I met the lovely Anne Cottingham this spring when she was nice enough to write about me on Vancouver is Awesome. We met up in a coffee shop to do the interview, ended up walking & talking for hours… and by the end of the afternoon, we were friends! Now, I’m not totally sure how to describe Anne… she works at a gallery, writes an art column, and does some photography on the side. Hm, let’s go with “renaissance woman” and call it a day! When I asked her to write this guest post she immediately asked “Oh! Do you know Gilbert and George?” I didn’t. But I do now…

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I’m jealous of Gilbert and George

{George and Gilbert on Fournier Street in East London, where they have lived for over 40 years. Photo credit: Auntie P}

Crass, pointedly honest and big, bold and colourful – I just can’t get enough of Gilbert and George. Perhaps it is their insanely organized work space, with boxes of negatives labelled as “Shit, 1980” (meaning photos of quite literally, shit from 1980). Or the delightful maquettes they make mocking up their exhibitions, perfectly to scale and with multiple little printed copies of their artwork to place inside. Or maybe I just have a deep appreciation for two people who have never seemed to waver in expressing who they are to the whole world, no matter what that world might think of them.

{Gilbert & George at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, 2008-09. Photo credit: diegoluis}

Gilbert Proesch (b. 1943, Italy) met George Passmore (b. 1942, England) at St Martins School of Art in London in 1967. It was “love at first sight” in the corridors according to George, and not long after they began creating art together. They started with singing, living sculptures and a dinner with well-known British artist David Hockney, and later moved on to produce the huge, photo-collage grids that have made them famous. The live sculptures remained though in the sense that they stopped separating their life and their art, insisting that one is synonymous with the other. Asked by Francois Jonquet whether they are still living sculptures today, George has replied, “I believe so. In my opinion, it’s our greatest invention.”

{Flow, 1988, White Cube London}

G&G’s large-scale photo works are known as The Pictures, though that encompasses many different series’ over a number of decades. They often feature the artists themselves, dressed or undressed, against a background photo of shit, piss, plants, London… creating thousands of works that fill some incredibly heavy volumes. In the 80’s they began to use a broad range of colour where before they had limited themselves to red. They also started using models and other objects, illustrating their zest for the beauty of life. That zest took a darker turn when the AIDS epidemic broke out and they lost a close friend.

{Nettle Dance, 2008, White Cube London}

Since that time they’ve eschewed models and used themselves, objects and many bodily fluids to cover any range of topics, from the 2005 London bombings to Britishness itself. In Six Bomb Pictures, G&G collected 136 sandwich board posters from the London Evening Standard, and layered them around computer-manipulated images of themselves. Each piece organizes itself around a singular word found on the sandwich boards – the largest a tripych entitled ‘Bomb,’ followed by ‘Bombs,’ ‘Bombers,’ ‘Bomber,’ ‘Bombing,’ and ‘Terror.’ They commemorate recent and past threats to London safety (from 7/7 to the IRA to World War II), but also paint a picture of the daily lexicon of life in London and its impact.

Gilbert & George are nothing if not controversial. Love them or hate them, you have to admire their quirks and their fierce devotion to each other and their art. They are everything I value most not only in art, but life – honest, passionate, unique and open. And exciting! Life is boring enough – why spend it looking at boring art that has nothing to say? As Gilbert notes, “we’ve simply given up on being boring, we don’t want to be like all those boring artists shut up in their studios, who lead middle-class lives and have nothing to say, and are happy to stay on the surface of things each day.” Thank goodness for that.

Recommended reading:
Gilbert & George
intimate conversations with Francois Jonquet
Phaidon, 2004

Recommended viewing:
The Secret Files of Gilbert & George
interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist
JRP Ringier, 2000

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Thank you, friend!