At a formal dinner given for Michael Landy at Tate Britain on Monday night, there was an uneasy moment - four minutes of extended social embarrassment, in fact - when the director of the gallery stood up to speak. As he offered his entirely deserved congratulations to the artist for what has a better than even chance of turning out to be a famous piece of work, and continued through a roll-call of all those who had helped to make it possible, some joker in the next gallery (a caterer? a sweeper-up?) went on whistling obliviously as he worked.
He whistled Danny Boy, then segued into an Irish Saturday-night version of the Jim Reeves weepie Welcome to My World ("Built with you in mind"). The Duveen galleries, where the whistling was coming from, are stone-walled, barrel-vaulted, 300ft long and perfectly echoic. It is the kind of cathedral-like space dedicated to the exaltation of high art, where a low art like whistling would seem to have no place. Known as "the Duveens" after Sir Joseph Duveen, the antiques dealer who funded them, they were added to the Tate in 1937, the first public galleries in England designed specifically for the display of sculpture. They are a reminder of a time when popular culture was more constrained, because there was another culture that was more dominant.
Very clever of Michael Landy, then, whose last show at Millbank was Scrap Heap Services in 1995, a bitter satire on the expendability of working people, to record his father, long unemployed as the result of an industrial accident, whistling slightly wheezily and wistfully to himself, and to use this as the soundtrack to Semi-detached, a new installation gathered together from the pieces of John Landy's life. The soundtrack intruded on the dinner in much the same way as the life-sized replica of his parents' Essex house that he has had constructed intrudes into the lofty interior of the Duveens.
Who would have known that such a small house, uprooted from its suburban plot, could look so big? The chimney barely makes it under the skylight; the outer walls leave only narrow brick alleys as a pedestrian way in. Or that such a modest house could look so imposing?
Sixty-two Kingswood Road, Ilford, 1G3 8UD. It is just a house, in all its pebble-dashed, net-curtained, nylon-windowed, slightly run-down boring ordinariness. Untampered with. Unamplified. A ready-made. A "found"object in the Duchampian tradition. Except it is the object Michael Landy found himself living in when his parents decided to move from Hackney in East London to Ilford in Essex for the sake of Michael, and Maureen and Lisa, his sisters. (Hollow laugh from Landy: "That's why I became a runner. I spent my whole childhood running.")
The Landys' happy, unremarkably ramshackle life was up-ended in 1977 when John Landy, an Irishman working with other Irishmen digging a tunnel in Northumberland, was buried alive after the roof of the tunnel collapsed on his head and shoulders. He suffered severe injuries: his back was broken and, in the language of industrial tribunals and compensation committees, he was considered "a total wreck case". In the years since the accident, disabled and increasingly immobile, he has progressively withdrawn from the world. His world has largely become contained within the walls which have been re-created down to the smallest paint stain and rust blemish at Tate Britain - traces of the earlier stages in the history of the building and the human life associated with it. As the brick crumbles and the materials weather, the house becomes its own record of everything that has happened to it.
John Landy is a link with the older world of hard, itinerant manual labour. "Labour" is the first word to appear in the long, slow panning sequence of the video Michael Landy has made of his father's rough, randomly accumulated bedside possessions. It is twinned with the logofied red rose of New Labour, and appears on some kind of promotional literature which has found its way on to a shelf that is weighed down with the dusty evidence of his former life as a DIY fanatic: the camera lingers lovingly over cable clips, welder glue, car indicator lights, chainsaw brushes (bagged and labelled), heel grips, a magnifying glass, a collection of torches. A chainsaw and all-purpose Power Devil are kept to hand (and in good condition, though they're hardly used any more) in the bedroom.
A second large video screen on the reverse of the house's facade shows a sequence of changing images drawn entirely from the collection of instruction leaflets, DIY manuals and home-improvement magazines that John Landy has collected over decades, both before and after his accident. Photographs and line-drawings of optimistic young couples and growing young families, hell bent in pursuit of the modernity, pureness and newness that was all the rage, alternate with illustrations of how to deal with blocked guttering, eroded surfaces, skinned knuckles, clogged drains.
Landy found it too unnerving trying to interrogate his father directly with the camera. Instead he pays attention to the small things in a house - and in a life - that are often noticed only in their absence: a fridge light; the chest freezer in the dining room switching through its cycle; the ball of fluff spinning on a thread above the radiator; the ticking of a clock.
Taped to a wall through the weeks that 62 Kingswood Road was being replicated at Tate Britain was a plan and elevation of the house pocked with the hundreds of individual peculiarities - every sore, scar and bricky pockmark - that Michael Landy had spotted and was anxious to bring to the attention of Mike Smith and the construction team. The people applying the finishing touches to the kitchen extension last weekend looked more like makeup artists than conventional chippies and painters, stepping back to appraise, and then going in with a fine eye-liner brush to finesse a scab by the door.
When are ordinary houses usually scrutinised in this way? By police forensics teams and in the visual vocabulary of newspapers and television, when something out of the ordinary, often macabre, has taken place: the school caretaker's house at Soham; Jill Dando's house at Gowan Avenue in Fulham; 25 Cromwell Street. The wadded albums of photographs that the "factors" worked from showed the skin of the house in eruptive, forensic detail. The elevations that Michael Landy marked up were strongly reminiscent of the body maps that cosmetic surgeons prepare (and Jenny Saville has painted) prior to an operation.
Many of the artists of Landy's generation, while studiously avoiding the human body in their work, have been aggressive in their referencing of it. Damien Hirst's use of animal carcasses has always been insistently anthropomorphic. Sarah Lucas has used dead poultry, fried eggs and assorted fruit and vegetables. Rachel Whiteread has cast the insides of wardrobes and the undersides of beds as well as mortuary slabs and discarded mattresses. But it was with "House", her "mutilation", according to hostile critics, of "the archetypal space of homeliness", that Whiteread inflamed a debate that, a decade later, is still difficult to make sense of.
Two decades before Whiteread, the young American sculptor, Gordon Matta-Clark had drawn a line with a chainsaw through a house in suburban New Jersey, and later installed the four roof-corners of the building in a gallery. More recently, the German Gregor Schneider has systematically mutilated the house he inherited from his parents to the point where Schneider himself claims he can no longer distinguish between parts that have been added and those that existed before. In all these cases the point has been the transposition of the familiar into its opposite: the uncanny, and stories of boarded-up houses whose secrets might only be imagined.
For Semi-detached, Michael Landy's family home has been dissected and 100ft of gallery space placed between the two halves. The video presentations are where the lived life of the house would be. But he is insistent that his intervention stops there. He would have uprooted 62 Kingswood Road and moved it across London, if that had been possible. The choice of ready-mades was based on visual indifference, at the same time as a total absence of good or bad taste. Duchamp once talked of "signing" the Woolworth Building in New York, and that's what Landy would have liked to do with the house where he grew up. It is in its implacable, unassuming ordinariness that his interest, and all his interest, resides. Nothing terrible, and possibly noth ing even particularly wonderful, has ever happened there. Just a set of unremarkable lives rubbing against each other, moving through time.
This is by a broad margin the most sentimental project Landy has committed himself to. Break Down (2001), where he took all his possessions, including works by other artists, and systematically ground them to dust, was a definition of unsentimentality. The final piece to go, inventory number C714, was the piece that Landy was most attached to - his father's old sheepskin coat, purchased shortly before he had his accident, and paid for over a year by Landy's mother even though it was too heavy and uncomfortable for John Landy to wear. Break Down was a ritual acting out of the disintegration that is the only end of every human life. "It's like my own funeral," Landy said at the time, "but I'm alive to watch it. I'm still alive."
He says he is dreading the day in December, six months in the future, when the house at the Tate will have to be demolished and taken away in skips. "In a strange way, although it's only been up less than a week, it feels more real to me than the real thing."
His father, though, already has first claims: the drainpipes, the guttering, the white PVC door and white plastic windows are all making the trip to Ilford and 62 Kingswood Road.
During the filming for Semi-detached a curious thing happened: they had to remove a lot of the stuff in which Michael Landy has invested so much meaning so that the camera could move freely in his father's room. At the completion of filming, his dad didn't want it put back. Now a move to Jaywick or Clacton or somewhere else on the south coast is on the cards.
Reminiscing about the interiors of his youth, the Viennese architect Adolf Loos observed that he did not grow up in a "stylish" home. The house was his family's product, not a work of art. "It was our table, ours!" The house was never finished, "it grew along with us and we grew within it". It possessed neither style, strangeness, nor age.
"Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us," Carl Andre once said. With their move, it's fair to say the art will have gone out of the Landys' unassuming semi standing on Kingswood Road.
· Semi-detached is at Tate Britain, London SW1, until December 12. Details: 020-7887 8008.
