Art Review: Gilbert & George: 40 Years of Shock and Awe

By Iain Gale

Gilbert & George Tate Modern, London

GILBERT & George are a national institution. More than that, they are a living national treasure. For almost four decades they have enlivened the British art world, holding fast to their style and principles, as trends have come and gone. They are the tacit godfathers of Britart, their exclusively autobiographical oeuvre predating Turk and Emin and reaching out to such young guns as Noble/ Webster and the Chapman brothers, who once worked for them.

They are the grey-suited eminences-grises of British art and the Tate’s show is no less than a homage. It’s not before time. The duo’s first retrospective was held at the Whitechapel in 1981 and another at the Guggenheim four years later. But the Tate’s tardiness is more than compensated for with this gargantuan show, running to some 200 works. Their trademark giant photographs, reminiscent of stained glass, transform the gallery into a cathedral.

Since they first met at St Martin’s in the late Sixties, cocooned in their early Georgian house in East London’s racial and cultural melting pot of Spitalfields, Gilbert & George have been turning out increasingly shocking images, and this is certainly not a show to which you would want to take your maiden aunt. Forget Tracey’s knickers, this is as frank as British art ever gets. Underlying any apparent sensationalism, however, is an abiding concern with the neglect and abuse of those who live on the edge of society.

Avowedly gay and utterly devoted to one another, Gilbert & George emerged on the London art scene in 1969 with the performance piece ‘The Singing Sculptures’ in which, standing on a table, they sang and danced their way through the Flanagan and Allen Forties hit ‘Underneath The Arches’. Repeating this act, often to mocking audiences, they proclaimed from the start their fearless independence. While George is from Devon and talks with a cut-glass accent, Gilbert apparently originated from somewhere in the Dolomites.

After their invocation of the urban down-and-out, they turned to the countryside in the works which open the Tate show. ‘The Nature Of Our Looking’ is a series of huge charcoal drawings on folded paper which presage their familiar grid-pattern. It was a counterpoint to their urban grit: that dream of a rural idyll which has informed English art for two centuries.

It seemed only natural that another early theme should have been the drunkenness they shared with the homeless who inhabited their East End milieu. By 1976, in images just as nostalgic in their way as any bucolic landscape, they were photographing themselves as they became progressively more drunk. They iconicised the symbols of their release: in particular the Gordon’s gin bottle whose royal crest married nicely with their apparent traditionalism. Quickly though their works progressed with Hogarthian certainty, from alcohol-induced euphoria to melancholia and depression until, just at the brink, they began to look beyond themselves at the city and its inhabitants.

BY THE END OF the 1970s Gilbert & George were producing the first of the huge primary-coloured multiple photographs for which they are best known. The technique is to blend montaged photographs with powerful iconic abstract shapes and equally emotive, often explicitly sexual graffiti to create multiple images which invade the consciousness with the subtlety of a sledgehammer and then demand careful contemplation to unravel their complex iconography. Often they use East End boys as their models. Supposedly these were plucked from the street. But am I alone in recognising a young Martin Clunes in ‘World’ made in 1983, suggesting that any or all are professional actors? This is yet another example of artists’ constant mischievousness.

The onset of Aids in the 1980s, and the deaths of many of their friends, brought new preoccupations. Although the first hint of an interest in the theme had appeared in 1975 with the self- explanatory piece ‘Coming’, it was in the 1990s that they began in earnest to look at bodily fluids (their own) under a microscope. While the flip-side of this physical immersion has been a profound expression of the spiritual aspect of death, it is bodily functions that have earned them notoriety.

They have variously been described as blasphemous, anti-semitic and right wing and the amount of homo-erotic imagery in their works featuring young boys might easily garner accusations of paedophilia. This misses the essential point of an art at whose heart lies an honest desire to present the physical essence of the human condition with all its concomitant desires, pleasures and problems.

Nevertheless, by room 13 even I was beginning to feel overcome. I see that looking at my notes on the exhibition guide at that moment I appear to have written ‘turds’, which is not a criticism of the artists, but simply a cry for help. You’re surrounded by the things. Assaulted by images of excrement. I might equally of course have written any number of euphemisms for male genitalia or other bodily substances, all of which are here in gargantuan profusion. Yet, overwhelming as it is, I can’t wait to re-visit the exhibition. It definitely needs more than one trip.

Not least, the artists’ recent work has a real relevance to current racial and social tensions. Incorporating found images ranging from Christian iconography to Class War flyers and slogans, and texts from radical Islamic groups, it cries out for a wider audience.

You exit through a series of pieces made specifically for the show. ‘Six Bomb Pictures’ reflecting on the July 2005 London bombings using headline boards from the Evening Standard are hugely important icons of the zeitgeist of a society under siege.

My only real criticism of the show is the apparent absence of any footage of the ‘Singing Sculptures’.

Gilbert & George opened up new worlds for British art, and despite their success, they still want to be perceived as cantankerous Peter Pans. The heirs of Gillray, Blake and the pre- Raphaelites, they believe that art possesses a unique power to redeem, and seem destined to continue to unsettle our sensibilities with their outrageous, intelligent, unforgettable imagery. Here’s to the next 40 years.

Until May 7

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