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“Politicians may pretend to believe still in full employment,” says Elmgreen, “but in our modern economic system this would mean making people sit about doing utterly meaningless jobs. What does our body represent in today’s post-industrial society?” he asks.

“Once it had a production value: as a unit in a factory. Now it has been reduced to the visual. Look at the papers, for instance: now the body means only sex and illness and clothes and facelifts.”

And so the journey into the heart of bleakness continues, down bland office corridors, past abandoned TV studios, and eventually back to the place from which you set out.

What do you make of it? The catalogue — a fat office file with an A to Z index — won’t help. It only confuses more with its facts, forms and fictions. But then perhaps Elmgreen and Dragset don’t want you to think so much as to feel: to experience our ludicrous systems at an emotional level.

Normally these sorts of spaces neutralise your individuality. They imprison you in their traps. They leave you numb. But now, as part of an art show, they awaken the senses instead, stirring an anarchic humour, rousing an acute sense of the ridiculous, prompting a subversive intelligence.

The queue for the post-office counter will never feel quite the same again.

The Welfare Show is at the Serpentine Gallery, W2 (020-7402 6075), from Thursday

Surreal society

Gilbert and George “Was Jesus Heterosexual?” their new exhibition asks. By way of an answer: a range of religious icons and multiple G&Gs themselves, as impassive as ever.

Richard Serra One of the world’s greatest living artists, Serra turned to the internet to publish drawings that condemned, among other things, human-rights abuses in Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

The Guerrilla Girls A subversive gang of anonymous feminists who launch poster attacks on male-dominated traditions.

Paul Noble The fictional city of Nobson, which Noble has created in a series of astonishingly detailed drawings, offers a dystopian parody of our urban planning.

David Godbold The official artist for the 2005 election produced work that was rather too honest for the parliamentary committee that appointed him.