The Welfare Show

I hope this guy (Adrian Searle) manages to be my teacher... meanwhile I dream...
This is about Elmgreen and Dragset's show in London:
I have been sitting alone waiting for what feels like hours and still my number hasn't been called. The walls are blank, the light is numbing. That pot-plant looks neglected. The electronic sign just sits there on the wall flashing a line of zeros. The door before me stays shut. There's always something sinister about these closed doors and this impersonal silence. You wonder what's going on in there. I am sitting here managing my fears and frustration. Maybe the doctor is looking at my notes, bracing herself to give me the bad news. If I'm in the right place, that is - this could be anywhere. Do I want a loan, an extension on the overdraft? But this isn't the bank. That was yesterday. And anyway, I checked my balance on the ATM a few corners ago, back down one of those corridors. I had to step round a baby in a carry-cot to get at the cash machine.
I thought for a moment to ask whose baby it was, like you do when you see an unattended bag on a bus or in the tube, but didn't dare. Baby bomber. Baby boom. That feels like years ago, before I passed the baggage reclaim, where a lone bag from a Luton-Ibiza flight turned endlessly on the carousel. Cheap flight, cheap people. There didn't seem to be any way to get to the carousel, grinding round in an empty room beyond the plate glass window. There was a staircase leading to an exit but half the steps were missing.
Perhaps I took a wrong turn somewhere. All those security guards I passed didn't say a word: they just sat there looking into space, like I didn't exist. Like they didn't exist either. No one gives a shit any more, not nowadays, not unless you make a fuss and then they'll have you down as a troublemaker. Wish I'd brought the Guardian to read, or pretend to read - really, your mind's on overtime. Even the silence here is disturbing. Took my ticket from the machine, like the ones at the deli counter at Sainsbury's. Socks at Woolworths: £1.25 a pair, I read when I came in. Must be made in a sweatshop somewhere; child labour, rubbish materials.
What's through those double doors? I don't like the look of it. Another antechamber, with a couple of beds parked to one side. You read about people being left like that for days, forgotten in a corridor. That's the NHS for you. She's looking at the wall, oblivious to everyone walking through. Not in any state to complain, but then none of us is. Should I give her a poke, see if she's alive?
Through the last set of doors, there's a sort of neglected lobby, with a pole-dancer's podium. The dancing is over. It must have been pretty hot stuff, because they've had to get the cleaners in to mop up afterwards. Caution, Wet Floor, says the plastic sign. A thought strikes: maybe the dancer has to clean up after herself, swapping her spangly thong for a nylon housecoat and rubber gloves. Don't know which I find sexier. They're all from eastern Europe nowadays, or possibly Guatemala or the Philippines. One of those places. Maybe that was her back there on the hospital bed; blonde, face to the wall, uncomplaining. Must be Ukrainian or Polish. Somewhere like that.
Soon we'll be back to the beginning again, where that empty wheelchair was parked in the middle of the room, a blue balloon tethered by a string from one of the arms, the balloon wobbling up there by the skylight. As if you could float away like that, get out of your wheelchair and fly.
This is horrible. This is grim. These are the circles of hell or, if not, then a purgatory where the soul might die of indifference. Do I hear someone laughing? Usually, we go to art galleries for a bit of solace, looking for something to take us out of ourselves. Some nice paintings, perhaps, or a jolly installation. Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset's The Welfare Show, at the Serpentine Gallery, plunges us into a world we'd sooner forget, a world of accumulated blank hours, of institutional anonymity, of boredom, trepidation, impotence and seething inner rage.
But what a great show this is - at the same time funny and terribly bleak. The uniformed security guards are specially hired job-seekers, whose task it is to sit around doing nothing at all. The baby in the cot and the patient on her bed are lifelike mannequins. After a bit, you feel like a mannequin too, with a heart of wax. The doors don't open and the cash machine doesn't work. The bag on the belt goes round and round. Some sculptures do that, too.
The pole dancer's podium might remind us of the squalor of the sex industry, but it is also a reference to the go-go dancing platform by the late Felix Gonzalez-Torres that was once installed at the Serpentine. The cleaning equipment might also make one think of Duane Hanson's lifelike waxwork janitors. But somehow totting up the art references doesn't cheer me up or make me feel clever at all.
All these mises-en-scènes, which one can take as individual works, are seamlessly run together as a single, nightmarish, transitory world: part airport, part hospital, part day centre, part art gallery. They're all delivering a service and we are all customers now. Am I supposed to tell you, on a scale of one to 10, how satisfied I am?
By now, we are well used to this kind of remodelling of the gallery. I have walked on fabricated streets, visited bars and brothels, locked-ward mental asylums, the lairs of fictitious psychopaths and many other more-or-less believable corners of the real world reconstructed in galleries. I have even stood in a gallery that posed as an altogether different gallery, with a fake name, a fake director and fake art on the walls. Last summer, the Serpentine invited us to inhabit a mock-up of artist Rirkrit Tiravanija's New York apartment: one could cook, take a bath, hang out, chill on the sofa. The last Serpentine show, by Russian artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, presented us with ward after ward of curtained-off booths, each containing a bed, in which we were invited to sleep, even to dream. These shows, both very popular, offered us not just an opportunity to look, but to behave as we liked, within reason. We were, so to speak, thrown inside the illusion.
Dozens of artists have done such things, often in the name of what has come to be called "institutional critique"; all are more or less rhetorical attempts to change the way we not only negotiate art galleries and institutions, but also relate to them and the things they contain, changing the terms in which we encounter and relate to art itself. What Elmgreen and Dragset's Welfare Show presents us with is less an installation, more a state of mind - or rather, a state of being that proceeds by a series of desolate images, all of which are disturbing, not least because of their unhinged familiarity.
Elmgreen and Dragset (who are respectively Danish and Norwegian) ask us to think not just of social models but of social spaces, including, of course, the gallery, and the things in it. Here we are asked to contemplate the ways in which (to paraphrase the gallery handout) the disabled are treated as children, the quality of state hospital care, the conditions of low-paid work, state child support and political debates about the welfare state; but, walking round, it is difficult to avoid thinking in terms of a chain of banalities. This is not to say that the artists have nothing original to say, more that the cliches themselves form part of their subject. Nor are they presenting us with mere truisms, or a checklist of "issues". What they present us with, ultimately, is a kind of horror vacui. This is how much of our world is now: dispiriting, fearful, bland, anonymous, deadening. It makes me want to weep.