in other installations too, like the 'Celebrity' show at ZKM, as has the perturbed schoolboy of High Expectations (2010). Likewise a gilded vulture, prophetically perched on Norman's bed, also cast a carrion-hungry eye over Harvest, a solo show at the Victoria Miro gallery and the Louis Vuitton store, both in 2012. In Brechtian fashion, these echoes jar the visitor from a total suspension of disbelief. In effect, the fragments of Elmgreen & Dragset's previous works assume personalities and narratives themselves; friends who show up from time to time, but with different stories to tell.

The title, Tomorrow, against a portrait of this absent and somewhat ossified individual, conspires to melancholic effect. How well do the artists know Mr Swann? 'Too well,' says Elmgreen, wryly rolling his eyes. 'We've been planning the exhibition for a few years!'

Like Loyd Grossman in an episode of Through the Keyhole, I pad through the 'apartment' wondering who might live in a house like this; nosing through Norman's postcards, admirable bookshelves, scrapbooks and finally creeping into the architect's studio. 'He's not very successful; he's only a part-time academic. He submitted to a lot of competitions that he didn't win,' says Elmgreen. 'The show is also a tribute to failure: having strong ambitions but not being really able to get them out. Like many of the Utopia modernists, he has a very different social background to those in the social housing schemes he designed.'

As inspiration for the Tomorrow show, the V&A was obviously impressed by The Collectors, the duo's immersive installation at the 2009 Venice Art Biennale, which also earned a Special Recognition from the Biennale jury. In the Nordic Pavilion, a meticulously curated depiction of a mysterious art collector's home (Mister B) was piqued with a dose of narrative intrigue. As at the V&A, the visitor was asked to play detective. Meanwhile, the adjacent Danish Pavilion was dressed as a home for sale, 'shown' to visitors by actors playing estate agents. So why choose to fictionalise an architect this time? And what's the meaning in asking the viewer to forget their own situation in a large museum in favour of his apartment?

Pragmatically speaking, in order to avail the installation of the museum's collection, it was important to describe a creative or artistic professional. There were different options, the artists tell me, and the architect ended up winning. But there must be more to it, I persist: in the noble absurdity of imposing moral and physical ideas on the world, the figure of the architect continues to be ambiguous and admirable. 'I always used to tell my grandmother that I wanted to be an architect. I had the impression that this was a very fine thing to be; every time an architect used to visit, she would put on extra perfume and tidy the house,' grins Dragset.'Though there may have been other reasons!' Here is an architect whose values are recognisable in their modernist social motivation, suffused with a sense of unrealised potential. Swann's architectural concerns, evident in his clippings of Corbusier and Cumbernauld, speak of problems that persist today -- the shortage of affordable housing, the provision of high living standards at the thin end of the wedge. That the world has changed around Mr Swann is rendered poignantly in his most high-tech bit of kit: an old Apple Macintosh II, so far removed from today's gadgetry as to seem almost comic.

'When you read the script, it's a bit like a Bergman film -- you don't necessarily like the characters but they're in a conflicted point in our lives,' says Dragset, whose early career began in performance art and writing screenplays. He is referring to the extraordinary script -- running to 64 pages -- that accompanies the show in lieu of any kind of formal catalogue. The story therein fleshes out what
the visitor traces in the vestiges of space, adding some shockingly unexpected plot-twists. Mr Swann's architectural optimism, if he had any, would have been intellectually radical in the same vein as the many influential architects and planners whose efforts were channelled through the GLC, CLASP and post-war initiatives. The major shift today is in political, or rather economic will; in former poet Elmgreen's words, 'this rude, rough neoliberalism, new money from all over the world, and new parameters. He's old Britain, he has all the mindsets of old Britain, brought up in very strict class system but sympathetic to the idea of welfare, the state.' Dragset adds: 'There are a lot of people like that in Britain and in Europe, without much optimism left.'

Banal domestic architecture might explain how, in Michael's opinion, museums have replaced some of the experience of going to church. 'People live in such shit spaces most of the time, they want to go to big, beautiful places like museums. Maybe they don't care what's in it, but the skylights! The ceiling heights! It's what you used to get from the cathedral.'

Elmgreen & Dragset's collaboration has evolved alongside their relationship -- boyfriends for the first decade or so, they are now more'like buddies and brothers in one, maybe'. As former poet and performance artist respectively, their work has gradually become more narrative and less ephemeral -- less strictly conceptual. I'm surprised that the artists are happy to grant access to the space, the script and various visualisations weeks before the show opens -- but as suggested by the anomalies in Mr Swann's apartment, the duo seems to enjoy revealing their own sleight of hand. 'When I was young I used to get frustrated with the traditions of Christmas; why did it have to be the same tree, every year?' confesses Elmgreen. 'It's same with the institutions, they prepare a show, they open the doors, then they close and dismantle it. It's fun for you to come and see it in process, see how we fool around.' Is this, perhaps, another sly dig at the reluctance ofinstitutions to show their messy, even quixotic workings? 'We challenge, not provoke -- never provoke...' protests Elmgreen, as Dragset rejoins: 'What we've found is that many people in the institutions are waiting to be changed; they are quite happy for someone to come in from the outside, make them see things in a different light, staff start talking to each other and there's a breakdown of normal hierarchy.'

And it's true that the artists' real success is not limited to the fine-grained artifice of their theatrical, politically nuanced productions. The Prada Marfa store, for example, takes the idea of brand consumption to a ludicrous situation: placing a perfect facsimile of the luxury fashion outlet in the Texan desert. It works beautifully: not only in the painstakingly accurate detail of the store -- which was convincing enough to cause a break-in, even though the only shoes on display were right-foot only -- but in the statement, the audacious absurdity of its deluxe existence, on the edge of nowhere. Elmgreen and Dragset triumph through pushing seemingly rigid institutions to break and subvert their own boundaries.

At its most poignant -- and darkly funny -- their work reveals the fragile, quivering heart of human avarice, ego and intellect behind various spatial and societal constructs. Like the crushing, private disappointment of arriving at a nightclub after the party of the year has ended, or the loneliness of entrusting one's working future to electronic resumés, sent from a dehumanising tower block into the equally dehumanised digital ether. Or like the dust-sheeted dreams of a Utopian, socially minded architect, surrounded by inherited and imperial wealth. Perhaps his time is Tomorrow.