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: 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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