But the budgets were not always so inflated, says Elmgreen, referencing the aptly named Powerless Structures, Fig. 19 (1998). ‘This is from when Elmgreen & Dragset had no such thing as an exhibition budget,’ he says. Two pairs of blue jeans with Calvin Klein underwear still entangled in them have been taken off and left on the floor. The underwear is fake, Elmgreen reveals, bought at a street market in New York—there really was no budget. The work says something quite tender about coupledom, dependence on one another, passion—maybe youth—or about E&D as a unit, somewhere between someone and something. In the Biography book there is a photograph of Elmgreen & Dragset kissing at a demonstration. It dates from when they first met and were newly in love. In the room next to the jeans at the Copenhagen exhibition is a public toilet, the two washbasins connected by a twisting and turning (but beautifully shiny) metal drain. The work is called Marriage and was made around the time the two stopped sharing a bed in 2004. “The dirty water from the one basin will drain into the other,” Dragset explains. “That is what most marriages are like.” “Is the water hot or cold?” a woman asks. “Lukewarm,” says Dragset, adjusting the faucet without missing a beat. This work reveals a more jaded vision of relationships—or rather, more experienced, more adult, albeit not without the artists’ characteristic playfulness.