Better than a poke in the eye?
Over 40 years, Gilbert and George have become an institution with their rude words, colossal images and public double-act, but does this huge retrospective finally show us what they really mean by it all?
Gilbert and George
Tate Modern, London SE1; until 7 May. The Observer is media partner.
Gilbert and George, the most famous alliance in art, are having the biggest-ever show at Tate Modern. It fills an entire floor, twice the usual exhibition space, and covers every other inch of wall from cafe to escalator to bookshop. You cannot avoid it, which must be keenly gratifying for the artists. For their wall-sized art has always aspired to be right out in full public view rather than mouthing its chosen words - Cunt, Fuck, Lick, Spunk, Naked, Shitted, Smash, Piss, Yell, Bomb and so on - to an exclusively art-world audience.
'Art for All': that's what Gilbert and George claim to have been making these past 40 years, well aware that for all those who revere them as our national commentators, our conscience etc, just as many regard them as blasphemers, perverts and pederasts. Indeed, one can't help sensing a slight snicker in that 'All', although it has always been surpassingly hard to work out what G&G actually think. So it is good to have this monumental survey of their life's work to try to piece together the meaning of their art and perhaps to get its tone, as it were, straight.
The basic format was there from the off: G&G in identical suits striking absurdly stiff poses with just the hint of an impish glint behind those Prufrockian exteriors. These self-portraits would then be juxtaposed with other black-and-white photos in the G&G grid: their East End house, their neighbourhood, the graffiti and crowds, skinheads and rent boys, cemeteries, churches and mosques. Visual history, in other words, plus more private - or more public? - exposures in between: the artists' genitals and orifices, magnifications of their excrement and semen.
It seems from this show that there was once a private strain to their art, and that it involved some of their best work - their drinking days in the Seventies expressed as a crazy-paving of snapshots: blank, outlandishly stark or a blur; or the marvellous Dusty Corners and Dead Boards series, haunting checkerboards of interiors in which each artist appears alone in a shadowy room, alternating upstairs and downstairs with the oppressively vacant chambers of their house: the world before, and as it seems after, they were here.
It's a look, an absolutely distinct look, the G&G grid: a way of assembling images while seeming to keep them apart. No matter how wild the conjunctions (Big Ben to pubic lice, for instance), they keep it all under control with tremendous zip and register. The format never alters and is still the most impressive aspect of their art. If you imagine one of their works done as a fresco without the slick frame divisions - a tiny G&G surrounded by enormous turds; an enormous G&G looking down on tiny London - it would look mad or naive. But the minimalist grid turns society into fragments and allows the artists to observe from a thoughtful distance, or so it is often argued.
In fact, the artists' relationship with their imagery veers from pensive to facetious to strikingly blank. In an early classic like Queer, G&G stand in elegiac sidelight beside the bowed heads of street derelicts as dark clouds loom over London: Everyman observing the world's sorrows. But this is a rare instance of openness from two artists so vaunted for their candour. A much more usual posture is their commedia dell'arte hamming - the faux-religious rapture when gazing up at a huge naked youth; the pantomime double-act that makes them look like a sinister Morecambe and Wise. But even as early as the Seventies, a gulf begins to grow between their self-portraits and the rest of a picture's content.
Here they are in their matching suits, their Persil-white underpants or nothing at all, surrounded by gobs of chewing gum; by pages of the London A-Z or chunks of the Koran, it is all one and the same - their responses cannot be placed. Some people find this blankness powerfully non-judgmental, but this ignores the fact of what the artists choose to show. The graffiti, like the gum or piss or the pretty boys or the controversial swastikas (significantly absent here) are all images taken from their neighbourhood, but G&G obviously wouldn't dream of showing a local Georgian front door. Provocation is all, the imagery must affront. Light the fuse and retreat.
In the Nineties, Gilbert and George's art became as pompous as stadium rock and as self-centred - our spunk, our bums, our turf - as so much young British art of that era. Lately, it has turned outwards again but still wants to appear to be showing both sides of the street. The 'Sonofagod Pictures' from last year include a work the size of a cathedral window that incorporates morphed crucifixes, the artists in haloes and the slogan 'God Loves Fucking! Enjoy' (as usual, not their phrase but quoted graffiti). But there is also the punning Mufti (a Muslim cleric) with its pageant of diamond-encrusted jeans and some Jewish symbols for good measure. The suggestion may be that all religion is superstition - wild new thought! - but the Catholic imagery achieves critical mass. Still, the relations between words, images and self-portraits, as usual, make no particular sense.
If they did, then you might have some idea how the artists really feel about what they depict and their position of aesthetic neutrality - genuine or feigned - would be breached. As it is, these colossal images, so gaudy and ornamental, so dizzy with computer-generated distortions, merely poke you in the eye rather than probing your religious sensitivities.
The final and most recent works seem more null than ever: newspaper hoardings about the London bombings stacked one above the other in long columns in the manner (the artists say) of a war memorial. Bombs, bombing, bombers they announce, these black-and-white lists of nouns and verbs. G&G, morphed and doubled and printed bright red, bounce among them. The look is vividly nasty, as busy as a page of shrieking ads and seems as remote from a war memorial as can be. I recently heard the artists describe these pieces as quiet, funereal and commemorative and, if they can ever be taken at their word, perhaps that's what they truly hope and believe. But what Gilbert and George claim to aim for and what they actually achieve with their art remain worlds apart.
1. Expo Gilbert & George Pictures (Jack Freak)
2. Bozar - Brussel
3. 27 november 2010 om 16u
4. Lotte Detré
5. Lotte wou graag naar expo met fotografie gaan en omdat me dit ook interesseerde zijn we naar Gilbert & George gaan kijken. Het is eigenlijk fotografie vermengt in een schilderij en dat is wat het concept zo uniek maakt. Maar de kunstwerken zijn wel allemaal erg in dezelfde stijl en dus is het misschien wat ééntonig. Maar omdat de affiche en de folder er wel heel erg leuk uitzagen, zijn we toch voor deze expo gegaan en het is niet tegengevallen. Ik had wel al een expo bezocht voor Esthetica maar deze leek me toch de moeite waard Lotte te vergezellen.
6. Ik had nog nooit over het duo Gilbert & George gehoord maar we hadden wel samen grondig de folder doorgenomen. Ik was ook nog nooit naar een voorstelling in het Bozar geweest en ook nog niet naar een fototentoonstelling denk ik.
C)
D)
