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Dynamic Duo

With a retrospective currently at the de Young Museum in San Francisco and a tour slated for later this year, the controversial art team Gilbert and George are about to remind America of the beauty of bad taste.


Polite, well-spoken gentlemen, Gilbert and George paraded dirty graffiti, pricks, profanity, and splashes of semen before a reluctant art world during the past 40 years. In 1969 they designed a preemptive strike on their critics titled George the Cunt and Gilbert the Shit. In the 1980s they began a series of images centered on their own body fluids. A British institution -- and a thorn in the side of conservatives -- the duo favors series titles like “Cunt Scum” while publicly lamenting that they can’t find a good tailor these days.

Since graduating from art school and striking out on their own as “living sculptures” in the late 1960s, Gilbert and George have led an ordered existence that observers find creepy and delicious. They’re rarely seen alone. They dress almost identically in suit and tie. They take their meals at the same local restaurants every day. Their house near Brick Lane in London’s East End is famously without a kitchen. Back in 1967 when they moved in, they named the house Art for All. When they found graffiti outside that said GILBERT AND GEORGE ARE WANKERS AND TOSSERS, George responded to a journalist, “Well, we are. We were rather flattered by that. We photographed it to include in our work.”

GINK, 2006 (COURTESY OF APERTURE/TATE) | ADVOCATE.COM
GINK: Gilbert & George, from "Gilbert & George: The Complete Pictures, 1971-2005"

Last year, despite opposition -- and lack of a corporate sponsor -- the Tate Modern hosted Gilbert and George’s largest retrospective. A smaller version of that show is now at the de Young Museum in San Francisco and will travel to Milwaukee and Brooklyn, N.Y., later this year. I walked through the de Young exhibition with the artists on the day before it opened to the public. George’s tie sported large black ants, while Gilbert’s ants were magenta. They wore the same quiet suit, although George’s was tan and Gilbert’s was gray.

Inevitably, we gravitated toward The Penis (1978). A large multipanel photographic piece (like most of their mature work), it features the artists flanked by vague images of tree branches above a street scrawl of a cock ejaculating into a waiting mouth. The graffiti artist had added the unnecessary caption “Suck.”

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