GILBERT AND GEORGE

gilbert and george south africa

biography

2013
[the singing sculpture]

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GILBERT PROESCH
B. Italy, Sept. 11, 1943

GEORGE PASSMORE
B. England, Jan. 8, 1942

Come on then. What was your first Gilbert and George experience like? I mean when you were there, in a gallery, and, wham bam, you saw it, one of those bright stained glass photo-montages. Wasn't it like art hitting you with the brightest sledgehammer? Or, for me, like losing my virginity: an experience that changed my life forever.

Come to think of it: it wasn't like losing my virginity at all. That was over way too quickly, was as overrated as Brokeback Mountain, and left me wishing I had said: "Can we do it tomorrow? It hurts". The first time with Gilbert and George inspired none of these things. So I guess what I'm really trying to say, albeit clumsily, is that the experience was as life changing as doing it the first time.

What of Gilbert and George? Gilbert is the Italian geezer with the Italian accent. He wears a suit. George is the English geezer with the non-Italian accent. He has quite a posh English accent and wears a matching suit.

They met in 1967 while studying sculpture at St Martins School of Art in London. To begin with they were performance artists. They quickly became known for their identical business suits and going around everywhere together in their identical suits. But it was the large-scale photo collages which caught the public eye. From the 1990s to the present their fame grew and grew, and prices to match (these days their originals sell for £200,000 upwards, though if you've got the space as well as the cash I would say they are worth every penny. If you haven't then a signed poster is no bad substitute, and the two seem to sign everything that is passed in front of them).

Gilbert and George

Why was the media so attracted to them? For me, it was because the photo-montages contained subject matter which caused offence in the heartlands of conservative Britain. If the heartlands were offended then the rest of us were naturally drawn. Oldest trick in the art book, that. Sprinkle the 'offence' with sexual content and the British media couldn't ignore it.

But I think it was the power of the images that the heartlands objected to most. Yeah, the vivid colours and the hugeness of the pieces hit you hard but Gilbert and George did it all so damned beautifully that the work transcended the subject matter. They depicted sexual acts, urine, faeces, semen, named each work with a strong or bold title, but by framing it all in those stained-glass panels they made us feel like some kind of worshippers in the church of bigness. Bigness with an inner East London bent (and they have lived in Spitalfields for many years).

And bigness that screams: 'THIS IS ART'.

But perhaps my link with virginity and sex isn't that wide of the mark. For like sex Gilbert and George get better with age, and their recent work is living proof of that.

2011: london pictures exhibition

This monumental body of 292 pictures is the largest series yet created by the acclaimed British artists.

For five decades, to international acclaim, Gilbert & George have been making art that is visionary, shocking, relentless, moral and richly atmospheric. In these new ‘LONDON PICTURES’ Gilbert & George present an epic survey of modern urban life in all its volatility, tragedy, absurdity and routine violence. Brutal and declamatory, these brooding and disquieting pictures have been created from the sorting and classification by subject of nearly 4000 newspaper headline posters, stolen by the artists over a number of years. In their lucidity, no less than their insight into the daily realities of metropolitan life, the ‘LONDON PICTURES’ are Dickensian in scope and ultra-modern in sensibility.

Drawing directly on the quotidian life of a vast city, the ‘LONDON PICTURES’ allow contemporary society to recount itself in its own language. Within the townscape of this moral audit, Gilbert & George appear to pass like ghosts and seers, alternately watchful and distracted, as though their spirits were haunting the very streets and buildings that these pictures describe. The ‘LONDON PICTURES’ seem to comprise a great visual novel, revealing without judgment the ceaseless relay of urban drama, in all its gradations of hope and suffering. A selection of the pictures

© Michael Bracewell, 2012

A few of the pictures are below as well as examples from earlier in their career.