The story so far, to the extent that Elmgreen and Dragset will divulge it when the three of us meet six months later in the then empty rooms designated for the exhibition, is this: The scion? of an old English family, Norman Swann, has lived all his life in a now crumbling stately home that his meager income from teaching can no longer support. (“These galleries are actually quite scruffy,” notes Dragset, pointing out the water damage in one corner and the peeling paintwork, “but we like that.”)
Swann trained as an architect and had, explains Elmgreen, “a lot of modernist utopian visions and opinions about social housing and how people should live.” Though his study is packed with plans and models, however, none of his projects has ever come to fruition. “He was too weighed down by his background and having to take care of his ancestral home,” says Dragset.
“It’s a very sad story,” continues Elmgreen, “filled with missed opportunities. You can have all sorts of visions, but if you can’t realize them, they’ll strangle you. You just suffocate in your own dream world.”
The artists don’t quite finish each other’s sentences, but it’s clear from the way their conversation interweaves that they are close. Not that they’ve been a couple since 2005, a decade after they met in a Copenhagen nightclub, walked home together, and found they lived in the same apartment block. (Buildings! They govern our lives.) Dragset now lives in Berlin, where their studio is; Elmgreen, in London. Instead, they remain “something indefinable, like buddies, or brothers maybe”—and, of course, collaborators.
Elmgreen picks up the story: “So Mr. Swann has reached an age where he is about to die.” (This is, if you will, his swan song, though one can’t help detecting something Proustian in their choice of surname, nor indeed a reference to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, in which Gloria Swanson’s character is called Norma.) “He has run out of money. He has been burdened by his heritage, a bit like the U.K., and now he has to sell up,” he continues.? A deal has been brokered for him by a former student, Daniel, “who was never very intellectually gifted but has become a?very successful interior designer of celebrities’ homes and has found him a buyer,” and who is already at work remodeling ?the apartment for its new owners—hence, the extremely modern kitchen, quite at odds with the rest of the decor. “So, unlike our architect, he’s actually got something realized,” adds Dragset. “Though of course it’s something dear Norman looks down on.”