As Gilbert and George’s Art Has Got Bigger and Brasher, It Has Only Become Dumber and Dumber, Laments Tom Lubbock on the Eve of Their Tate Retrospective
By Tom Lubbock
A critic once said it was cheeky of T S Eliot to publish a set of poems under the title Minor Poems, because it implied that the rest of them weren’t minor. Gilbert and George have no business with such subtleties; their retrospective at Tate Modern is called "Major Exhibition". It will occupy all of Level 4, spreading into the cafe and foyer. If you go there today you could see, for free, their latest – six gigantic responses to the 2005 London bombings. In the literal sense, G&G’s art has been big for decades.
The pair are just about of pensionable age. Gilbert Proesch and George Passmore were born in 1943 and 1942. They began their lifelong collaboration in 1968, and the show first catches them soon after, in a group of enormous but sensitive charcoal drawings of the English countryside, in which two prim young men in tweed suits are to be found walking dreamily through the greenery.
Perhaps Tiny Tim was an influence. His camp tweedy cover of "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" had been a hit not long before; and G&G did something similar with their "Living Sculpture" performance of "Underneath the Arches". I also wonder if the autistic twins in David Mercer’s Sixties TV play, And Did Those Feet? – two wise, cross, innocent strangers in the modern world – were an inspiration. Twins, with their weird two-in-one-ness, seem the relevant role- model.
These drawings are good, a funny, involving mixture of double self-portrait and journey narrative. But they soon give way to works of multiple photographs. The black-and-white composites from the mid- 1970s seem to me G&G’s masterpieces. The series Dead Boards and Dusty Corners are chequerboards of photos. Images of each man walking alone in a bare room alternate with – bump up against – close-ups of floorboards and corners. They’re about moving into an empty house, and feeling lost in the new spaces. The play of squares dances, with delicate collisions and precise disorientations.
You never see this tension, this choreography, again. As bright hues flood the monochrome and as photography becomes photomontage, you’re into G&G’s mature style. You know it: those wall-sized pictures, full of big themes and hot imagery, the artists pulling arch faces and striking stiff poses, the surface blaring with black outline and saturated colours – highly theatrical, but basically inarticulate.
The dominant feeling is: overwhelmed. G&G are overwhelmed, by the world, life, fear, desire, optimism, nausea, glamour. The scenes are packed. But you have to look hard for an interesting visual relationship or idea. Photomontage is the great art of image- mixing, but G&G make do with the simplest puns, the broadest contrasts. It’s scissors-and-paste surrealism. Big mouth swallows little man. Giant turds fall on little man. Little man stands on giant knee. Cut-out eyes, mouths, flowers, blood. And everywhere, symmetry. It’s as if the content is so obviously important and the colour so sincerely passionate that no further invention is required.
I quite like the "fascist" pictures from the early 1980s. They conjure up a truly bizarre scenario – a gay, multiethnic, quasi- religious, sex-based fascist movement, with phalanxes of heroic, beautiful young men, and G&G as youth leaders – scout masters, rock’n'roll vicars – adopting dynamic authoritative poses, but also romping with the boys. And the pictures look like totalitarian propaganda. But I doubt the pair have any political convictions worth the name. Besides, in the same series they fall into abject and degraded activities.
No; the G&G act is really the most interesting part of all this. From the 1980s on, they appear not quite as themselves, but as extraterrestrial or supernatural visitors, generously participating in all the horror, glory and boredom of modern human life. Sometimes they’re standing back in bewilderment. Sometimes they’re in the thick of it, buffeted by social conflict, or sinking naked into the dirty depths. Some-times they pose with authority.
But always there’s an edge of godly distance. I suppose it’s a Jesus act. They’re sufferers, saviours, judges and spokesmen for humanity. And their imperturbable conjoined persona keeps up the feeling that they’re not quite mortal.
The total absence of the female is a notable feature of the G&G world. But it would be more accurate to say that the only people who appear are G&G and young men.
There are no children, middle-aged men, babies, and while there’s plenty of sperm – alongside blood, tears, piss, shit, s p i t , sweat, as the viscous stuff of life – one of the well-known properties of sperm is not mentioned. The process by which G& G or anyone else arrived on our troubled planet is something their work does not allude to.
But my real problem with their art is its refusal to make sense. It has a voracious appetite for serious and difficult material, but it merely presents it. As they say: "Sex, money, race, religion; it’s all there." Yes, but "there" is all it is. More and more, their work takes the form of a list of items: pound coins, bird shit, chewing gum, graffiti, public signage, class war flyers, gay small adds, Islamist propaganda, crucifix pendants – the exemplary conflicted bits and pieces of life, noticed as if it was enough just to notice. And there are G&G in the middle of it, going Wow, or My, or Blimey, or Yikes. You fill your pictures up with hot stuff, and then resolutely say nothing about it, because all you wanted was the heat: it’s too damn artistic, this attitude. Of course, if they did have something more definite, and therefore more disputable, to say about these things, their art would have come down from its grand dumb pedestal. But that’s exactly where they prefer it to stay. I hear the voice of Lady Bracknell: "I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing." G&G’s art has reached a condition of high gormlessness. Anarchism, fundamentalism, homosexuality, homophobia, hoodies, dereliction – there’s a lot of it about, guv, what about that, guv, makes you think, guv, world gone mad, guv?
The new London bombing pieces are simply ridiculous. Surrounded by Evening Standard hoardings, each with some screaming headline, the pair stand there, looking as if they’re about to explode themselves. No doubt these pictures are meant as a heartfelt statement of shock and panic and solidarity, but the visual rhetoric is pure sixth-form art class. Please don’t tell me they’re "extremely powerful".
OK, it’s nice to have big, bold, shiny pictures. And it’s energis- ing when you walk among them. But after a full "Major Exhibition" it becomes sheer sensory and mental oppression – as you will find when you emerge from the gallery into the outside and notice your consciousness quicken. The colours of the world, how much more interesting they are, how much more complicated – and not just the colours.
Gilbert & George: Major Exhibition: Tate Modern, opens Thursday, to 7 May (020-7887 8888; www.tate.org.uk/modern)
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