Which brings us to another theme: the clash between old and new money. “Power is shifting in the world at the moment. Who are the rich in London? Not Britons. It’s no longer the traditional upper class. It’s mostly people who have moved here,” says Elmgreen.
This backstory, as it were, will unfold through numerous personal items, from his spectacles, watch, and medication to letters, unpaid bills, and old periodicals—“architecture journals and lifestyle magazines, but all very outdated and yellowish because Norman Swann has not invested in anything for the past 20 years at least”—and ashtrays “filled with fake cigarette butts because we’re not allowed real ones here.” Even his smart Swiss-cotton pajamas are there, carelessly slung on the sword of a 19th-century bronze David by the French artist Antonin Mercié. To anyone acquainted with the V&A’s sculpture collection or indeed the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, it’s a familiar image. How were they allowed to treat the work so cavalierly? Elmgreen laughs. He wants people to be shocked and intrigued, to wonder what is art and what is not, why we venerate some things and not others, to look intently and maybe see things differently. This version of the bronze doesn’t belong to the museum; that is safely behind glass (case 5, room 101, for the record). “This statue is mine,” says Elmgreen. “So we can do what we like with it. It’s also much bigger than the one here.” (There were six editions in different sizes; the V&A’s is just 92 centimeters high.) He picked it up in an antiques shop in Barcelona for about $5,000. “They obviously had no idea what it was.”
“We want to make the space appear as though someone just left,” Elmgreen says. “Or like a set for a film that has not yet been shot,” adds Dragset, to which end they have also written a script or play that sheds some light on Swann—who is “like a weird mix of us and of people we have known, and also somehow a mixture of all our fears and anxieties,” explains Elmgreen—and what has caused his sorry predicament. (Elmgreen was a scriptwriter and poet before he became an artist; Dragset had been to drama school and trained in mime.) Indeed, films come up repeatedly in the conversation. “We’re not referencing anything specific, but we are big fans of the sets in films by people like Luchino Visconti and Ingmar Bergman: The Leopard, Conversation Piece, Cries and Whispers, Autumn Sonata....”